For corporations to achieve short term & long term business goals, a strong & competent leadership team is of paramount importance. Hiring the right leaders with a perfect functional & cultural fit is the first step towards long term growth & building a strong brand equity. The leaders can either be hired externally or the organisation can look at vertical movement of their promising & competent senior managers with proven expertise in leading teams & driving growth in their respective departments. Dynamics of leadership hiring has changed considerably over the last decade given that there has been a shortage of leadership talent globally.
Some of the leadership hiring challenges corporations are currently facing include:
- High candidate withdrawal rate at various stages of hiring process
- High time & cost of hiring
- Not much focus on succession planning thereby leaving competency within the corporation untapped
- Wrong assessment of accurate talent
- High number of incompetent leadership hiring who are not able to deliver
- High attrition rate of existing leaders & future prospective leaders (competent managers who could be elevated)
The above mentioned challenges are recognised as the biggest bottlenecks in getting the right leaders to help corporations implement the next 3 years & 5 years growth road-map.
I am discussing below some of hiring trends that are taking shape currently:
- Internal hiring: Corporations are now focusing on building succession pipeline & tapping existing competency by promoting employees to fill up leadership roles before resorting to external hiring. The reasons are manifold:
- Internally employees understand the work culture & enjoy confidence & trust of senior management. Besides, it promotes longevity & trust. This reduces the employee attrition rate.
- Leadership hiring, on-boarding & development takes a lot of time & in the absence of a succession pipeline, corporations are forced to hire externally every time they need to fill in a vacancy. In such a scenario, the process of talent identification starts one year in advance to make sure that the new hire is ready to take charge in time. Hiring internally saves a lot of time in the entire process. Besides, promoting internal employees reduces time float in performance delivery
- Leadership hiring externally is a costly affair & it is always recommended to look for folks internally mostly through vertical movement of existing employees.
- With scarcity of leadership inventory in the market, not having an internal pipeline of candidates adversely impacts a corporation’s chances of getting the right talent that can lead from the front.
- Competency based leadership hiring: Corporations are now moving towards setting up a competency framework that defines the skills , expertise & competencies required for each role. Using such frameworks for leadership hiring ensures that you can easily eliminate potentially unfit candidates who do not possess “ must haves” skills/competencies. Besides mapping the skills of candidates with those required for a particular role ensures right selection.Sadly, till now the selection is based on the company’s need, desperation, gut feeling & macro level assessment of skills. It is interesting to note that close to 40% of corporations globally do not have a competency framework in place. Mostly big organisations have a competency framework in place. Most of the fortune 500 companies have job role wise competency framework basis which they structure hiring & development processing leading to high hiring success & retention rate
Ideally competency framework should cover:
- All major skill areas – cognitive, personality, behavior & functional
- Making leadership hiring rounds custom designed for each role depending upon competency framework leads to an accurate assessment process & increases hiring success rate.
Some of the leadership attributes that can form part of such framework includes leading people, leading change, innovation & creativity, process driven, result driven & building partnership.
3. Assessment of most relevant leadership skills: The nature & requirement of skills in leadership roles have undergone a paradigm shift. The skills which were relevant earlier does not hold ground now. Leadership positions which were earlier held by baby boomers have now been taken up by millennials & hence the definition of relevant skills have changed. Most important leadership skills in today’s scenario include personality, cognitive & most importantly interpersonal skills , effective communication, cultural fit & leadership potential. However, besides these skills, other standard competencies such as problem solving, visioning & strategy, leading others, customer focus, relationship management, coaching & motivating others also hold true. In addition to this, assessment of relevant skills differs for different industries. For instance healthcare sector focussed more on personality skills while IT sectors gives more importance to domain related skills.
4. Using proven talent assessment tools: Large number of organisation has moved from traditional model of face to face interview involving question based on what you have written in your resume to more sophisticated & technology aided methods such as psychometric tests, leadership assessment & various other assessment methods to thoroughly assess skills & competencies accurately & make data backed decisions. Close to 77% of organisations globally are using these tools to hire talent.
5. Superior candidate interview experience: Given that demand of leadership talent outstrips supply, it is important for corporations to make the interview experience as convenient & smooth as possible to prevent candidate withdrawal from the process. Given that most of the candidates back out due to long process & hiring lead time, corporations are now focusing on making the process structured, concise & staying in regular touch with the candidate.
As the founder and executive resume coach at Sushant Kumar Ventures, I offer customised executive resume and LinkedIn profile writing services for modern day job seekers. Sign up here for our services/free consult.
