Do you know this feeling? Your boss has just approved that headcount you’ve been longing to fill for the last six months. You want to hire NOW.

Before you call your HR partner or hit up your LinkedIn network with a job post, pause for a second. In the hiring marketplace of this decade, good talent is tightly held. Almost certainly, the process of hiring excellent candidates won’t be either as simple as it looks or as fast as you’d prefer.

The cost of poor hiring is high, and a candidate who is the wrong fit for your firm introduces a long cycle of negative consequences. Consequences that are likely to cost your company time, money, revenue, innovation cycles, and even employee morale.

8 steps to ensure you hire the right executive for your business

As tempting as it is to cut to a shortlist of candidates with stellar degree qualifications and brand pedigrees, there is more to finding the right candidate “fit.”

Here are our eight recommendations to help you find the right executive for your business every single time:

  1. Get honest about your organisational dynamics. Typically, the more senior a candidate, the more delicate is the process of introducing them to an established culture and setting them up for success. This process requires you to examine and understand the intangible nuances and unspoken practices of how your organisation truly operates to assess if a candidate is a good match.
  2. Be ready to clearly describe your company’s goals and expectations of the role. The world’s best leaders enjoy responding to a clear goal. If you can’t articulate that goal, it is hard for incoming leaders to deliver what you want.
  3. Define the characteristics of your ideal candidate. The greater your clarity around the precise skills, competencies, and experience of the ideal candidate, the greater the likelihood you’ll spot that person as soon as they walk through your door.
  4. Develop a balanced scorecard of crucial candidate attributes. Sometimes your ideal candidate is a unicorn: a creature with such a rare combination of experience, skills, values, qualifications, and more that they’re not likely to exist. A balanced scorecard will guide you to the areas of compromise that ensure you get the closest possible fit to the ideal candidate.
  5. Cultural fit. Understanding your organisation’s cultural characteristics and exploring how candidates fit with that culture is a critical success factor for effective hiring. Many candidates bring the right functional skills to a firm or can learn them on the job, but not everyone can naturally work well with other team members.
  6. Talent diversity brings a broad range of skills, different experiences, and perspectives, all of which increase your organisation’s potential for improved productivity.
  7. Explore stress management techniques. As executives become more senior, a key differentiator is how effectively they handle stress. Short-fused executives who cannot manage stress fast become a liability. Executives who maintain their composure and decision-making prowess under pressure fast become invaluable assets.
  8. Engage an executive search firm. The right executive search firm will bring expertise in your industry, a wealth of connections and potential candidates, and practical marketplace insights to help you connect with exemplary leaders.

“A company is only as good as its people.”

Mary Kay Ash, American businesswoman and founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, was famously quoted as saying, “A company is only as good as its people.”

It stands to reason then that investing time and energy in the right partnership to help you find the best people is a logical next step.

Morgan Young is a boutique executive search firm with close to 15 years of experience introducing Australia’s leading blue-chip companies to exceptional candidates. It’s one of the reasons our clients report 100 percent satisfaction with our partnership.

Discover more about how we can help ensure you hire the right executive for your business by exploring our website or contacting us directly.