Best Hiring Practices: How the Winners of the Recruitment Game Are Playing

A business can enjoy every advantage—initial profitability, the most modern technology and infrastructure, cutting-edge tools for metrics and data analysis, and a great reputation—but just not be very good at hiring the right people for middle and upper management. Despite everything it has going for it, however, chances are the business won’t reach the heights it could with top talent—it could even fail due to a lack of it.

Failing to hire the best candidates isn’t necessarily some failing of HR or whichever department- or team-specific hiring group, because they keep picking incompetent, ineffectual employees. A hire could be an incredibly skilled, experienced, talented, driven, and otherwise exceptional candidate who isn’t as well suited for the position, for any number of reasons.

Additionally, department heads and team leaders involved in the hiring process are in managerial roles because they excel at what they do. But what they do may not necessarily be considering, vetting, selecting, interviewing, negotiating with, and hiring people full time. That’s why the best resource for the best hires are executive and C-level recruitment firms with industry experience, be it in analytic recruiting, data science, or ecommerce. They should also possess the tools and practices needed to consistently find the best candidates for the most important positions.

The Ins and Outs of “Fit”

Executive recruiters have a number of critical advantages that make them an ideal resource for and source of information about corporate hiring. Among the most important of those are their experience and connections; there is just no substitute for them. They also benefit, however, from objectivity. Members of a company’s management are often less suited to objectively consider that company’s culture, quirks, and inter-personnel dynamics.

Employing the experience and connections, executive recruiters are positioned to consider who among their massive pool of professional contacts and applicants is not only the best professional fit for a C-level or managerial job but the best cultural fit as well. For an ecommerce recruitment campaign, for instance, executive recruiters recognize that a CPG company’s R&D subculture isn’t going to be identical to its sales subculture. And candidates are going to be selected with distinctions like that in mind.

Appealing to the Best

All too often, when a business’s brass is considering how to lure the best talent to their company, the focus is typically preoccupied with salary and benefits. Obviously, salary, benefits, perks and amenities, a liberal PTO policy, and so on are hugely important. If those things aren’t sufficiently appealing, or open to negotiations, the best candidates aren’t going to accept a position. However, there are equally important but less tangible considerations that can make all the difference between a great candidate for your business or for a competitor’s.

For instance, virtually anyone who is very good at what they do is not only aware that they’re good, they are ambitious. That ambition is generally not tied exclusively to how much money they make or the square footage of their office in comparison to the rest of management. Qualified, ambitious candidates want to make their mark. They want to be part of an organization that they have a personal role in shaping, elevating, defining, and growing with.
By working with a C-level recruiter with wide industry experience, such as BrainWorks, you can trust all of these considerations will be taken into account to bring the top-tier candidates to your leadership team