When you are building a firm, recruiting staff is a part of the business. Even though hiring employees is not that hard, hiring executives can be. Businesses spend a great amount of time hiring executives or representatives because they have a huge role to play for an organization. While your company is going through the executive recruiting process, there are some tips that must be considered. Have a look at this entire post and check out the top 9 tips to boost your executive hiring process.
1- Pre-Screen Candidates
Pre-screening candidates refer to examine not only the professional and educational attributes of the candidates but also their personal attributes. You ask various personal and professional questions to the candidates to verify whether or not they are perfect for the position at your firm. After you figure out the job descriptions and key points of the job, you post the vacancy on relevant job boards. And when you scan through the resumes of the applicants, you will get to know the identities of the candidates. But a face-to-face interview will help you determine the nature of the applicants.
2- Ask Open-Ended Questions
After selecting the candidates based on their professional resumes, you should ask them open-ended questions during interviews. For example, ask them if they are happy with their professional life. The answer you get will give you so many insights about the person. Write down the answers of each of the candidates in a notebook so that you can look at them when required. You can also get in touch with the people that are familiar with the personalities of the candidates.
3- Create a Search Team
Only the job boards may not help you find a top executive alone. But if there is a search team at your organization, together you can find a top customer executive easily. Make sure your team is efficient and effective enough to figure out the professional criteria of a great executive. Make the team familiar with the job description, requirements, etc. However, you may not find what you are looking for from a job board alone. But executive recruiting firms can help you in that case.
4- Maintain Confidentiality and Privacy
Try to maintain your professionalism during executive recruiting. Most of the executive candidates prefer when the recruiters send them offers through private email addresses or online chats. During the time when you are contacting the executive candidates, don’t forget to maintain your professionalism and confidentiality.
5- Build Relationships with Your Candidates
Asking open-ended questions to your candidates will help you determine their personality traits. The key here is to get to know the person. Note that, the best executive candidates are hard to pursue because they are not around much. They are either working with the most popular firms or their professionalism is under progress. But with time and a good team of interviewers, you can achieve a relationship with executive candidates.
6- Create a Team of Interviewers
Recruit multiple people from your team to interview the executive candidates. It is not always possible for one person to handle different things at the same time. But a good search team along with a good interviewers team can help you find the most professional executive. Ask the team to create their best interview questions about the candidate’s professional and personal life. But also try to recruit a team that has knowledge in the position.
7- Explore Creative Interview Ideas
Sometimes an in-person interview at the office or a phone interview is not an effective approach to find the best candidate. And when it comes to the executive role, getting to know the person becomes more important. The solution to this problem is to create different interview ideas that are professional and also friendly. At times candidates feel pressurized at an office circumstance but a dinner or lunch outside of the office premises can cool things up. You can also invite the interviewees to an event or mock presentations, business trips, etc. to get to know them.
8- Look for The Record of Leaderships
While interviewing the candidates, ask them to show you their portfolios. What jobs did they work for? What big differences did they make in a project? How do they make and execute decisions? How do they behave with customers and peers? What do they love to do? All these questions are important to determine the candidates’ leadership qualities. While you are interviewing, do not only look for their resume and job experience by years. But observing these qualities is also helpful.
9- Be Patient
Since executive recruiting is a time-consuming process, you need patience and effort. Please note that due to being a highly competitive area, hiring an executive can take up to 8 months. Because not only the process is delicate, but also your candidates need time to prepare themselves for the job.
Conclusion
While recruiting executives, you should look for employee refers besides job boards and executive recruiting firms. Sure the firms will help you with professional and experienced candidates but they also have their friends and family members they can refer for the position.