How to identify and hire top leadership talent.

Knowing how to hire top talent isn’t always as straightforward as you might wish it to be. However, you may decide that your in-house recruitment processes are sufficient. But what about building top leadership talent for your organisation? Is this a task you fulfil yourself?

Do you hesitate to engage an executive search firm? Is it that you’re resistant to paying the cost of outsourcing? Or perhaps you’re simply sceptical of the process. In this article, we’ll look at how identifying and hiring leadership works. We’ll show that, by failing to outsource, you might be missing out on an opportunity to hire the right talent with the right leadership qualities for your company. The task is to identify and then recruit executive leaders who you can be sure will provide the direction that your business requires – strong, competent individuals who will foster and lead strong, competent teams.

What makes a good leader?

Building a winning team of top talent matters. These teams will only be successful if they are well-led. The best leaders possess at least seven specific characteristics. These are not easily learned. Sometimes they are found within the individual. One of the roles of an executive recruiter is to acknowledge those characteristics and to know how to recognise them. The characteristics are –

1. Self-awareness – understanding how they come across – how they affect those around them.
2. Empowerment – genuinely caring about and supporting others to get tasks done.
3. Development of others – mentoring team members and opening opportunities for them – Taking wellbeing seriously.
4. Challenging the status quo – embracing and enabling change.
5. Communication – the ability to listen actively and to speak informatively and with clarity.
6. Making others accountable – clarifying expectations and handling shortcomings.
7. Giving feedback – using direct yet sensitive feedback to enable others to improve.

Step one is to recognise these characteristics. Step two is knowing how and where to find the individuals who possess them. This is where the skills of a dedicated executive search firm come into play. Leave this process to chance, and you’ll dramatically reduce your chances of hiring the right individual for your leadership role.

Executive Search know-how

It’s not enough to simply post your executive vacancy on job boards or your website. Top executives don’t spend their days poring over job boards hunting for new opportunities. More often than not, they’re busy working and leading. They’ll expect to find new job opportunities through their networks, connections, and referrals. If you leave your executive search to an HR employee, the chances are they’ll get negligible response. They’ll be lucky to get further than the gatekeeper. However, a top talent expert will devote vast amounts of time and energy strategically working on their networks – building up connections, giving them access to these usually inaccessible people and their networks.

Leave it to an amateur – lose productivity, morale and money

If you leave the task of hiring executive talent to employees lacking the necessary experience and skill, you might save money in the short term. However, the long-term costs can be considerable. If you fail to recruit the right kind of leadership talent, the time and money wasted on the redundancy process, re-interviewing and onboarding are almost incalculable. You’ll also be faced with the likely consequence of falling morale and productivity.

Narrowing down the talent pool

What’s wrong with posting an ad. for a senior-level position on a job board or on your company website? Surely this will get you the fastest response? It may well do, but do you want to be inundated with hundreds of applicants, most of whom will almost certainly be under-qualified for your leadership role?

The best option is to take on a specialist executive search firm – one that will be experienced at recruiting and pre-qualifying candidates. Instead of sorting through and interviewing dozens of often casual applicants, they will use their network and connections to approach a much narrower candidate pool. They will filter a more manageable number that comprises the best of the best. The result? A streamlined recruitment process that will get you top leadership talent faster and at a lower long-term cost.

Specialist executive search firms for the best results

In the past, organisations might have promoted production or marketing employees into leadership and executive roles, perhaps on the basis of loyalty or longevity. No longer. In order to satisfy their function, the best leaders need to possess unique sets of skills. A successful marketing executive, for example, will need to excel at their core skill set, but they will also need to be analytical creative and possess the seven leadership skills listed above.

Specialist executive search firms have the relevant resources and processes to find candidates to fill specialist leadership roles. Only these firms spend years building databases with pre-qualified candidates. Only these firms have the know-how to perform searches that will achieve the right results.

Newly created executive roles for growing companies

The challenge of hiring top leadership talent isn’t restricted to large, established businesses. What if your company is small yet growing? Have you always been the only ‘leader’ in your company? Dare you risk handling for yourself the task of hiring your first leaders?

Asking an executive search firm – experienced at building winning teams – to work with you will make the whole process so much smoother. The relationship between you and the firm will be consultative – very much a partnership. You’ll find the hiring process rewarding on numerous levels – efficient, informative and educational. More importantly, the relationship will bring you the result you’re looking for.

Targeted executive leadership search

Thrivve is a targeted Search and Executive Search consultancy. We know about hiring and retaining top leadership talent. We use our years of experience and know-how to place top talent into forward-thinking organisations.

Find out more about hiring talent, fostering leadership and team building. We’d love to hear from you.