Executive recruitment, or the process of finding and hiring candidates to fill leadership, or top-level roles across your organisation, is both crucial and often, challenging.
The people in these roles will shape the culture of your workplace and make decisions that define the future success of your business.
With the insights gained over our 15 years working in recruitment, here are some of the most common challenges we’ve uncovered in executive recruitment and tips to overcome them.
EXECUTIVE RECRUITMENT CHALLANGES
Competitive market.
With the employment market already competitive top talent is in high demand. Plus, organisations are fine-tuning their retention strategies to ensure that they can retain excellent staff, rather than having to replace them and re-build industry and organisational knowledge.
Recruiting ‘passive’ candidates.
It is very likely that executive-level candidates and potential leads for your role are already employed by another organisation and not actively seeking a new job.
The executive recruitment process is not as simple as advertising a job on Seek. These candidates will often need to be approached directly and provided with greater detail about the role and the organisation.
Time.
On average the time frame for finding and hiring staff at the executive level is much longer than the typical recruitment process. Patience is important as this is a staffing decision not to be rushed.
This also highlights the importance of succession planning across your organisation, and the need to identify skills gaps long before they actually arise.
EXECUTIVE RECRUITMENT TIPS
Here are some of Hunter Recruitment Groups’ tips to secure the best talent and find the perfect fit in your executive recruitment search.
Research, clear expectations and documentation.
It is very important to do your research, be well prepared and have very clear expectations as to what you expect from the person fulfilling the role before you even commence your executive recruitment.
Designing a thorough and detailed job description and defining role objectives will make the experience much smoother.
Your relationship with recruiters.
As a business the better the relationship with local recruiters the more effective they will be to secure the best top talent.
At the Executive Level, the people in charge of sourcing need to have a critical understanding of the current culture and of the culture you wish to create if moving through change. Without this information, you won’t find the right person. Having regular catch-ups with recruiters even if you are not recruiting can be fruitful as they are constantly meeting with the best talent in the market, either through direct recruitment programs or in their networking
Provide an outstanding candidate experience.
Executive recruitment requires an extremely high level of professionalism, discretion, and confidentiality.
Get to know your candidates, understand their motivation and clearly articulate what sets your organisation apart.
The best candidates for executive recruitment may be hard to find – as with all recruitment – you want to treat them with respect and to stand out as an employer of choice.
If you’d like advice and guidance on your executive recruitment process, or you’d like an experienced recruitment professional to manage the process for you, contact Hunter Recruitment Group on 02 4936 6537 we’d be very happy to help.
