There are two types of executive search acquisitions—replacements and additions. Typically, replacing a person in an existing position is an easier task as you have a built-in measuring stick—the executive who had been or is currently in the role. Filling a newly created position on the other hand can be a much larger task—no pre-existing measuring stick is in place and you may have challenges throughout the process. If you are expanding your team, here are the top considerations you need to address to be successful:
Start early.
Don’t wait until it’s a code red, Defcon One status. Start to interview candidates early in the process. If the target is to hire into this role for the beginning of the calendar year, start two quarters ahead of the anticipated start date.
Interview LOTS of candidates before you make your selection.
Need a number? Assume you will want to interview at least twice the number of candidates you might when conducting a replacement search. You’ll be “learning” through interviewing, and with each candidate interviewed you’ll accrue additional clarity around what are the “must have’s,” and what are the “nice-to-haves” for the position.
Map out the first 12 months of deliverables with clear metrics.
Developing a position scorecard is essential to the success of developing and defining the position as well as hiring for it. This scorecard may evolve over the half-dozen candidates you interview, but it will coalesce and help you continue to distill the quantitative outcomes you want from this position. Steer clear of qualitative descriptors, and stick to the “within the first 12 months, achieve X% or $Y.” Resist the temptation to water it down and take a “we’ll figure it out together when we get the person into the role.” Even if you know you will be flexible once things are under way, having a concrete structure in place to start is critical.
Get buy-in, early and often.
Success in this role will directly correlate to the buy-in you have from the rest of the executive team as well as the board. Often, expansion positions are not yet completely socialized across the entire executive team or the board of directors. This puts a new hire at risk for failure, as those who incumbents who weren’t onboard from the beginning will actually seek to undermine the newly hired expansion executive in a passive aggressive approach.
Assess and assign the org chart before introducing the new position.
Determine what responsibilities will map to the new hire, and pre-sell it across the existing executive team
Often, a new hire into the executive team in a new role is really driven by the fact that one or more of the existing executive team is overburdened with responsibilities, and isn’t getting to key business imperatives. As companies grow, executive responsibilities often tend to get “narrower but deeper.” An example might be a VP of Sales and Marketing who runs both departments for a period of time. As the company grows however, the CEO and board of directors recognizes that a discrete effort needs to be made around both sales and marketing. Therefore, it makes sense to “split the role,” and divide up the responsibilities across 2 executives—one focused on sales both inside and outside efforts, and the other focused exclusively on marketing and related responsibilities like top-of-funnel demand generation, branding, marcom, and investor relations.
Make sure you set the new hire up for success in their new role up.
- Budget—don’t underfund it. This is one of the biggest contributors to disenchantment for the new hire in a “creation” role.
- Coaching/mentoring. Coaching and mentoring will absolutely be needed to integrate the new executive into their new environment. Because it’s a new role, coaching and mentoring may be needed not just for the new executive and their direct superior, but the rest of the executive team as well, as they have not had this piston available or firing in the business engine prior and may need to get used to and comfortable with this added horsepower.
- Clear direction. This requires not only the aforementioned scorecard for the first 12 months but the roadmap to achieving these outcomes. Sure, you may be hiring a new trailblazer and some goals may include a bit of “creating from scratch” but you will still want to make clear how you expect the scorecard metrics to be achieved. In addition, make clear that priorities and metrics may morph over time and require shifts and pivots to keep expectations reasonable.
