Finding the next leader of your organization by serving on a search committee is a long process, full of potential pitfalls. It’s also an honor and a privilege. But although the conversations are fascinating, the daunting complexity of the decision and the risk of making a mistake can weigh heavily on each committee member.   

Happily, having the right decision-making process can dramatically improve your odds of success. Long before you develop the job description, and certainly before you begin interviewing candidates, the search committee needs to develop their decision support process, where the information on the position and candidates is gathered and organized effectively. Although “deciding how to decide” can sound terribly bureaucratic, being attentive to this governance question is important. You need to understand who has the authority to decide, who needs to approve the decision, who should have input into the decision, and what information should be used to make the decision. Most importantly, this process will also need to include enough time to consider all the gathered information.

So what should you consider when you evaluate executive search firms proposals and what should you discuss with each search firm?

From my work with search committees, one question that often comes up is how to evaluate whether a search firm is evidence-based or data driven. Staffing Advisors' entire approach to hiring is evidence-based. But how can that be proven, or compared to another search firm? 

I'm often asked by both candidates and clients, "So how is the job market?" Candidates want to know if they will be able to find their next job. Employers want to know how hard it will be to find their next employee. And this question of, “How is the job market?” seems like a reasonable way to start that conversation.

As an executive search firm, we're often invited in for conversations when there are questions about an employee's performance. In having these many discussions over the years, we've gained a fair amount of expertise in diagnosing and assessing the many factors that can lead to poor performance (knowledge, skills, abilities, attributes, cultural fit, and environmental factors). And understanding these factors is often essential to do our job successfully.

The hiring process can be a nauseating rollercoaster of emotions—from the emotional high you feel when a top candidate enthusiastically accepts your job offer, to the sickening corkscrew of misery when:

How does your employer's reputation affect your career? Executive recruiters know quite a bit more about that question than you might expect. 

We're in the room when hiring managers decide who to interview, so we know how outsiders perceive the people who work for your organization. It's common for hiring managers to attribute the company’s reputation to everyone who works there. We also conduct the social media background checks as part of our due diligence, so we know when your (formerly private) management matters become all-too-public.

Conversely, for you hiring managers reading, we know precisely how responsive candidates are to your job opportunities. We see first-hand how job seekers are more eager to respond to job opportunities from highly reputable organizations, and how they shy away from organizations with bad reviews on employer review sites. 

As hiring process experts, it's our job to know exactly how your Glassdoor score affects your abilty to recruit, and how your employer's current reputation will affect your own ability to land your next job. 

After a lengthy hiring process, you really, really, want the candidate to accept your job offer. And why wouldn't you? The cruel irony of staffing is that the recruiting process only happens when you are already overworked and understaffed.

Why does a headhunter need to know about long-term employee retention and how to prevent employee turnover? Why do we read the latest research? Because knowing what causes people to leave their job, and what causes people to accept a new job is our stock-in-trade. That's what we do all day, every day. Executive search firms make a living replacing underperforming employees with top performers recruited from other organizations.

It's common to include a large number of people in a hiring decision. When handled properly, you can reduce your risk of making a hiring mistake by getting valuable input from a variety of perspectives. But when your hiring process is not organized properly, you will only be wasting everyone's time by including more people.

One of the most common dangers in the hiring process is "groupthink" -- where the opinion of one vocal (often powerful) interviewer dominates the narrative about a candidate. When the vocal participant expresses an opinion, everyone with a less firmly-held opinion usually agrees. (The research on groupthink is quite compelling: check out How Certainty Transforms Persuasion in the Harvard Business Review.) 

As it turns out, creating the perfect hiring process is fairly difficult. Who knew? For more than ten years, we've been on a quest to bring you the most useful tools for every kind of hiring situation, and for every stage of the hiring process.