If you find yourself in the position of filling an executive level position, you’re making one of the most important decisions of your professional life. Hiring someone isn’t just bringing a value neutral skillset into your company. If you hire an executive, a programmer, even a member of the customer service team, you’re bringing a whole person with strengths, weaknesses and a personality that could gel brilliantly with their colleagues and the company culture, or rub up against it painfully.
Your new hire could boost everyone’s productivity and inspire a whole department, or bog down everyone with an argumentative bad attitude. The pressure’s on to get it absolutely right, whether running the business, or have simply been given responsibility for this hire.
The key to success is often to use an executive search firm or specialist recruiter. They have a broad reach, to establish a pool of candidates more diverse than you could, with only your professional network to draw on. They know where to advertise your job to get responses that are useful and valuable for your business, so avoid wasting your time replying to candidates who are underqualified or a bad fit for your company.
They can also give you the benefit of their longer experience in the field – you’re recruiting one person as a part of your job, they work with recruitment full time, day in day out. They can help you write and rewrite your job description and person specification till it captures exactly the skills and qualities you need, will tell you if you’ve missed the obvious or included the irrelevant.
The key to a successful relationship with your chosen recruiter is to see it as, in fact, a relationship. It’s a two way street with expertise and discussion flowing both ways until you achieve an outcome you are both happy with.
If you see your relationship as simply paying for a service, you’ll miss out on the best parts of working with a recruiter. You’re not paying them for a candidate in the way you’d pay a barista for a coffee. You are, at least, like Frasier having an in depth conversation with the barista about guest coffee blends, the temperature of milk and cinnamon toppings. You describe the experience you want – to hire a new programmer/manager – and they will tell you how to achieve that. You can argue back and forth on the specifics (the cost, the exact skills and qualities involved, the experience needed) and the final results will be a compromise between respected professionals, and the better for it.