A Guide to Recruiting Leaders for Executive Roles

Your choice of an executive hire can make or break your organization. The right executive leader can help your company move forward and accomplish lofty visions, whereas choosing the wrong person can be disastrous.

Here’s a guide to recruiting the right leaders.

Define Your Leadership Requirements

Before you start your search for an executive, you need to clarify your leadership goals and requirements. Every organization has a brand that is derived from its mission, vision, and values. Your leaders should embody these factors in setting company culture. The person you hire for an executive leadership role should be an advocate for that culture while steering your company in the right direction.

This isn’t to say that one type of leadership style is necessarily better than others. However, it’s best to hire someone who automatically shares the organization’s values as part of his or her own character. Authenticity can’t be faked, as leaders have adopted management styles that have made them successful and are unlikely to change.

Think of the exact role you’re hiring for and the kind of leadership expectations you have for it. What may work for one department, company, or industry may not work well for another. Identify what you wish to achieve from your new executive in terms of their leadership capabilities and search for those characteristics accordingly.

Tap the Nurtured Relationships of an Executive Recruiter

People like what they know more than they know what they like. That’s why a lot of companies advance people from within, which makes sense. Employees who have worked their way up the ranks understand the company culture and have seen the succession plan executed for years.

However, when the organization is looking for new thinking to perhaps take the company in a new direction, looking outside can bring fresh ideas to the table. But many hiring managers struggle to find the right candidates for executive roles because they target individuals they don’t know. That’s where an executive recruiting firm can really help.

Executive recruiters own a database of qualified candidates with whom they have relationships that they’ve nurtured for years. They may have interviewed a candidate for a middle-management position some time ago for another client, but for some reason, the client went in another direction. That candidate may be progressing to upper management and looking to make another step up. Recruiters are great at keeping these key people in their network.

Be Thorough—QUICKLY

Any recruitment process needs time to fully vet candidates because an executive leader is so critical for your company’s future. But in the 2022 market, you don’t have time for a six-month vetting process while you make a decision—the best candidates will no longer be available.

Build your detailed profiles of shortlisted candidates, follow up with them, conduct well-thought-out interviews, compare your options, and make them an offer they can’t refuse. Remember, offers are not entirely about the financial package—they are about discovering what the candidate values and making sure your package addresses those points. But do it quickly because it’s a candidate’s market and talented professionals are not available for long.

Brookwoods Group is a top executive recruiting firm in Houston that helps organizations find the right-fit talent that moves their businesses forward. If you’re looking to fill an executive leadership role at your organization, get in touch with our executive staffing agency near San Antonio today.