Finding your next key hire
Deciding who to recruit is arguably more challenging than finding a lifetime partner. Make the wrong decision and the repercussions can be painful with messy divorces or drawn-out employment disputes.
Of course, it’s not all that bad, all the time; but that’s not what headhunting is about.
Headhunting should be about finding your next key hire who is going to make a lasting impact to your business. Headhunting is about making the perfect hire.
But how do you do that?
We often find clients who tell us about hitting it off with a candidate who reminded them of their younger self, or who trod a similar path through training and career progression. But as headhunters with experience of building great senior leadership teams, we see things rather differently and are challenging our clients to consider making hiring decisions which are not affected by personal bias.
Sound easy? It’s actually quite a hard adjustment to make as you need to go against your natural instinct and challenge your decisions, but we think it is worthwhile.
We encourage our clients to appoint candidates who offer something different, who have different personalities, different skills and different experiences, because it’s through this blend of skills and characteristics that great teams are formed, and great teams achieve great things.
Clearly there needs to be an alignment of values, but that doesn’t mean we should recruit carbon copies of ourselves. So next time you are short listing CVs or selecting the final candidate, ask yourself, can you find someone with something different to add.
An article which Harvard Business Review promoted recently has picked up a similar theme and the author (Ruchika Tulshyan ) summarises her case well. “Diversity in our workplace makes us smarter, more innovative, and promotes better critical thinking”.
You can read Ruchika’s full article here - How to Reduce Personal Bias When Hiring (hbr.org).
