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.

It's easy to copy a job description from another organization. But posting a job advertisement that looks like every other employer won't help you hire someone terrific.

Whether you are the CEO or a newly promoted manager, the majority of your interview training (if you received any) was probably from legal counsel. Congratulations. Now you know a dozen questions you are not allowed to ask. But how should you conduct the job interview (beyond dodging legal trouble), so that you can be confident you are hiring the best possible candidate for the job?

In a typical CEO or Executive Director search, the hiring process can take 4-8 months. But just where does all that (elapsed) time go? 

Candidly, some of it occurs before we even know there is a search need. It's not uncommon for a committee to devote a month or two solely to the search firm selection process.  But once Staffing Advisors has been retained to run a search, the largest driver of the search timeline is scheduling.

If you are the chair of a search committee you have a daunting list of factors to consider. A CEO search involves far more than posting an ad, collecting resumes and scheduling a few interviews.

Several times a week, a potential new client calls our executive search firm to learn more about us. Most people ask us whether we have handled a certain kind of search before, most people want to know our fee structure, and everyone wants to know how long the hiring process will take. 

This article originally appeared in The HR Examiner. You can read the original here.

This is a preview of a article written and published for ASAE, in collaboration with Jackie Eder-Van Hook and Mary Logan. You can read the full post here (paywall).

The biggest mistake most people make in negotiating executive search firm contracts is focusing solely on the outcome instead of the hiring process. In hiring, your goal is not to merely hire someone qualified; your goal is to hire a top performer, so your contracts need to reflect that.