Recruiting the Right Executives

Posted on May 26, 2010

One of the CEO’s most important tasks is recruiting and maintaining an all-star top team. Here are my key strategies for finding the right executives to move your company forward.

As the economy thaws, the need for finding and recruiting great executives is growing quickly. With demand rising, some of your executives will jump ship, tempted by greener pastures and the security of a healthy market for their talent. You’ll need to re-place them with upgrades and maybe a few more executives as well to lead a bigger business.

Recruiting executives to your top team is hard work. Yet there are few other tasks for a CEO as important. From formulating your leadership team strategy until the last day of on-boarding, the CEO must invest the time and money it takes to do it right. Anything less will create many sleepless nights dealing with all the problems that the wrong executive will cause.

Future Focus. The process must commence long before you start the search. It begins with strategic planning, where you become clear on what the organization should look like in a year or more. For your future organization, what top executives would you need? Those are the executives that you’ll want to find and hire now. Executives drive growth.

Picking the Plums. CEOs and top teams should always be on the lookout for future executives. They may be working for the competition, for a supplier or customer, or they might have been on your last company’s top team. Building a network of potential team members is one of the fastest, most reliable, and lowest cost methods of building a great team.

Velocity. Half-hearted, slow searches are a problem. The uncertainty is hard on lower levels, it’s hard to maintain focus on hiring the right executive over long periods of time, the work the future new hire should be doing is languishing and worst of all, you may end up with only one good candidate at a time, with no real options. Driving strongly into the process gives you the best chance of filling it sooner, and having several excellent choices from which to select the most ideal candidate.

Compensate Well. The salary and bonus of a top executive will be far smaller than the cost of their mistakes or the profits from their successes. So why wouldn’t you pay that extra 10 or 20% if it means you attract amazing talent? Having said that, expect what you pay for. If the person you hire turns out to be ho-hum, send them packing quickly.

Alignment. At this level, it’s like a marriage, so take the time to see if the candidate’s future career path is fully aligned with the company’s future. So if that CFO needs to take a company through IPO to push her career to the next level, and the company is IPO bound, we have great alignment. Without excellent alignment, motivation and results will be poor, and the relationship will be short lived.

Fun Factor. A supercharger for a CEO is having interesting, stimulating, fun executives. The ideas and creative juices flow at an accelerated rate. A great executive is generally not like medicine for the CEO, they are like candy. If you get that icky feeling, don’t hire, even if the resume and your team say he’s great.

Team Fit. Management is a team sport, and the team has to accept the newcomer. The team should be deeply involved in the process of saying yes. If the candidate is married, their spouse is their team. Spouses are really important before hiring, and after hiring. The teams should not just be focused on work experience, but on culture/personality fit.

Communication. There should be lots of this before tying the knot. I’m not saying it should be dragged out over a long period of time, but the top team should really feel like they know the candidate well. This does mean hours and hours (if you have a larger team), and several meetings/meals. One CEO I just talked to spent three days at the company he had been asked to lead, conducting 3-4 hour meetings with board members and key executives already on the team. There are a variety of assessments that can help shed light on a candidate too. If the candidate is high level, they might be interested in seeing your assessment profiles too. It’s a joint decision.

Share your Nightmares. One way to get to yes is to flush out all the worries, objections and concerns that make both parties hesitate. I call it the nightmare list (which precedes insomnia). Both parties should lay their nightmare list on the table, and openly discuss them. In some cases, such a discussion will make it obvious that everyone should walk away—a successful outcome! In other cases, a new level of understanding and trust is established, and things move forward.

Avoid Settling. Too many times CEOs hire the “best they can get”, but it’s not a great candidate. That’s a shame. Some best practices that help us avoid settling are having multiple great candidates to choose from at the same decision point, hiring long before you are desperate to fill the position so you’re never up against that wall, and to do the search in a hard and fast mode, so you have time and energy to re-start and do it over again.

On-board Well. Is there a bigger crime than hiring a great executive then ignoring or undermanaging the critical on-boarding phase? In those first 90 days, if things go poorly, enough toxins can be created to poison and kill even the perfect top team hire.

An all-star top team is what every CEO wants. We certainly want to retain the great team members we have, but when the business requires that we recruit from the outside, using the right processes and techniques will reward you with the right executives.