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Around 46% of leadership appointments and 50% of leadership transitions fail within 18 months. Disturbing results for such an important activity. And the cost of this failure is more disturbing, at least 3.3x the first years compensation and often much more.
Here’s what we’ve found is underlying this.
Recruitment processes are normally intense affairs with alot of ground covered in a short space of time. The effectiveness of the process, as well as our judgements, unconscious decisions and memory of what took place are often distorted by certain key moments.
We have identified 5 key ‘moments’ in all hiring processes that have a critical impact on the success or failure of a key hire.
Very often the brief for a leadership hire is focussed on past career experience, current job title or ‘get me the person responsible for the same function at a specific’ competitor.
Executive searches have a tendency to centre on factors that lack contextual relevance. After all, just because someone delivered impression growth in a well-funded P.E business doesn’t make them right for a global corp.
Coupled to this sometimes flawed definition of requirements, we have seen the focus is on skills and attributes that were needed for what the company has just been through, not what it’s about to go through.
Matching the candidates with experience from the right context is vital to appointing leaders who last and excel.
Utilising our Hire Insight platform, our process combines our unique Leadership DNA Assessment™ together with proven Behavioural Traits surveys.
These tools canvas opinion from stakeholders about the attributes of the right candidate through easy-to-complete online surveys. The results are combined into reports that identify where opinions align (and where they don’t) so consensus can be achieved.
Think of this as sign-posting the destination before the journey starts.
The very best candidates tend to be busy and time-poor. The chances of catching their attention with a quick call or email and a re-cycled job description are slim at best.
In a survey of senior candidates just 12% reported receiving any useful information ahead of the interview.
One of the key differences between the best candidates and the rest is they are more ruthless in cutting out the noise of things that are not central to the achieving what they want.
Recruiting great leaders is as much about engaging their interest as it is about choosing ‘who’.
In order to catch the eye of great candidates and make it clear this is something they should give time to we provide a red carpet experience via our Hire Insight Candidate Portal.
The online portal gives candidates invite-only access to beautifully presented and detailed information about the role, the organisation and the objectives. Video Briefing
The Candidate portal is also where each candidate
The very best candidates tend to be busy and time-poor. The chances of catching their attention with a quick call or email and a re-cycled job description are slim at best.
In a survey of senior candidates just 12% reported receiving any useful information ahead of the interview.
One of the key differences between the best candidates and the rest is they are more ruthless in cutting out the noise of things that are not central to the achieving what they want.
Recruiting great leaders is as much about engaging their interest as it is about choosing ‘who’.
To ensure that each candidate is judged on meaningful factors our remote assessment centres layer together:
The process of completing these layers provides a motivation test for candidates ensuring that the shortlist contains only highly motivated candidates.
The profiles provide each interviewer with a meaningful overview and granular detail about each candidate allowing them to be objectively assessed.
A key component of success, even for elite candidates, is operating in a landscape of support, trust and psychological safety. Incoming leaders will initially only know a certain amount about an organisation. Having the support of key stakeholders will help gain support for new initiatives and protect against the sabotage, however subtle, that often derails new Leaders.
Very few leadership hiring processes canvas the opinion of stakeholders through the hiring process. So it is common to find disagreement about the choice of appointment.
An effective way of encouraging a support is to put in place mechanisms that canvas input from stakeholders throughout the process. This helps to gain a consensus about ‘who’, even where compromise is necessary, and thus pressure on the stakeholders to ensure ‘their’ choice is successful.
Stakeholders are included from the beginning of the process. The Leadership DNA Survey™ and McQuaig™ Behavioural Traits Survey canvas input to the requirements mandate to ensure the search is directionally correct from the start.
Once candidates are presented, stakeholders provide feedback in the ratings score-card. This is ‘calibration’ process completely blindly to mitigate the influence of the ratings others have done.
The involvement by stakeholder at key stages means that even those who have not been involved in interviews have still had a strong voice in the appointment.
Therefore the success of the new appointment is a direct reflection on them, which we have found fosters a supportive culture around the new hire.
Due to a desire to keep discussions with key candidates confidential, many interviews for leadership roles take place in settings such as hotels, restaurants or private clubs.
Another factor at play is ‘reputation bias’ – where the interviewer does not feel it is appropriate to challenge, explore and probe the candidate’s background because of their reputation or position.
These factors combine with many interviewers not addressing their biases (conscious or unconscious) and therefore result in a lack of objectivity. This leads to the wrong decision about ‘who’ and great candidates being turned down for reasons that are irrelevant.
Building on the direction provided by the Leadership DNA Assessment™ and McQuaig™ Behavioural Traits Survey we have developed two highly effective tools:
Our unique Interview Journal provides structure to each interview but also formalises the sharing of interview notes between different stages of the process.
Our candidate ratings tool (within Hire Insight™) canvas’s feedback from each interviewer with a flexible categories framework. It does this without each interviewer seeing how the other interviewers have scored each candidate and so neutralises any effect of dominate personalities in the ratings process.
In less than 5 minutes.