When was the last time you hired a senior executive only to watch them churn and leave your organization in a year or less? Executive recruitment is no easy task.
While you source top talent for niche roles, the stakes are higher to ensure you onboard the right employee who will help shape the direction and future of your business.
Imagine what that can cost your company if they quit: nearly 23% of that hire’s salary.
5 executive recruitment best practices
To ensure you recruit the right candidates and do so strategically when you hire for senior executive roles, use our five best practices listed below.
1) Create a plan and market map before you recruit
Hiring for senior executive roles can look quite different from recruiting for other positions in your organization, and there’s a strong likelihood that some of the senior candidates you communicate with are being pursued by your competition.
So it’s crucial you have a hiring plan and market map in place before your team invests time and resources into recruiting for these roles.
Market mapping refers to using an outline — or a map, if you will — that helps your organization understand the current landscape of your market regarding both your competition and the supply/demand for candidates.
By using a market map, your hiring team can dive deeper into information and data around talent availability, compensation, future business needs, and recruiting opportunities.
And market mapping is helpful for more than just understanding what you’ll need to offer a senior exec to win them over; it can also give recruiters a holistic view of why they’re sourcing candidates for this role and what your organization needs in its next senior executive hire.
For example, before your team reaches out to potential candidates or actively sourcing talent for an open role, they’ll need to answer questions like:
- What challenge or problem will this senior executive help us solve?
- What level of experience does the executive need in order to be successful?
- Do we need a seasoned candidate with experience scaling rapidly growing companies?
- How many people will this role oversee, and what level of hiring responsibility will they have?
- Do we have one or more internal employees who could be a fit for this open exec role?
Keep in mind that, when you hire for senior executive roles, you must align every stakeholder involved in your hiring process to the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of the role—this goes for hiring from within, too.
2) Define the leadership role(s) you’re hiring for
Sourcing and recruiting, then interviewing a candidate for a senior executive role is one thing, but actually defining that role is quite another. And, really, your team can’t hire for such a role without knowing what and who you’re hiring for.
This ties back to your market map and hiring plan, however, when defining a role, you’re answering specific questions about the role, how it will function in your organization, and the long-term goals you have for the role.
Knowing this, you can break down defining a leadership role into 3 aspects:
- Organizational stage: Most companies experience growth at various stages, where one or two quarters will see staggered growth whereas others will focus on consolidation. If you’re growing, you’ll want growth-focused and experienced execs, while other companies may require someone who can help them build the foundations of their organization. Where does your next senior executive role fall?
- Short versus long-term goals: What goals does your company have that a new senior executive or leader can help you solve? For one company, this could be a seed round, but for another, it could be expanding to several more locations or pivoting by producing a new product for a new vertical.
- Internal and external challenges: Between a pandemic, changing market conditions, political landscapes, and more, there are many internal and external challenges that force your organization to hire leaders that help with change management.
Of course, there is a myriad of other factors that will influence how you define a senior executive role — knowing how the role must function to drive your business forward will help your hiring team recruit the right senior executives.
3) Work on your talent pipeline strategy
As a talent acquisition pro, you know how long recruiting can take when hiring people into senior executive roles. There are more stakeholders involved, several steps to the sourcing and interviewing process, and multiple rounds of approvals before you can extend that offer of employment.
But, what this really means is that your hiring team needs to recruit these roles early on — not just when you’re in desperate need of replacing a senior exec.
This is where your talent pipeline strategy comes in.
If you’re looking for resources to help you nurture relationships with top senior exec candidates, check out these blogs and actionable tips:
- How to Write Effective Recruiting Emails That Attract Top Talent
- 10 Essential Tips for Writing Great Recruiting Emails that Convert
- Engaging Your Talent Pool with Intelligent Nurtures
- Attracting Passive Candidates with Smarter Outreach
- Executive Interview Questions
4) Consider hiring from within using internal mobility
When an employee leaves an organization, it’s not only costly to replace them but their knowledge and expertise around your company, too.
When an executive leaves, that loss can be tenfold, especially if they managed a large team.
While hiring to replace a churned employee has its own price tag, ignoring the potential of existing employees to step into these roles can be expensive when they leave in favor of a company that will up-level them.
Our own data found 41% of employees will ask for some sort of role change in 2022.
That’s where leveraging an internal mobility program to hire from within can benefit both your organization and its existing employees.
Hiring from within is also an effective way for employees to upskill while contributing what they know about your organization to their work.
5) Conduct effective and fair interviews to find the right candidate
You want to hire the best candidates for your senior executive roles, but how effective is your interview process in helping you achieve those recruiting outcomes?
Structured interviewing has been shown to not only be more reliable but also more effective than traditional hiring, where interviews are unstructured.
The crux of structured interviewing is putting a process in place that standardizes how you interview, in turn nurturing more equitable and productive hiring.
Our Structured Hiring 101 eGuide teaches you everything your hiring team needs to know about developing and implementing an effective structured hiring process so you can hire the right candidates and eliminate bias in your interviews.
