Maybe you’re familiar with the challenges of recruiting at the most senior levels of your organisation.  You might even have faced the ultimate challenge – taking someone on in a senior role and finding, maybe from the beginning or maybe some months down the line, that they aren’t delivering.  After going to the trouble and expense of shaping a job description, placing an advertisement, drawing on the services of a recruitment agency, interviewing, short-listing and interviewing again, you are faced with a whole new set of problems.  Maybe you battle on for a while, hoping that things might sort themselves out.  Maybe you bite the bullet and embark on some kind of disciplinary process or cut straight to discussions about a compromise agreement.  As well as the initial costs of recruitment you’re now staring at the costs of months of poor performance and (*sigh*) the costs of embarking on a new recruitment campaign.  If your initial mistakes have attracted any media attention, you also face the costs of turning round perceptions in the marketplace… and you already know how much bad history can linger.

Are you on your own?  No, you’re not.  Over years of assessing candidates for senior roles, I’ve learnt that clients learn to trust my advice most when they haven’t followed it and have to take action to address a Big Mistake in their senior level recruitment.  More than that, I’ve learnt that even at the most senior levels of household name organisations mistakes are made and sometimes left to linger for months and even years.  I’ve learnt that poor design of organisational structure or job descriptions that are not clear come back to haunt organisations down the line.  I’ve learnt that recruitment agencies often have a poor understanding of jobs so that the candidates they send to my client organisations are often poorly suited to do the job.  I’ve learnt that some organisations get an awful lot right.  I’ve learnt that some organisations get an awful lot right and still end up making Big Mistakes when it comes to recruiting at senior levels.

There is one thing that organisations find hard to do using traditional interviewing methods.  They find it hard to get past their own initial impressions and hard to get beneath the surface of candidates’ CVs and their answers in interview in order accurately to assess the behavioural match – to answer the question “to what extent does this candidate have the skills, values and motivation, emotional intelligence and behaviours to deliver effectively in this role?”  There are all sorts of reasons why organisations find this difficult.  The more organisations are unclear, for example, about the role for which they’re recruiting, the harder it is to make judgements about what’s needed to succeed in the role.  Many organisations lack an understanding of the behavioural side of recruitment – they just don’t know what it takes to succeed.  In the current marketplace, some of them are even abandoning well researched descriptions of behaviour (often called “competency frameworks”) in favour of, frankly, motherhood and apple pie.  Perhaps they lack the skills to interview effectively – a behavioural- or competency-based interview requires specialist interviewing skills which many organisations don’t have.

Perhaps one reason organisations struggle to make sound judgements about senior recruits goes beyond anything that’s easy to address within your own organisation.  I say this not only because I recognise the skill involved in conducting a competency-based interview.  No.  In addition, I recognise that the success of this kind of interview depends on getting right down and dirty with candidates – gathering detailed evidence of their approach to work, which can only be given by sharing detailed examples of their work.  Not many candidates are prepared to share this level of detail with a potential future employer, even if there are people in the organisation who have the skill to conduct the interview.  Commissioning skilled outside help can make it safer for the candidates to share their experiences as well as filling a gap in your organisation’s skill-base.

Now, I realise that what I’ve written is a bit of a rant.  Actually, I’ve rather enjoyed writing a bit of rant – at speed, from the heart and based on many years’ of experience.  I don’t know you.  I don’t know your organisation.  I don’t know the capability of you or your organisation.  One thing I would say to you is this:  you need to know your capability and the capability of your organisation.  Recruiting at senior level needs to begin with a good dose of self honesty so that you know where you are strong and where you need help.  And yes, I mean where you need help to recruit the right candidate as well as what help you need from the right candidate.  Without one, oftentimes, you won’t get the other.