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April 13, 2025
Hiring top level executives is a daunting task. With any other level of the organisation, the impact of a new hire can often be managed, minimised and controlled. But when you’re hiring for executive level candidates, the impact of making the wrong decision could be much greater.
These candidates often command media interest and can influence confidence in your organisation, and this could have long-lasting implications for the future growth of your company. So it’s vital to get things right with this particular hiring decision.
With this in mind, it’s helpful to have a rigid process in place to ensure due diligence during the hiring process. This will ensure that all red flags can be caught and dealt with promptly, and no quality candidates will slip through the cracks because of an oversight in your recruitment process.
The steps can broadly be divided into three time periods; before, during and after the interview. Remember that candidate impressions are formed at every stage in this process, so as much as you are assessing them, remember that they are also assessing you. Simple oversights in the recruitment process could lead a candidate to reject a job at a late stage in the process.
Preparation is the key to success when hiring executives. First, you need to define the candidate, then you need to find the candidate. Before the interview, it’s essential to get familiar with the candidate’s track record and identify areas of weakness you’d like to explore. Let’s look at the preparation stage in more detail.
Building a robust hiring team will help to share the load and also get insight from different parts of the organisation. You might include your HR director, chief operating officer and a top level manager to give insight from all levels of the organisation.
A huge part of a successful interview process is to make sure you’re speaking with the right candidates. In order to do this you need to clearly define the role, which requires stepping into the shoes of the dream person you are hoping to hire.
To hire a CEO, you need to think like a CEO. You need to move beyond typical recruitment requirements and think about what a CEO that could make a measurable difference to your business would be concerned about. This allows you to define the scope of the role and your expectations.
Once you have stepped into this person’s shoes, you can then craft a candidate profile. Remember that this candidate profile might only fit a few suitable individuals. With general recruitment, it’s expected that hundreds if not thousands of candidates would be suited to the role. With executive recruitment, you’re hiring from a much smaller pool.
At this stage, you may have narrowed it down to a small pool of candidates you’d like to speak to. It’s time to get to grips with their skills and experience.
The ideal candidate might not fit 100% of the profile, but might display strong aptitude in many areas that allows them to become a viable candidate. When assessing candidates, try to think about the bigger picture and long-term potential.
How the candidate presents themselves will also be an important factor to consider. Did you find them or did they find you? Do they seem familiar with your organisation or just bluffing their way through the application? Do they seem to want this particular role, or just any executive role?
You can also do your due diligence at this stage and back up any easily verifiable claims using media sources and press releases. This can help to pinpoint any potential red flags that need to be addressed. Small embellishments can be interpreted as enthusiasm, whereas obvious lies should be looked upon more seriously.
It’s important to remember that interviews are two-way conversations. So, as much as you would expect the candidate to be prepared, you also need to ensure that your team is prepared.
Decide on the format of the interview and how long everyone will have to ask questions. If you expect a presentation from the candidate, factor this into the interview times. It’s essential for things to run on time, as being forced to cut an interview short could give the candidate a poor impression. Bear in mind that the candidate might have other commitments, so it’s essential to stick to the schedule to manage expectations.
You need sufficient space to conduct the interview in a spot where you won’t be disturbed or distracted. Think about the candidate’s view as well as your own, and don’t forget to make the space comfortable. You’re also trying to entice the candidate, so make it a place in your office that you are proud to show off.
It’s helpful to start the interview with an overview of the company, the role and why you are hiring. Is it a new role, or are you hiring to replace someone? Expect questions about your future plans and how the executive role will fit into these. It makes sense to hold back key information that could be useful to competitors, but not at the expense of making the role so opaque that the candidate can’t form an accurate opinion of it.
You should have a batch of questions that are relevant to all candidates. These will help to assess the candidate’s understanding of the role and how their past experience will help them to succeed in this role.
Creating a candidate assessment matrix will allow everyone to record their thoughts in a cohesive and easily comparable way. By sticking to the same core questions for all candidates, you’ll find it easier to compare them to one another.
