Executive decisions

A number of leading experts in the executive search field – including ElanRTO’s Declan Ryan and Norrie Johnston of Executives Online – on how to manage ‘the talent war’.

As competition for top talent hots up, attracting and retaining the best people to help fill your senior management positions will require an increasingly innovative and focused approach. Companies will increasingly turn to specialist providers to help them in the search for the best executives. Here, CXO hears from a number of leading experts in the executive search field on how to manage ‘the talent war’…

Declan Ryan is the Solutions Director at ElanRTO, the global recruitment and resourcing solutions integrator for the Manpower group. Ryan’s background spans 18 years and has seen him working with leading international clients at a very senior level where he has a solid track record of successful business development, and engagement delivery. Ryan is based at ElanRTO’s Fetter Lane offices in London, but travels into Europe regularly. His skills and experiences cover years of board-level business and IS strategy consulting, programme management, commercial negotiation and bid management. He has worked with a broad client base including international publicly listed companies, private corporations and government organisations.

Norrie Johnston is founder and Managing Director of Executives Online Ltd, one of the UK’s fastest growing executive resourcing agencies. He has provided interim management services since 1997 and is the current Chairman of the Institute of Management Consultancy’s Interim Managers special interest group. He is a sales and marketing orientated director, with wide hands-on experience in the successful management of dotcom, telecom, technology, and technical services businesses in home and international markets. In his earlier career, Norrie held marketing and sales directorships in the engineering sector, involving residential periods in the US and Pakistan.

CXO. Finding the right employees is becoming increasingly important as companies seek to use their human resources as a competitive advantage. As a result, an increasing number of firms are choosing to outsource the executive search and recruitment function. Why do you think this is?

DR. Recent research indicates that best practice companies now estimate that workforce management problems are causing them to under perform by as much as 10 percent and overspend by as much as 10 percent.

Organisations are beginning to realise that in order to grow revenue and profits they need to be structurally agile. An organisations' overall performance could improve dramatically if the skills within their workforce were aligned to those required by the business to achieve its goals and objectives.

As a result, organisations are choosing to outsource the executive search and recruitment function to companies that can deliver workforce optimisation, process efficiencies and recruitment innovation within a cost effective framework. This will ensure that organisations balance the internal and external resources supply channels, such as local and international employees, niche resource suppliers, offshore services, permanent and contract staff in the best possible combination for cost effectiveness and skills optimisation.

NJ. It’s a natural trend for organisations to look to buy in ‘best of breed’ skills. It’s just that companies – at long last – are waking up to the fact that recruitment can impact on the bottom line.

Companies are realising that the speed with which they can find the right senior management for their organisation is a critical determinant of corporate success. To ensure that they are really doing it well, they are understandably looking at how they handle the whole process and are looking at providers who can offer expertise that they just can’t find or is too costly to recreate within the internal HR team.

The advent of online recruitment is accelerating this trend. An online specialist allows quick access to a far richer seam of diverse management talent, people that in-house teams just don’t have access to.

However, this outsourcing doesn’t seem to be leading to a wholesale move to conventional headhunters. Companies appear to be keeping a mix of recruitment specialists in their armoury.

CXO. So what criteria should companies use to help them attract and choose the best provider? What should they demand from a third-party recruitment specialist?

DR. It will depend on each organisation and there specific requirements. However, in most cases an organisation should consider a recruitment partner that has a successful track record of delivering permanent, contract and temporary recruitment across all sectors and desired geographies. The recruitment partner must be able to deploy specialist resources in solutions development, process re-engineering, employer branding, change management, business governance, cost take out, and implementation.

Furthermore, outsourcing delivers the greatest business benefit over a longer timeframe. Therefore, the organisations must look to partners who can demonstrate a high degree of client commitment and are financial stable in the long term.

NJ. A recruitment services provider is only as good as it’s talent bank – so first and foremost is the quantity and caliber of the candidates on the recruitment specialist’s books. By that I don’t mean a select number of names in a little black book. Going to the same old senior director gene pool doesn’t make for a strong species in nature, and companies are realising that it doesn’t work in today’s increasingly global corporate world either.

In today’s business world companies need a recruitment specialist with access to a much richer seam of talent than that.

Second, but absolutely crucial, is the level of professionalism and service. It’s no good having access to thousands of diverse and skilled executives if you cannot select from them exactly the right person for the job. A third-party recruitment specialist must be prepared to take the time to get to know its clients – to drill down to make sure they have a specific brief. Our advice, for instance, is to forget the four-page job description; instead specify key tasks and deliverables. That way you’ll be sure to have someone who can really deliver.

Time is another consideration. With many recruitment providers, companies today are still expected to wait six months or so to find the senior people they need. I can’t think of any other critical business area where this kind of delay would be acceptable. Any company that is serious about its recruitment being a real point of competitive advantage, needs a third-party specialist who can deliver far more quickly than this.

