The departure of an important executive can leave a company feeling pressure to replace this person quickly. However, businesses end up in an even worse situation if they rush headlong into executive recruitment, without a thoughtful plan for placement.
Having a stable approach to this problem helps boards avoid making bad decisions, hiring someone for an important role without adequately evaluating them or, worse still, ignoring the things that make them wrong for the job. When a company focuses too heavily on a position being empty, and not enough on the person being hired to fill it, sub-par candidates can be brought on board.
In a 2000 article for Inc. about CEO regrets, Brian Geisel, the head of a software company, admitted to hiring a bad key manager, someone he kept onboard for a full year even though they were ill-suited for the job and the business in general.
"My biggest mistake was to let myself get into a situation where you need to solve issues immediately, in desperation," he said. "I didn't have the resources to let me do due diligence. I didn't have a board. I didn't have a human resources department. I didn't have the depth of management to use the managers as a sounding board."
It's true that recruiters should work quickly to locate the best candidate for a vacancy, as doing so respects that individual's time and gives them an edge over competitors. However, sufficient reference checking and other pre-hiring measures also have to be undertaken so the quality of the candidate is guaranteed before the offer is made.
For a global executive search to be truly effective, the people conducting it should use recruitment professionals who are timely but also thorough.
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