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? 

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 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.

Why hiring so often leads to disappointment.

Great hiring practices bring hidden issues to light, and provide insight into questions you had not even thought to ask. But most typical hiring practices do the opposite, ignoring more information than they gather, and leaving your hiring decision up to chance. The “insight gap” is what makes an executive search firm worth their fee. It's what justifies the cost of any professional services firm.

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

From time to time, you need to make a key hire to achieve your nonprofit's mission, and that sometimes requires the services of an executive search firm who specializes in nonprofit executive placement.