Every company wants to find and hire the best talent. And while there’s a wealth of advice offered to companies trying to find top talent, much of it focuses on the mechanics and tactics employed rather than establishing a talent acquisition strategy to set the company up for success. The major concentration is on where and how to look, with some advice on what to look for in terms of experience or aptitude. But it seems very little is offered on the subject of determining why and exactly who you are looking for in a talent.
When an opening occurs, often times an organization will retrieve the job description from their HR department, “update” it by perhaps adding or changing a few bullet points and then begin the tactical process of finding a replacement. It would be of more benefit for the hiring/executive team to take a moment to ask three pertinent questions.
Where are you now?
Where do you want to go?
How do you get there?
While deceptively simple, asking and answering these questions can make a crucial difference between making a great hire that moves the company forward versus making a poor hire and putting the future of the organization in potential jeopardy. Let’s explore…
Where are you now?
Assessing your organization’s current status should be the first task. Are you already successful in your area of expertise and looking to expand? Are you in an at-risk position because of changes to your industry? Are you experiencing peaks and valleys – doing OK but wishing the progress was smoother and steadier? These are but a few of the initial questions that will help determine the type of talent that you need to hire.
With regard to “where you are now” with a particular talent opening, understand that openings on your team occur for a reason. Are you hiring because of growth i.e. for a newly created role? Are you hiring a replacement for a talent who left your organization? If it’s for a replacement, why did the talent leave? Were they let go because of poor performance? Were they no longer effective because your organization has evolved away from its initial core offerings and the talent’s skills were no longer a fit? Were they a strong talent who was recruited away to another organization? The answers to these questions need to be explored because gaining insight into your organization’s current status is crucial before you begin your search for a new talent.
Where do you want to go?
Looking at the 1, 2 and 5 year plans for your organization is the next step. With regard to your current opening, ask yourself whether you are “hiring for today or hiring for tomorrow”. And while the answer will most likely be a little of both, determining the primary focus of the new hire is important to your company’s future success. Perhaps it’s an Enterprise Software company that has begun incorporating a SaaS solution, in which case hiring for tomorrow requires looking for someone with strong SaaS experience. Or a traditional advertising agency that is refocusing its energies towards digital & social media, but needs someone to step in immediately and work on current accounts (hiring for today). While these are very general examples, they hopefully illustrate that determining hiring success for your organization entails a look at the past, the present and the future.
How do you get there?
Or more precisely, now that you’ve determined where your company is at present and you have a roadmap to its future, how does any potential new hire help your organization move forward on that journey (for example, the conclusion may be “we need more customers”). Then specifically focus on the opening at hand and how (and whether) that role actually moves the company towards that goal (“but our opening is for client services”). This is really when an organization determines who it’s truly looking for beyond job description bullet points and keywords on a resume.
Returning to the typical model of updating a previous job description and immediately beginning a search, very often an organization will find that they aren’t seeing the talent that they desire because they’re truly “hiring for the past”; they’re not taking a holistic and fresh look at where their organization has evolved to since the last time they filled that role. The talent they are finding don’t truly fit the needs of the organization because the needs of the organization have changed.
Let’s look at a practical/theoretical scenario…
Company A is in the “tweener” stage – past the startup stage, but recognizing they need further growth to reach their optimum capacity to serve their customers. They’ve lost their Head of Client Services to another company offering a higher salary. Rather than immediately begin the search for another Client Services person, they take a step back and assess their true needs. They conclude that the existing team has been doing well at keeping their clients happy with their service and capable of procuring renewals and expanding existing relationships, but their 3 growth year plan is in jeopardy if they don’t acquire more customers, or as briefly cited above “we need more customers but our opening is for client services”. So the conclusion that might be reached is that they don’t truly need another Head of Client Services, they need a strong VP of Business Development to expand and grow their customer base and revenue – especially since they now know that they have to increase their salary levels to get and keep top talent. Rather than spend fruitless weeks and months searching in vain (and in the wrong direction) for a talent that would not truly help the company to reach its goals, by performing that assessment, Company A now knows who they are looking for and can focus on finding the right talent for their team.
Avoiding the search “Evolution”
By asking these questions and taking a look at their conclusions an organization can avoid one of the primary frustrations that both clients and search consultants run into – namely that the search for a particular talent has “evolved”. If a talent search begins to change direction midway through the process, it’s most likely because the organization didn’t take the time to ask where they were, where they wanted to go and what type of talent would get them to their goals. Asking these three seemingly simple questions can save an organization time, money and potential damage to their employer brand.