All of our Executive Search Solutions begin with an in-depth consultation with the hiring team to ascertain the needs of your organization beyond any written job description to ensure we’re looking for the right acuities. Hager’s focus is on getting to the heart of the matter – How does your opening affect the success of the organization? Success or failure is defined by how leaders lead, how they interact with teams and how they integrate with company culture. A thorough examination of your current leadership, your company culture, and your existing organization enables us to use both actionable data and a decade of expertise to determine the best course of action.
PEOPLE + ORGANIZATION CONSULTING
We Start by Asking Better Questions
There is far more to executive search than just finding the right candidate. Before a successful search can begin, it’s imperative to understand the true needs of the organization. It begins with a conversation with the leaders; identifying pain points, assessing the current team and determining what’s working and what’s missing, defining what success looks like for the entire organization and by extension what success looks like for the open position. We frequently find that companies who are experiencing a challenge in finding the right talent are often looking in the wrong direction.
What is the right fit for your organization? We look at your current leadership team and understand the existing intelligence base already present within your organization. This evaluation is done prior to establishing the requirements of a role itself. Any new leadership role should align with the missing elements not present in your existing team. Many companies focus only on a job description and fail to look at the existing team thoroughly enough to define what performance gaps must be filled to fully meet the needs of the organization as a whole.
Culture is a determining factor in the retention of current top performers and key to attracting the best new talent. Many companies believe their culture is self-evident to the internal organization only to find that during the hiring process, their team was not on board with the sense of purpose as the leadership originally thought. Our data driven process helps quantify and qualify your company’s true culture, as it appears to both internal and external audiences.
Executive level searches can fail because of the lack of alignment between what is truly needed and the definition of the open position. Often times when replacing a position, the existing job description will point the organization towards an area of past need rather than current or future requirements. Or with a newly created role, the list of desired acuities becomes longer and longer as the needs are calculated – this can be especially true with start-ups and smaller organizations that have multiple areas of need. This results in a cumbersome process that can result in “Mission Creep” (where the position description becomes more of a “wish list”) or “The Chimera” (where the described talent seems to have a widely disparate set of skills and responsibilities). Our goal is to head your company in the right direction with the right set of criteria resulting in the best talent to achieve your objectives.
A successful candidate must integrate with the existing leadership team and then operate at the highest performance level to achieve the determined direction. The addition of a new executive/decision maker/influencer changes the organization itself. But how can you tell whether a new leader will integrate properly? Our understanding of organizational development coupled with our ability to find the right talent to fulfill your strategic objectives is what sets us apart from other executive search firms; firms that often rely on an existing database of resumes or presorted information based on resume keywords.
Each company is different and their challenges are unique. Hager’s prime focus is on understanding the needs of your organization and how your open position fulfills those needs as well as integrates with members of your team. Our consultative approach enables us to minimize the “Evolution” of the search as the candidate pool begins to present itself saving critical time and associated costs.