Find & Fetch vs. Find-FIT-Fetch
Where doth the candidate assessment—often referred to as “executive selection” and what we term here FIT—lie in terms of ownership & expertise?
On the hiring company, the search firm, or both? Let's find out.
Historically, search firms would do their best to find candidates that looked the part, but it was really the domain of the company to determine fit. However, at a more granular level, there are a number of variables that come into play when considering the question of who is best equipped to measure fit—
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Company SIZE: the larger the company, the more likely the organization is to have a robust human resources department, with a talent acquisition function that has built out position scorecards & competencies models for each executive hire and has expertise within the company to do culture, personality & critical thinking assessments. The smaller the company, the less often these capabilities exist inside corporate walls.
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Company internal expertise: even if a company is larger, sometimes human resources serves more of a "compensation, benefits & lower-level hiring" function, and therefore is less provisioned to lead when it comes to executive assessment & talent acquisition.
The best answer to this question is probably that both search firm and hiring company should partner on executive assessment & selection
And further to defining where FIT applies, FIT actually has 2 logical parts:
not only in pre-hire assessment & selectionbut post-hire onboarding, integration & acceleration
But—if search firm & company should partner around “FIT,” what are the myths & truths around good executive assessment?
- A lot has been discovered over the last 20 years around human decision-making. Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book “Blink” about the proclivity humans have to make decisions “in a blink.” The full title was “the Power of thinking without thinking” was released in 2005. The message? Often, critical ambiguous decisions aren’t predicated on anything other than instinct. But are our instincts to be trusted in decision-making, in specific around hiring decisions?
It turns out that Dr. Danny Kahneman, a statistician and researcher, ended up doing research on precisely this question. In his book, “Thinking Fast & Slow,” Dr. Kahneman lays out the results. Humans—even if they are experts in their area—more often than not make decisions too quickly. It turns out that “thinking slow” returns more accurate assessments & decisioning than our quick gut assessment, or “thinking fast.” In fact, Dr. Kahneman ended up winning a Nobel prize for his research in this area—awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his groundbreaking work in applying psychological insights to economic theory, specifically in the areas of judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. It turns out that humans across evolution have developed a keen decision-making instinct—the same instinct that drives our “fight-flight-or-freeze” decisions, housed in the small but power part of our brain called the amygdala. Making decisions fast in an unfamiliar situation turned out to be a Darwinian survival skill, the instinct to make a snap judgement powered by self-preservation. But we humans don’t control this instinct well enough to discriminate when—and when not—to use it. In hiring decisions it turns out, we need to subordinate it to a series of “think slower,” more deliberate, scientific, and rigor-driven processes to meaningfully improve talent selection.
What is the history of the executive search value proposition?
From its creation back before the Great Depression in the 1920’s, the retained executive search industry has firmly committed to its clients to deliver a certain value proposition. According to the Association for Executive Search Consultants, the crucible of the executive search was actually Boston, Massachusetts (also our cradle at BSG) – ““After World War I, A. Lincoln Filene, the Boston merchant, then president of the Retail Research Association, called on Mr. Deland to direct an executive search activity for member department stores.” In 1926 Deland went on to establish the Thorndike Deland firm, “devoted to recruiting executives, many for the nation's major retailing companies.”
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Back before World War I--FIND—or the old “black book” was a big deal. Once upon a time, black books were real. And were VALUABLE. Before the internet, and subscription databases, and “business intelligence,” a lot of value was created in a search firm knowing an industry, and the org charts of top competitors in that industry. The information was rarely available before LinkedIn, Bloomberg Online, and a myriad of other databases including Hoover’s, Zoom Info, Pitchbook, Crunchbase & CapitalIQ to name only a few. However, over the last 15 years, there has been a proliferation of information available online. Some of it is free, some of it is moderately expensive, and some is quite expensive and not reasonable to buy for “one time use.”
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The second value proposition of executive search has always been FETCH—once a company has interviewed a set of candidates presented, the inclination is to determine a favorite from amongst them and “pick a winner.” At that point, the search firm is notified of which one, and is tasked with fetching him/her. That involves compensation negotiation, counter-offer avoidance, referencing & background checking among other “fetch” steps in the end-game process.
What does the CURRENT Company > Search firm partnership look like today?
So, if Dr. Kahneman proved the fallibility of human decision-making in the early 2000’s, and won the Nobel Prize in October 2002 for it, what have we done in the last twenty years? Sadly, often not enough. The vast majority of hiring decisions are still decided on “gut,” companies (and search firms) still make pre-emptive decisions “fast,” and too many false positives (and false negatives) are the resulting outcome. But should a company bear the exclusive blame? Companies—and in particular individual hiring authorities at the executive level—don’t hire that many new executives in any given year; perhaps 2, maybe 3, on the high side 4 or 5. But that still pales in comparison to how many hiring decisions over which a search firm has influence and advisory impact. If a search firm—even a boutique—executes 20, 30, 40 even 50 searches a year with an average of 5 executive candidates making it to the shortlist, this results in 100 to 500 executive interviews per year. Shouldn’t the search firm be able to bring to the process some of that experience and “slower thinking & deliberation” on behalf of its clients?
What is the best Company > Search Firm partnership & respective responsibilities in today’s 21st century talent acquisition marketplace?
Likely the ideal company > search firm relationship should be one where search firm as advisor helps to coach the client on best practices and gold-standards around recruiting assessment, decision-making and executive selection. Not that the search firm should MAKE the decision. But rather, our industry should be coach, mentor & educator around what advances have been made in executive selection. The goal? Enfranchising client companies with a known methodology that yields more positive results more of the time.
Can a company improve their executive hiring batting average? Absolutely. And with the estimated opportunity cost of a bad hire calculated at more than $1,000,000 per, when the decision is ultimately determined to be the wrong one, companies should be highly incented to go back to school around best practices in hiring.
Will the company be able to eliminate hiring misfires, and “bat 1000”? Highly doubtful. For more on that topic, another Malcolm Gladwell booked titled, “Talking to Strangers” frames the challenges that lie therein. Humans assessing humans is still deeply complex, and there is no “Consumer Reports” for this purchase. But shouldn’t we all avail ourselves of the research and studies that have been presented to improve our odds at the gambling table, and move it from “house odds” or “coin toss” to “player odds”?
Search firms that specialize in not just the traditional find-and-fetch, but assessment-and-selection are critical in upping the odds of success: using repeatable methodologies enhanced with proven tools that can help scratch beneath the surface of how an executive candidate presents themselves to uncover what lies beneath. Only then will we be able to move the needle on company-candidate FIT, ultimately driving more frequent win-wins for both the executive & hiring company.
