Tips for Making Challenging Hires
On occasion you will have complex challenging hires that are difficult to make. These will be costly in terms of both time and effort, in addition to the opportunity cost of the open headcount for an extended period. These roles could be senior leadership level or lower-level and replacement or new growth hires. Either way, they're frustrating for all concerned. What can be done?
This is key to clearly defining the role and person specification, as well as the hiring process. Make sure everyone is on the same page. Misalignment will compound your hiring challenges greatly.
This needs objective honest and open discussion. What's the problem? Whether it's related to your industry, company, the role, person specification or your process, it will be something. Is the issue related to the attractiveness of the opportunity or to the hiring criteria? For example, is the talent pool too small for whatever reason? Is your company not attractive to your target audience for whatever reason? What exactly is it or is it a combination of issues? Location? Experience? Skills? Remuneration? Development and progression? Timing?
Once identified, can the issue or issues be put right? If not, can they be mitigated? Continued agreement amongst stakeholders regarding the nature of the problems and potential remedies is vital.
Can you be creative in making the opportunity more attractive? How could changing the structure or responsibilities of the role make it more attractive to your desired talent? Maybe it's a case of making compensation changes? Maybe there's a wider industry, company or role-related attractiveness issue and work needs to be done on communicating a broader vision for the opportunity?
What trade-offs can realistically be made? What's a must-have and a nice-to-have? How do you stack-rank your hiring criteria? Can you make the person specification less strict to increase the size of the potential candidate pool? For example, could you target transferable skills from other sectors? Could you change the location? Could you hire someone less experienced and with high-potential? Can you exchange experience for skills, ability, motivation or potential? How does timing affect this dynamic?
Can you challenge any assumptions regarding leftfield candidates? Talent DNA can be defined as the intrinsic qualities an individual has or their natural potential. It's all about drive, dedication, motivation, IQ, EQ etc. It's not about experience or learned skills. One thing's for sure: given enough time, a high-DNA candidate will out-perform a high-experience candidate every time. But do you have enough time and support resource to invest in making this happen?
How do you increase candidate buy-in? It's not just about assessment and needs to be a two-way process. Top talent has choice. What's attractive to them? How are they best engaged? Who should be involved and how? What's the message? How do you make the process a positive experience and reflection of your company?
Inbound channels like direct applications and advertising will have already failed by the time your hire becomes challenging. Exhaust your network for referrals. Work with specialist recruiters. Ultimately, it's likely you'll need an outbound approach. Rather than relying on inbound active jobseekers, you'll need to proactively target ideal talent profiles on an outbound basis. Most will be passive - i.e. not actively seeking a career move. Dependant on the role being hired, you'll either have competent in-company resources to do this yourself or you'll need to work with a recruiter that operates this model.
Finally, recognize that hiring for a challenging role usually takes time. Making changes will reduce this time but you should plan for the interim period. What do you do whilst the headcount remains open? Assign role responsibilities elsewhere? Look at fractional options? Could third party options cover the gap?
The path to making a difficult hire is not straightforward and requires constant review, diagnosis and adjustment. It's a process of learning and the key is to manage this as smoothly as possible and in as short a timeframe as possible.