How to Avoid Making Recruiting Mistakes That Can Ruin a Business

Obviously, it’s essential for the management, executives, and officers of a business to be familiar, concerned with, or involved in sales, advertising, growth, social media branding, and everything else that it takes to run a successful business. But all too often, the details of those “traditional” business concerns is given priority over a robust recruitment and hiring program. It’s becoming increasingly clear that if hiring and recruitment is only a business’s focus when there’s an opening or current need, that business suffers.

Much of the day-to-day details being prioritized instead of establishing a recruiting program, policy, and strategy, are exactly the sort of thing talented employees could be focusing on. After all, not giving recruiting and hiring its due and proper attention can significantly increase the risk of a business-damaging or even business-ending mistake: a regrettable executive, management, or C-level hire.

Do You Have Hiring Best Practices? You Should

There’s no question that hiring for all positions, including lower- and mid-level within a company, is incredibly important. Those employees are the backbone of a business. But hiring shortfalls, a toxic culture, or simply a bad culture fit between lower- to middle-management and their subordinates can lead to a number of issues within a company. Establishing hiring best practices girds against that and is great for perspective. And that rings true whether you’re looking for a VP of Sales and Marketing or you are building a data science team with specialists in analytic recruiting.

Consider Accomplishments Over Years of Experience

Trends are certainly emerging regarding which traits and tendencies are good indicators of success and which aren’t. Increasingly, a premium is being put on personality and culture fit. Even technical and ecommerce recruitment is turning more toward how well someone is going to communicate and cooperate with their coworkers, while having 15 years of experience rather than 12 is less critical. It also comes down to hard-won accomplishments. The best recruiters will consistently take 10 years of growth, success, drive, and innovation over 15 years of status quo line-toeing.

C-Level, Management, and Executive Recruiting

Though the advice above is certainly relevant no matter who you’re hiring, when it comes to C-level, management, and executive recruiting, you’re best to not go at it alone. The best policy is to contract with a recruiting firm. While less-than-optimal lower-level hires can be detrimental to a company, a bad executive hire can prove a fatal strike for any business.

Consider the distinction of the funnel and the tunnel when looking for candidates. For non-management employees, the hiring and recruiting strategy may involve broad outreach to funnel in a good fit. For C-level recruiting, however, the approach is more like a tunnel:a single, specific pipeline for exactly the candidate you need. For this focused approach, recruiting firms are invaluable. They have the experience filling C-level roles, they have connections, and they know how to identify top-tier talent. Plus, their third-party perspective means they may see your company’s culture better than you do. The recruiter will be your strategic partner to recruit, source, and manage the hiring process. The goal being to successfully hire the next senior level executive to join your leadership team.