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Four Steps to Choosing an Excellent Executive Search Firm (PDF)
We encourage you to download these articles if you find them of value. We suggest you to share them with other members of your hiring team, as you see fit. We also encourage you to contact the author of any of these articles for any additional information and/or insights.
The chief executive officer is ecstatic and on the verge of coming out of his chair. “I love the guy, terrific; he’s got to be the one. Let’s make him an offer.”
“Well, fine, but tell me how you think he fits our profile and search criteria as you described them to me?” I ask.
“The heck with the profile. I have an instinct about this guy. He went to Harvard at the same time I did, belongs to the same golf club, and his kids go to high school with my kids.”
I know where this is leading, and it isn’t good. Nothing can play havoc with an important hiring decision like the No. 1 interviewing error — often known as the “similar to me” error.
We all respond favorably to people who share our values, passions, hobbies and other important life experiences. Making a hiring decision, however, based on the fact that a candidate went to the same college you attended may not ensure a successful hire and may, in fact, do just the opposite.
What happens in the typical course of interviewing is that a hiring executive, when he discovers that he and a particular candidate share some aspect in common, makes an unconscious positive association (”Oh, that’s similar to me”) with the candidate, quite apart from how he or she might meet the specific criteria established as critical to successfully fulfilling the position.
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Beware of “Similar to Me” (PDF)
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We encourage you to download these articles if you find them of value. We suggest you to share them with other members of your hiring team, as you see fit. We also encourage you to contact the author of any of these articles for any additional information and/or insights.
The executive looks like the type of prosperous, self-confident professional one would expect: Well-dressed in a dark blue pin-stripe suit, impeccably coiffed and appropriately exuding a sense of purpose and resolve. He proffers his resume and tells me with great pride that he had to pay some purported “expert” only $500 for the advice necessary to assemble it. I look down and realize that $500 went down the tube. It’s one page long. More than two decades of solid achievement molded, crammed, shoved and extruded onto a single page. I know now that it will be necessary to once again unearth “the speech.”
The speech goes something like this: Somehow, sometime, no doubt shortly after World War II, somebody floated the idea that in order to compose an effective resume, job seekers had to limit themselves to a one-page document or nobody would read it. This is total insanity, but it somehow took root in the American psyche and has become so ingrained that even today, some 60 years later, executives still labor under the misconception that a scanty resume is what every hiring manager wants.
The real truth is that nobody, save perhaps the recent college graduate, can or should effectively represent his or her skills and accomplishments on the front of an 8 1/2- by 11-inch piece of paper. In 25 years of reviewing resumes, I’ve never declined to interview someone because I had to read two, three or more pages on a resume. I’ve decided not to interview someone whose resume was on glitter paper, included a picture of his dog, implied that they were related to Bill Gates, or claimed they were charter members of Mensa — but never have I refused to consider a candidate because I had to take an extra 10 seconds to read a few pages of text.
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The Right Size Resume (PDF)
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We encourage you to download these articles if you find them of value. We suggest you to share them with other members of your hiring team, as you see fit. We also encourage you to contact the author of any of these articles for any additional information and/or insights.
In 1955 the popular rhythm and blues band, The Platters, released a hit record called “The Great Pretender”. Today there is another Great Pretender you should know about…
You need to hire a key executive or a professional that is vital to your company’s success. You advertise and go through your network of contacts to find the successful candidate. After reviewing countless resumes you find your likely candidate and a short time later he is sitting in front of you in an interview. You can’t believe you have found the perfect person and even what is more surprising; he is interested in coming to work for you! Your search is over. The offer letter is signed. You make the announcement to your organization that Mr. Right has accepted your offer of employment and will be joining your team!
Now, let’s fast-forward 2 months. Suddenly, it occurs to you that you may have hired the wrong person and as you spend the next 6 months taking time away from your job to help Mr. Right do his job, you are wondering, what was I thinking when I hired him? After 8 months of wasting your time and your company’s resources, you meet to discuss a separation plan.
Let me introduce you to the “Great Pretender”. He or she confidently walks into your office and conducts an interview with you, negotiates your job description to fit his or her background and identifies your problems to be the perfect solution for your upcoming challenges…
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The Great Pretender (PDF)
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We encourage you to download these articles if you find them of value. We suggest you to share them with other members of your hiring team, as you see fit. We also encourage you to contact the author of any of these articles for any additional information and/or insights.
The hunt for a key executive, a CEO or CFO, typically requires three to six months of effort. No board of directors or hiring manager wants to arrive at the end of such a grueling journey only to find that the entire effort has failed and has to be repeated. It’s emotionally debilitating and very costly.
But it’s far better than an even more costly alternative: hiring the wrong person.
Too often hiring managers are so fatigued at the end of the drawn-out interviewing and evaluation gantlet that they agree to hire a candidate without making absolutely certain that the person is authentically who he or she purports to be. Quick decisions at this stage can lead to organizational, financial and public relations debacles that can take years to live down.
If there is a skeleton lurking in the candidate’s closet, someone will eventually pay in a severe way for not unearthing it before hiring is complete and the individual is onboard collecting a high salary.
Of course, rigorous and comprehensive reference checking from all angles can help prevent such an occurrence. But the unmentionable truth is that reference checking in the first part of the 21st century is a highly problematical effort at best.
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Recruiting and Exposing Skeletons (PDF)
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Even in the best of economic times, employers frequently botch the opportunity to recruit top-level executive talent when they either forget or ignore one of the cardinal rules of the recruiting — both the candidate and the company have to “sell” each other on the available opportunity.
Now that the job market has cratered, and the supply/demand dysfunction has contributed to a surplus of available executive talent, many companies have foolishly adopted the “you’re just lucky to be here” approach to recruiting. That is particularly true in big, highly visible organizations that have the distinction of finding themselves in a growth mode while everyone else is downsizing.
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Mutual Focus (PDF)
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We encourage you to download these articles if you find them of value. We suggest you to share them with other members of your hiring team, as you see fit. We also encourage you to contact the author of any of these articles for any additional information and/or insights.
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Hiring Practices for the Next Decade (.ppt)
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We encourage you to download these articles if you find them of value. We suggest you to share them with other members of your hiring team, as you see fit. We also encourage you to contact the author of any of these articles for any additional information and/or insights.