By partnering with a global executive search firm, you can make sure that none of the executive candidates presented to your company have serious flaws. However, it's still possible to make the wrong hire for your company, which can end up costing you time and money. According to Joseph McCool, writing for Bloomberg Business, the indirect costs of a bad executive hire can mount up to 8 to 12 times the executive's salary.
So how can your company avoid making the wrong choice when evaluating executive candidates? First of all, it's important to remember that "one size fits all" does not apply to executives. This means that someone who has worked for a competitor previously doesn't necessarily know the ins and outs of your business well enough to run it right off the bat. If a potential hire seems overly confident that their leadership style will transfer directly from their old position, this might be a sign that they will have trouble adjusting to and learning from a new environment.
It's also important to make sure that a new executive will actually be able to carry out the duties expected of them. To verify this, it's helpful to include interview questions about specific situations that have occurred or are likely to occur at the company. If possible, it can also be a good idea to have the candidate complete a sample task working with the same people they would be interacting with often if they were hired.
Finding people is easy, but finding the RIGHT people is not. YES Partners helps companies FIND the right people – for all company functions, across many industries and globally.
