According to The Economist, hiring the wrong person for the job may be the “single biggest problem in business”. As executive recruiters, we see this problem unfold time and time again in global corporations, small businesses, and everything in between. Fortunately, there is a way to avoid this pitfall while protecting your bottom line.
The solution? Partnering with an executive search firm or consultant.
When it comes to hiring top talent that will have a lasting positive impact on your culture and company success, an executive search partner is one of the most effective investments you can make. Let’s take a look at the multiple ways an executive search firm can enhance the success of your hiring process as well as your bottom line.
At the executive level, leaders have specific goals and objectives they must deliver to ensure the company remains competitive and successful. An executive search partner will help your company identify and recruit the critical talent experiences, competencies, and leadership traits needed to achieve, and exceed, your long-term goals and objectives in a manner that honors your values and culture. This will mitigate the inherent risk that comes with any new hire.
Additionally, retained search partners will improve this pool of candidates even further by reaching diverse, passive prospects who are not strictly looking for a new position, but are performing well in their current roles. By targeting both active and passive candidates, this ensures that your candidate pool will have the mix of necessary skills and abilities to successfully fill the opportunity at your company. It also reduces the cost of spending valuable time and money on prospects that are less likely to be successful in the position, or do not have the capability to contribute beyond the position.
Going deeper: Hiring for the opportunity at hand should not be your company’s only interest. When assessing talent — either remotely or in-person — it is in your best interest to select a candidate who meets multiple needs in your organization and possesses characteristics of someone with internal mobility. At Kinsley Sarn, we not only select candidates for the current role, but also have the potential for the additional roles, internal movements, and promotions that will inevitably come.
Having an unfilled position at your company requires other team members to increase their workload while a new hire is found. This can be detrimental to your business in two ways. First, an increase in work — especially when one or multiple employees are forced to juggle the responsibilities of an open position as well as their own — will result in diminished focus and may ultimately lead to low employee engagement.
Second, this increase in workload may cause employees to miss deadlines and lose focus on what is most important. While critical positions remain vacant, this level of oversight will not only be disruptive, but costly. These extra tasks take away valuable time that could be otherwise spent carrying out their primary responsibilities — and time is money.
As a business leader, you have to be smart about your investments, and that starts with your employees. Employees who are mismanaged, overworked, and/or required to take on work outside of their position to account for a missing employee will burn out, potentially costing you the price of two employees, rather than one.
By working with an executive search partner, you are engaging an expert whose only focus is to source, identify, assess, and ultimately place the best hire in as short a time as possible. This not only reduces the risk of missed goals, but also alleviates burnout and mitigates turnover.
Staffing costs are the single largest expense item at many companies –– and the cost of a mis-hire can be damaging to your bottom line. In a study by Dr. Bradford Smart, the cost of hiring the wrong candidate ranges from five to 27 times the amount of the person's actual salary. These costs may include the actual cost of hiring, compensation, and severance, along with the opportunity costs, including customer impact, and wasted hours spent on the employee.
Use this hiring calculator provided by Dr. Smart to calculate the cost of a mis-hire for your business.
Although involvement from upper management is vital to the success of the hiring process, it can take away precious time that could otherwise be spent on other business needs. An executive search partner will own the majority of the responsibilities while keeping the necessary parties involved in the most essential steps of the hiring process. They will also save you time by ensuring you are only interviewing fully vetted and qualified candidates, and providing a guarantee on their work, holding them accountable for identifying and placing the perfect fit for your company.
As you already know, not all business costs are monetary, yet can end up influencing your financial success and bottom line. Some of these hidden recruitment costs may not be on your radar at the initial time of the hiring process, but a search partner will be sure to take them into consideration as they source potential candidates. Three main areas of your business that can be affected include: organization, productivity, and company culture.
Finding a new employee is already challenging enough, but it can be even more difficult to find qualified prospects for executive positions. These candidates should not only exemplify a particular set of skills and experiences, but they must also fit within your organizational culture. When starting the search for a new leader, many of the candidates may have similar abilities and experiences, but distinguishing how they achieved their results and understanding the competencies and behaviors they exhibit daily is critical to identify the best choice for the position. To read further about deciding between similar, qualified candidates, take a look at our blog on experiential interviewing.
This is where an executive search firm can help you manage the process efficiently and identify candidates that fit your position and culture. Executive recruiters have the expertise necessary to advise your business on selecting critical talent to ensure they have the desired impact on your bottom line. Additionally, a search partner will have a distinct advantage due to their refined process that keeps you organized and on track to fill the position in a timely manner.
Ultimately, the higher-quality employees that a search firm will identify will be more productive, both individually and as a part of the team. This improves their ability to transition into their new role, preventing any additional strain on other members of the team, which could lead to delayed projects or missed deadlines.
Furthermore, productive, self-driven hires are easier to onboard because they are able to get up to speed faster and require less oversight once they are operating independently. This allows everyone to focus on their roles and responsibilities, improving overall performance, and helping the company to focus on what is most critical.
Once your employees begin to feel less invested in and motivated by their work, the company culture could also suffer. This feeling could very easily spread through the company, bringing others down with them. This is where it is crucial to have strong leaders who exhibit the beliefs and values of the organization and reinforce them day in and day out. Hiring leaders who do not respect the culture, only know their way of delivering results, and/or are inconsistent in what they say and do, will inevitably damage your culture — in some cases, even beyond repair.
The right search partner will help determine what candidate aligns best with your culture, making for an easier transition into the company and improving employee morale.
Ultimately, working with an executive search firm is the only way to cover all of these pain points and assure you are reaching the most desirable pool of candidates to fill your position without negatively impacting your bottom line.
A professional, deliberate, and in-depth search process ensures that candidates presented by Kinsley Sarn meet or exceed our client’s specifications.
By partnering with the hiring manager and understanding their wants and needs, as well as any particulars about the position, our team can develop a detailed executive search profile against which we assess all candidates during our in-depth interview. The result is that our clients only see fully vetted candidates which leads to better hiring decisions and successful new hires.
Also, we include assimilation, assessment, and integration support to help the successful candidate make a quick and successful transition to their new role at the organization and workplace culture, guaranteeing our placements for one year.
All of these differentiators provide you with the assurance that our retained search process at Kinsley Sarn will cover the risk associated with new hires and result in a great new employee for a much lower total cost. If you are interested in partnering with us to find your next hire, please contact our team to discuss our process in more detail.
