It sounds radical, but it is logical: CEO and senior leaders include recruiters in management performance assessment.
If a company is only as good as its people, shouldn’t the focus be on managers’ ability to get the right people?
All things equal, your company’s output and results are a function of the organization that your leadership team hires and develops under them.
To assess an organization, one must assess the performance of the people (management) in responsible for using all their creativity to hire and build a great organization to make great products, deliver great services, and ultimately, produce results!
Why include a recruiter as a feedback source about how effective your leadership team members are at developing their organization?
There are three reasons your firm’s recruiter (search firm or agency) is a good source of leadership feedback:
- Another perspective.
- Unbiased professional assessment.
- Identify and analyze root cause.
A CEO must do this assessment personally for his executive team. Never abdicate this process.
Your human resources leader must remain unbiased in their own perspective across the organization, and a good CEO knows better than to initiate a conflict of interest at the senior leadership and c-suite level.
Let’s look at three important reasons:
- Another perspective. It’s easy to focus on results measured by the numbers. The CFO will bring those factors to light throughout the year. A performance assessment goes deeper. Senior leaders have goals that are structured to support corporate goals. To achieve these goals, senior leaders and managers must build effective teams through objective organizational development. A CEO needs to know how his or her leadership team is building teams that support those goals in terms of financial, productivity, brand and culture.
- Unbiased assessment. The best recruiters and search people I know are some of the finest and most knowledgeable human resources professionals. Many of them are active members of SHRM (Society of Human Resource Managers) or ASA (American Staffing Association). Many are also certified in their specific domain of recruiting either by industry and profession for staffing and/or recruiting. Your recruiting firm has professionals with a very broad perspective in many domains and can give valuable unbiased input on performance.
- Identify root cause. Every organization has a spectrum of strong and weak leaders and managers at all levels in the organization. By assessing how well a leader or manager is able to build a strong team, a CEO and senior leader can learn what and how to coach his team to raise the bar for everyone. Consider the case of a division failing to produce results. And, where that organization is not developing (new hires, performance managing weak team members, etc.) The leader/manager may report that excessive time is invested in recruiting and hiring, but they are not successful at building the team. Your recruiter that is engaged to build the team may provide the CEO with insight as to why the manager is not hiring (see more on this, below).
What should a senior leader or CEO ask of his recruiting professional when inquiring for input on the performance of one of his/her team members? Here’s some ideas:
- Compared to other similar companies, how difficult are we (or my team member) to work with?
- How long does it take to fill a typical position at various levels of competency with my manager?
- Are some managers easier to work with than others? Why?
- What methods of recruiting do my managers like best (referrals, online search, etc.)?
- What are my manager’s ratios for resume to submittals to interviews to offers and hires?
- How fast does my manager/leader get back to you when you submit a candidate? Hours? Days? Weeks?
- What can my team do to work better with you, the recruiter, to accelerate our organizational development?
I’m sure you can think of other questions, as you ponder this. The point is that your managers have different abilities to develop their own organizations to achieve goals and results. If you are not achieving results, then you must be looking at your organization as one factor to address as a CEO or senior leader. As you look at your organization, take into account how it was assembled, and by whom.
Recruiters can give you unbiased feedback relative to a large experience pool (they work with many managers like yours). Recruiters can give you a good perspective of what is normal for your industry, positions being hired. they can also give you a baseline average perspective on managers’ abilities in like companies.
Barton Professional Placement Group regularly counsels clients on how organizational development can be improved to maximize results and improve a company’s competitive advantage. Call us today.
