Hiring an employee is in any case “a cat in a poke. But in the situation of hiring a manager, everything is complicated by the fact that much more is expected from this structural unit than from an ordinary rank-and-file employee. And all the functions of a manager, such as management of people and resources, building relationships with colleagues, partners and management, he will have to carry out from the first day, and sometimes from the first hours.
So before we start looking at managerial recruiting as a structured process, we need to answer the questions:
- What goals do we want to achieve with his acquisition?
- What expectations do we have for him or her?
- What resources are we willing to invest in finding him?
- What should this manager look like?
- And in general – how much do we need him?
So everything, as always, begins with planning and setting goals. Certainly, if a company is not ready to adopt an open policy, or if it wants to save money and cut costs, then it makes sense to turn to internal personnel reserve and select an applicant from their team.
Generally speaking, the policy of creating internal personnel reserves of a company has recently gained in popularity. This can be explained by the shortage of professional managerial staff and is objectively reflected by the time it takes to fill managerial vacancies. On average, it takes from 60 to 180 days to close a manager’s vacancy, as opposed to 40-50 days for a specialist. There are many pros to this method of recruiting:
- The candidate who grew up inside the company environment is directly familiar to you, and you know their successes, failures, weaknesses and strengths firsthand, and you can more accurately predict their effectiveness in the new position.
- Finding an internal candidate and training him or her for a new position will cost the company less than recruiting an outside candidate and then training him or her.
- An internal candidate is familiar with the company’s corporate culture, which is very important to a manager.
- He or she is more fully aware of the key elements of management in this particular organization, the structure of the company and the scale of business. And so on and so forth.
But there are disadvantages…
- This is also a “cat in the bag”. No matter how effective the employee was in his previous positions, even if these positions were managerial, not the fact that his effectiveness in the new position and under the new goals and objectives will be the same. After all, he will now have more questions about the strategic vision of the future and how to achieve it, as well as the intricacies of management, resource management and people skills. And he was just a good performer. Or a good manager, but of smaller units. At the new position a person can “burn out”, he can “grow a crown”, but there is little else that can happen – you can’t predict everything. That is, the risk of failure is always there.
- The process of building an internal talent pool by developing promising employees is long, and the need for a manager can assume acute relevance.
- An internal employee’s eye is most often “washed out”, he is used to working the old way, and such a person is unlikely to bring something truly new, innovative to the management process (if, of course, this new is required at all).
- The illusion with internal staff is that they do not need to be taught. Unfortunately, everyone has to be taught and retrained. And in the variant with his own person, the danger is also that his mistakes and blunders in the new position may not be immediately obvious – we are used to him, and his past successes will also affect the objectivity of the evaluation. Wrong choice will be evident over time with an obvious decline in performance of his unit or team, when it becomes clear that the failures are not accidental, but the time will have been missed. So, now let’s consider recruiting managers as a structured and meaningful process.
So, now let’s look at executive recruiting as a structured and meaningful process.
Setting the goal and forming the desired image of the candidate.
As we have already said, the results of our search depend on this point. First we have to figure out what we want to hire a new executive for. It should be: a new direction in business or structuring and rethinking of previous processes which need a fresh look; the need to increase profits or anti-crisis measures; expansion of strategic partnerships through the acquisition of new contacts, the introduction of new technologies that require new specialists with their own team, etc. In doing so, you need to understand whether the company is ready to go for an open policy, or your internal privacy policy does not allow it; whether the company is ready to go for the costs associated with hiring an outside candidate; whether hiring this outside candidate will be promising and cost-effective to achieve the goals set for the organization? Analyzing your needs and matching them to your capabilities will determine the source of the search for the candidate you need.
Once you have defined your objectives, you need to draw an ideal image of the prospective executive. Consider everything: age, personality characteristics, qualifications, the requirements of your corporate culture, etc. The more specific and clear the listed characteristics are, the more questions you can ask the personnel department or the job seeker, and the more suitable candidate you will receive.
Ways to Search for Personnel.
We have already considered the internal personnel pool, now let’s look at other ways to find an executive.
In order to find and attract an effective executive with a good business reputation, the technology of targeted search (executive search) is used. It includes two directions: direct search (direct search) and the art of poaching a specific candidate (head-hunting). In both of these cases, the aim is to systematically develop an elite specialist in order to attract him or her to your firm. But if the first option is to work with an abstract high-class specialist, involving market research, finding companies and applicants of interest, then the second case is about pinpointing and poaching a particular specialist, using a variety of persuasion options. Both methods are rather expensive, but the poaching method can cost up to 30% of the annual salary of the attracted candidate.
You can, of course, try these methods on your own, but the results are likely to be unimpressive. There may be lobbying of relatives and acquaintances of employees or management, discrimination on non-work-related grounds, and a preoccupation with one source of search to the detriment of others. It is better to entrust this job to professionals who, while respecting confidentiality, will assist you in your search for a successful executive.
Evaluating a manager’s effectiveness.
Actually, this is what you have been fighting for. In any case, you will interview the candidate for the position, accompany him to the new place of work and assess its preliminary effectiveness. Here’s how to properly assess it (see, foresee, anticipate, predetermine – choose any word) is a very big burning question, which is where your huge risk lies. It is the risk of drawdown, failure, collapse in the end, depending on the position, on the position, on the strategic or tactical tasks that this person has to solve. But, first of all, it is necessary to understand whether the person is capable of managing in principle?
The essence of management lies in the fact that he – the head – must make a personal contribution to the activity of the labor collective by means of its management. This is achieved, first of all, by: understanding the essence of the future managerial activity with the team that will be in subordination; the ability to give correct, well understood orders; the ability to delegate, not to do it himself; the ability to control the process and adequately assess the result. A significant advantage of any potential manager is his or her off-the-job experience in managerial activity, namely the organization of informal associations, creative, sports or other teams. It should be understood that the candidate’s micromanagement skills are very important for the subsequent growth and development of a true manager.