This is my inaugural blog post.  I’m late to this game but look forward to lending some useful perspective to the online dialogue around senior level recruiting/search.  Hopefully most of what I end up writing will be worth reading and at least some of it worth contemplating after you leave this blog.

While my plan is to offer substantive insight, I’m going to allow my first post to be a ‘venting session’ about one of my pet peeves.  First, if I may let me quickly establish that I have some basis on which to offer my opinions.  I’ve invested over 20 years in this crazy business and have been blessed to have worked at levels that should qualify me as at least enough of a ‘player’ to have experiences and perspective worthy of commentary (sector leader for a top 4 global firm; completed over 75 board and/or CEO searches; 10+ searches for those ‘horrible’ examples of capitalistic excess…compensation over $10 million, dozens in the mere-7-figures and hundreds of equally critical players that make up the six-figure masses).

Now that ‘pet peeve #1’ (not necessarily the #1 pet peeve cuz I’m not sure I could choose that ‘one’).

How has the practice of ‘plugging in’ new talent continued for as long as it has without greater codification of processes that assess the ‘alignment’ of existing and new leaders sufficient to ensure that we will actually achieve improved results sufficient to warrant the change?  A mouthful, I know.  Stated another way, the effective definition and assessment of prospective candidate’s critical success factors in recruiting has remained the purview of a few ‘artists’ vs. the science on which an industry can be expected to deliver persistent value.

Clients and their recruiters are equally at fault.  Expediency, ignorance, callous disregard are all at work here.  Admittedly, the task of assessing leadership’s alignment with an organization’s most critical strategic imperatives at any given time is a huge undertaking.  Take this down to an individual executive role targeted for change and the processes required to establish accurate/predictive success factors is tedious at best and overwhelming most of the time.  We as an industry of recruiters have wasted the opportunity to step into this gap with solutions that have substantiative validation; solutions that dig into the context that exists behind each and every search we undertake in order to give our clients added insight and context-rich data on which prospective candidates can be assessed. 

Instead we fall back on leadership platitudes and loosely defined success metrics.  I fought to overcome this tendency when I was leading a large group of practices in one of the ‘class-act’ firms in our industry.  We had our fair share of ‘artists’ who were delivering truly differentiated value.  However, we failed miserably in institutionalizing the processes and training necessary to ensure that as a firm and as an industry, we were helping/pushing clients to dig deeper, to develop the insights necessary to ensure our search resulted in an ‘infusion of impact’ that would make enough of a positive difference to warrant the change.  I faced resistance and on this front, believe I failed to push our industry as far into the realm of validated core processes as I had hoped.  My experience was not unique.

This said, while we face resistance from within our own ranks, we also face resistance from clients.  In many cases, even the best artists face resistance to such diligence from clients who all too often either feel too overwhelmed to take on such introspection or are over confident in what they think they already know about what is needed.  I know that I have been very unpopular with certain elements of a client organization when I’ve felt compelled to ‘call them out’ on their arrogance or laziness (though I try to use much more diplomacy than I am showing here) and this has been true on roles paying both $500,000 and $5,000,000.  However, I have also experienced firsthand that when we bring the right tools and commit to the heavy-lifting necessary to enable clients to reach this insight, we further not only our own relationship-integrity with that client but also the integrity of our industry.

I have also learned that the development and implementation of these processes are ‘high-level’ skills requiring investment to develop and training to implement.  I know that at least some of the major firms are diligently attempting to address these flaws. However, there is significant conflict in the reward structure and inherent disincentives to such labor intensive work.  Despite the level of difficulty, we need to find some way to move the needle on our value add…  this critical set of processes cannot remain the purview of a select group of ‘artisans’ (whether operating in the big firms, in affiliation with a small band of like-minded, or solo).  Clients, in turn, need to claim or reclaim their resolve to commit both time and resources necessary to assess alignment, determine how precisely the targeted executive will achieve differentiated value and seek out/demand search consultants who are committed to enabling same.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 1:00 am and is filed under Candidate Development, Candidates, Clients, Executive Recruiting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.