I enjoyed a really nice bottle of Cabernet last night, and it suddenly occurred to me that the similarities with great candidates were striking. Both take a great deal of effort to produce on the front end, not to mention the right timing and conditions. But if the end consumer doesn’t time their intake properly, both wine and candidates spoil and turn into wasted effort and money. Of course shelf life varies widely, and this is where the two really depart.

With candidates, we can continue to have input and develop the relationship, but that only goes just so far. At some point, especially with great candidates, there has to be some interaction with a hiring authority which results in a line of sight to an opportunity. If not, they’ll spoil and find opportunity elsewhere.

Are you filing great candidates in the “I’ll have to get to it later” folder? Is that really in your best interest? Does it produce the best return on your investment in generating those candidates?

Just my 2 cents…well, $45 actually…and a little food for thought.

BTW, it was a 2005 Joseph Phelps Napa Valley Cab. Great now and should develop nicely over the next several years!

Make it a great day!

Here’s a simple tip to help increase your ROI on Candidate Development (CD) projects, and make your recruiting efforts more proactive.

I should point out that it is still important to maintain a fairly tight focus on the criteria for the position(s) that initiated the CD project, in order to produce the kinds of people you seek to fill that opening. However, in every search we generate people/resumes/leads that are close but not quite a fit for the current opening.

In some cases people are too junior or too senior. Or they might not have all of the skills/experience that you were looking for in this specific position. Then again, we might also come across people that work in the same department, but have a totally different role. In each of these situations, these people might just be the exact person you’re looking for on another search in the future. Or perhaps they’re the perfect fit for another hiring manager in your company. And if we’re targeting specific competitors/companies where you normally find and hire good talent, then they are definitely worth capturing.

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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.

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