CXO. Recruiting top-level leadership talent is also becoming an increasingly specialised area. What are the challenges of recruiting for leadership positions? How can a specialised recruiter help?

DR. The overriding challenge is in identifying and then persuading top-level business leaders to move role. It is imperative that the recruiter has a deep understanding of the role requirements and organisational culture in order to identify suitable candidates. Once high quality candidates have been identified the challenge is in delivering a compelling employment proposition that is powerful enough to make top-level business leaders change organisation and role.

NJ. Senior talent recruiting is a niche business that requires knowledge of how businesses work, skills to deal with senior level clients and also senior level candidates, plus the ability to make contact with lots of good senior candidates, especially in a buoyant recruitment market. A web-enabled company that combines the best of conventional senior recruitment with web skills and technology will be well placed to fill even the most demanding of roles and very quickly.

CXO. Interim management is becoming increasingly popular as firms look to fill short-term leadership positions with top-level talent. Why do you think more and more companies are turning to interim management providers to help them meet their objectives?

DR. Interim management provides organisations with a fair degree of flexibility when recruiting top-level talent. The speed of recruitment means that an organisation can implement resource decisions in days versus months for a fixed period of time at a fixed cost. This can help where specific skills are suddenly required or if an executive has left rather hastily!

Interim managers provide organisations with a high level of experience that can help less experienced managers develop. They can also provide the organisation with valuable breathing space so the recruitment process is well informed and not rushed.

NJ. The growing popularity of interims is due to a number of factors. Organisations need to move faster than ever, and an interim is a really fast solution - whether your looking to plug a gap, deliver a project or inject a specific skill set. An interim can be recruited, in place and delivering in days.

Secondly, as the ‘job for life’ culture has gone, so companies are questioning whether they actually need permanent senior managers for certain roles and situations.

Companies also increasingly view much of what they do as a series of projects. In this spirit they are resourcing the business on a project-by-project basis – finding this helps them stay far more fleet of foot, flexible and focused on delivery.

Lastly, the wider benefits of interims are attracting many. Interims bring a fresh perspective. They can avoid the usual corporate distractions and remain very task- orientated, which is vital for project work. They hit the ground running and get things done and they can be a great support perhaps mentoring a more junior manager through a critical situation.

CXO. How is technology impacting on the recruitment aspect of HR?

DR. Technology has had a significant impact on recruitment, and organisations are finally realising the benefits that it can deliver. In short, technology speeds up the recruitment process and reduces the administrative burden, delivers access to a wider pool of diverse candidates, improves the candidate experience, promotes the employment brand, delivers real-time reporting that can be used to make informed business decisions and enables organisations to nurture and manage talent. However, whilst technology has provided significant benefits, face-to-face business engagement continue to remain a vital part of the recruitment process.

NJ. The internet provides access to a much wider range of candidates and speeds up the whole process or recruitment. It enables more job hunters to become aware of vacancies and employers to reach vast numbers of job hunters in an instant. As a result its biggest commercial impact has been on the publishing world, which has been rocked dwindling print-based ad-sales as HR people have moved to place their ads online.

However as anyone who has posted a job on a job board or intranet site will tell you, the internet on its own doesn’t hold all of the answers. Firstly, it can create a deluge of applicants for employers to wade through – secondly technology is impersonal, and recruitment is, after all is said and done, about people. This is why specialist recruitment agencies, who can harness the web, but still do the legwork, are in big demand.

CXO. Finally, what trends/developments do you think will have the greatest influence on the recruitment and executive search sector over the next 12-18 months?

DR. There will be more multi-source deals covering large parts of the business and tending to be longer in duration (five years or more). Increasingly the outsourcing relationships will cover larger geographic areas and become more complex in nature. There will be increased focus on the importance of business governance and change management in the strategy, solutions development, transition and operations phases of outsourcing relationships. Organisations will expect to see strong methodologies and capabilities from suppliers in this area and will be investing more in their in-house governance.

Recruitment providers will be expected to demonstrate applied expertise in methodologies such as Six Sigma, Prince 2 and ITIL as well as change management, stakeholder management and communication. Recruitment providers will need to keep a close eye on developments in employment legislation/case law and concentrate on retention strategies as well as recruitment strategies. The recruitment marketplace will be characterised by two types of recruitment provider – multi-source outsource providers and boutique/niche recruitment specialists.

NJ. Again, it is sure to be the internet, as more employers and employees become savvy to online recruitment. I would go so far as to say that online recruitment could and should shake up and revitalise the whole recruitment business in the same way as it has already transformed other sectors such as estate agency. Companies will no longer be satisfied to wait months to find the right person for the job and job seekers will have a much wider choice of positions to apply for. The end result is that the recruitment process will have to become much smarter and finely honed in order for companies to retain their competitive edge.