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.

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.

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.

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

Replacing an underperforming executive is one of the most challenging situations that a nonprofit leader must confront.

If you work in an association or other nonprofit organization, it’s risky to think of recruiting as an HR function. It’s not.

By telling HR to “Post a job ad, get some resumes, and then I’ll starting interviewing,” you are making a career-limiting mistake, one that puts your personal reputation at risk.

Hiring requires you to make decisions about people you don’t know particularly well. But people-evaluation is prone to pitfalls. Although most people trust their own assessments of candidates, extensive research shows that we’re just not that good at it. We give too much credit to the individual and not enough credit to the work environment. (Pro tip: If you want to get better at hiring, you need to learn from your mistakes and stop blaming the candidate. Most people don’t understand all the factors that led to their success. Every time you hire someone and they disappoint you later, you just might have missed something in the hiring process.)

My client Bill has a unique yardstick for measuring results. It has no markings between one inch and 36 inches. Every project either measures up as a total success or a total failure, with nothing in between.

A few years ago, the caliber of your management team was not a public matter. Your internal disagreements stayed private. Outsiders rarely knew whether or not you had few bad apples on your leadership team.

One of the fastest ways to sabotage your business results is to hire the cheapest HR professionals you can find. When you saddle your executive team with under-staffed (or under-skilled) HR support, you hobble their performance. Here’s why: