The Slow Path to High-Level Talent: How Can You Speed Your Executive Search?

How can you make your executive talent search as fast as possible while optimizing effectiveness? The right strategy will ensure that you not only attract extraordinary candidates, but also dominate your industry and any future product lines you may one day develop.

Take a Data-Based Approach

The route to corporate greatness is via continuous innovation – and this cannot occur until a company shifts to a similar level of innovation in talent management.

• Manage your search based on people analytics. Talent costs are 60 percent or more of total variable corporate costs, so it makes sense to manage them analytically. No one in finance, supply chain management, marketing or other key functional areas would propose solutions without a plethora of data. HR should be no different.
• Use Big Data tactics. Retention algorithms help predict which future hires might become flight risks. Predictive modeling provides a spot-on “what-if” analysis to improve forecasts about upcoming talent management challenges. Hiring algorithms can determine which candidates have the highest probability of on-the-job success. Shift your strategy from non-analytical to data-based decision making.

Pick the Right Executive Search Firm

Build an ongoing relationship with an executive search firm that has honed the process to a science and has the experience and expertise to help you exceed expectations.

• Work with a firm that specializes in your industry. They can help you source candidates you might not find on your own, including the cream of the crop, passive talent. Their databases and extensive professional networks are doors they can open to you as you surge ahead in the competitive talent race.
• Benefit from market intelligence. Your executive recruitment partner has a pulse on your business and on the business of talent management. Via their vast contact bases, they are aware of hiring and industry trends before they occur – and well before they hit the corporate grapevine.

Offer Competitive Compensation

In order to attract top executive talent, you need to offer salary and benefits packages that are tailored to each candidate and that exceed industry standards. Money still matters, but so does the right work/life balance. This is especially true among millennials, who are more likely to flee from employers whose cultures clash with their own.

• Offer benefits that make employees stakeholders in your company’s success. These include stock options, profit sharing and equity incentives.
• Include offerings that enhance quality of life. Find candidates’ personal pain points and identify how you can relieve them. Offer flex time, telecommuting, tuition assistance, day care, additional vacation time … or whatever it takes to optimize an individual’s experience and success.

Deploy Your “A” Team

Carefully choose the members of your hiring team. Then properly groom and equip them for success.

• Strategize in advance. When determining who will serve on your team, choose top performers and true ambassadors who will champion your organization, its mission and the position on the table. Hold strategy sessions and coordinate the process so everyone delivers a consistent message.
• Pose the same questions to all candidates. Give interviewers a checklist. This helps you to control the process and compare results more accurately and objectively.

Team members should:

• Sell your company and promote your vision. Convey to candidates why your company is the best place for them to grow and advance. Paint a picture of where your organization will be in one, two and five years and how the position will grow accordingly. Focus on promotion opportunities.
• Showcase your employer value proposition. This is the sum total of all you offer employees in return for their contribution to your success. In a recent survey of more than 3,000 talent managers, 83 percent agreed that their EVP was a critical driver of the ability to hire top performers.

Are you seeking additional guidance in reducing time to hire executive talent? Read our related posts or contact the specialized search consultants at BrainWorks today.