Next, you can ask a batch of candidate-specific questions. These lean more into their specific experience and allow you to fill in any gaps that you might be curious about.
And finally, don’t forget to turn the tables and give the candidate an opportunity to ask questions. An interview should always be a two-way conversation, not an interrogation. It’s also possible to give the candidate the green light to ask questions throughout, and this will allow the interview to flow much more like a conversation.
Through proper preparation and a solid understanding of how to structure interview questions, you should be able to understand the candidates aptitudes and motivation.
Pay close attention to the candidate’s behaviour at the end of the interview. The interview panel will often let their professional mask slip once they have left the formal setting, and this can lead to some interesting behaviour from the candidate.
While some will keep things professional until they have left the building, others might let their true colours show at this stage. It can be insightful to ask a junior member of staff to escort the candidate out of the building and observe their behaviour. This can often be put down to nerves and dismisses, but it could also confirm doubts that you have had about the candidate.
When hiring executive level professionals, it’s as much about finding reasons to not hire them as it is about finding reasons to hire them. Weeding out potentially problematic behaviour at the first interview stage can save you a lot of trouble further down the line.
The candidate experience continues long after the interview. It can be seen in follow-up communications and how the next stages of the interview are handled.
You don’t need to be coy about your plans. If you are planning to meet with other candidates, give a timescale for when they can expect to hear back. Bear in mind that your top candidate might also be meeting with other organisations, so it’s best not to keep them waiting around for too long.
Executive level candidates are in short supply, and the best ones won’t be on the job market for long. This is why communication, transparency and an expedited process is essential. This doesn’t mean you should rush the process, but you also shouldn’t sit on a decision for longer than is needed.
If you are caught between two candidates, it’s common to arrange a second round of interviews to help make a final decision. This round is likely to be less formal and might include a tour of the facilities. The candidates could also meet more of the team.
Again, transparency and communication are essential so that candidates know where they stand and when you plan to make a decision.
Before making a job offer, you might need to carry out some final checks to ensure there is no reason the individual shouldn’t be able to take up the role. You may have an obligation to shareholders to ensure that specific checks are carried out, particularly when it comes to financial roles.
If the candidate passes the final checks, you have the green light to make a job offer. This is often when the negotiations begin. If the candidate has multiple offers or is currently employed, they may have a counter offer from their current employer or a competitor. You’ll need to decide the ceiling for what you can realistically offer, and look to enhance the job offer in other ways.
The executive recruitment process can be taxing, so it’s essential to be courteous to those candidates that you choose not to move forward with. Follow up communications should be personalised and never templated. It could also include feedback, or you can hold back on feedback until this is requested.
It might seem like an unimportant step, but how unsuccessful candidates view your organisation is just as important as how the successful candidate views your organisation. Success in the interview should not be a requirement for courteous treatment, and candidates will remember being treated with respect.
If the above process sounds complex and too much of a drain on internal resources, there is always the option to work with a specialist recruitment agency. With this option, you get the added insight of their knowledge of particular candidates.
The agency might have placed them in roles before, or they might have prepared them for other interviews in the past. This added insight can help to cut through the initial introductions and get to the heart of the candidate’s knowledge and experience much faster.
Working with an agency can also give much needed insight into culture fit and a sense of the candidate’s working style long before you meet in an interview setting. This can help the interview panel to formulate better questions that deliver more insightful answers.
If you would like to streamline the process and only meet with pre-screened candidates, then working with a recruitment agency could be the right move for your organisation. But if you prefer greater oversight, then it’s best to keep things in-house.
While it may be a stressful process, the good news is that this is a process that you would do much less often than for a mid-level manager position, for example.
It takes longer because there is more at stake, but this also means that the hiring panel has an opportunity to get deep into the hiring process and make decisions that will help to shape the future of the organisation.
It’s often the case that the hiring process for executive level candidates is slightly different every time due to the core differences in the role you are hiring for. It’s only through experience that individuals can develop keen instincts in the recruitment process that help them to read between the lines of what is being said.
The simplest way to develop these skills is to focus on all communication skills – not just speaking, but also listening to the candidate and reading their body language.
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