New Leaders Must "Fit" to Be Successful
Share
In a recent survey of senior leaders, learning their culture was deemed one of the most important factors for selecting retained executive recruiters. Leveraging this knowledge should lead to identifying leaders who will "fit".

The survey was conducted by Gundersen Partners among 220 senior leaders across industries. Most respondents were line leaders in general management (51%), followed by marketing roles (35%). Additionally, 81% of the respondents had the title of VP and above.

To be clear, the primary reason for securing a search firm is to identify and present high quality candidates. These areas are the foundation for the business relationship, and far exceed other "price of entry" categories. When asked, "What factors are important when selecting a retained executive search firm?" two areas were deemed very important at a very high level. Specifically, those areas included: presenting quality candidates (93%) and having access to quality candidates (86%).

Digging more deeply, two additional characteristics broke through in the survey: 1) the desire to have the search firm understand their organizational issues; and 2) the most important organizational issue is their culture. Importantly, 90% of the respondents desire recruiters to know their organizational issues. This suggests that simply understanding the position specification and knowing the hiring manager and the role are "not enough".

Organizational issues are broad, but the number one issue that resonated with the respondents was culture. When asked "What factors are the most important organizational issues for your executive recruiters to understand?" culture garnered the largest response for very important (66%). Interestingly, less than 15% indicated that they were very satisfied with their recruiters on this dimension. This strongly suggests a gap between expectations and performance on the part of the clients and their recruiters.

The implications are that understanding organizational culture is the next frontier for retained executive search firms. There are steps each stakeholder can take to improve the process:

• Client and search firm include an on-site visit to the primary location for the role. The client should facilitate meetings with several key stakeholders: peers, subordinates and hiring managers.

• Culture should be explicitly discussed and captured in position specifications with the critical competencies and behaviors that characterize successful performance clearly defined. Thus prospective candidates are exposed to a view of the culture early in the process.

• Candidates should seek to learn about the position and the culture of the prospective employer from a variety of sources. This learning process should continue throughout the interviewing process. This would include reading articles, speaking to current and former employees, and also probing the subject during interviews.