Insights

Once you’ve made the decision to proceed with a senior hire into your business and engaged with a specialist search firm, if you haven’t already, it’s time to map out your interview process.  

This is often neglected, with the interview process being made up on the fly. With over a decade’s experience managing senior level searches, I can say this rarely makes for a smooth process. Real consideration is required as to what you need to get out of the interview process, in order to give you the confidence to make a candidate a job offer. 

What are the most important things you need to find out from a candidate, and who is best placed in your organisation to obtain this information? Which members of your Exec leadership team need to be involved? Will your investors want the opportunity to interview candidates?  

What are you looking to achieve with each interview stage? Each stage should have a clear purpose, rather than merely getting multiple people to cover the same topics with the candidate. Decide who will be assessing different competencies. Everyone involved in the interview process should have a specific objective. 

Complete interview panel alignment is non-negotiable for senior executive hiring. We saw a C-level search fail when an interviewer, a direct report who felt threatened by the candidate’s incoming position, successfully derailed the process, creating a very poor candidate experience. Managing internal stakeholder dynamics early in the process is vital. 

Having a very clear process mapped out from the start and being able to communicate this with candidates, creates a more positive experience and impression of your business. It demonstrates your company is organised and that you’re taking this process seriously.   

We would recommend no more than three interview stages.  

Too often we have seen an ad hoc interview process with too many stages, end unsuccessfully. Candidates can get frustrated when new stages keep getting added, increasing the chance of losing great candidates to competitors who move faster and who are more decisive. We recently had a client that insisted on a seven-stage interview process with multiple stakeholders over the course of a couple of months. This was against our advice and subsequently resulted in their chosen candidate accepting an alternative offer. Time kills deals. 

It’s important to keep up the momentum in an interview process; to keep candidates fully engaged and motivated, to reduce the risk of them accepting other offers and to stop their enthusiasm from dwindling. When candidates have been shortlisted, work with your key hiring stakeholders to block out diaries and map the process out. You want to avoid weeks between different stages. You want this process to be as tight as possible to give you the best chance of a successful outcome. Unfortunately, we’ve seen many processes fail due to the interview process dragging on for months. Equally, I’ve seen slick interview processes that cut weeks off client’s time to hire, bringing forward the positive impact a new senior leadership hire can have on their business.  

One final tip, interviews are two-way processes. Remember to sell the opportunity of working for your business as well as deciding whether a candidate is the right fit for you. The last thing you want is to make a candidate an offer which is turned down because you missed the opportunity to sell your business and the role. Even in soft markets, top talent is always in demand, and always has options. 

Ross Hoare