Finding executives: How to successfully master your recruitment process

Managers have a significant influence on your company.
Not only their professionalism plays a major role in your success, but also their behavior toward employees. A manager can turn entire teams into top performers or weaken their performance. Today, we'll show you how to find leaders who will take your company far and retain them for the long term.

What makes a good leader?

The ideal profile of a manager encompasses much more than just professional qualifications and industry-standard skills. It is not enough for HR managers to hire based on professional skills alone.

Much more crucial than knowledge in a particular field itself is a manager's ability to lead a team, to motivate it, and to keep leading it to new successes - and that is anything but easy. Empathy and sensitivity for the situation of the employee:in and that of the entire team is a key to success, in addition to the typical performance parameters. At the same time, the leader should ensure that everyone feels comfortable in the workplace. A good keyword is balance.

Strict pack leadership is just as unhelpful as an "everyone can do what they want" approach.

Qualities that a good leader should bring to the table:

• Integrity
• Ability to deal with conflict
• Empathy
• Team competence
• Fault tolerance
• Openness
• Knowledge of human nature

A good leader allows great freedom, but provides guidelines within which a team can move. The requirements profile for a manager is therefore more complex...

Yes, and now the crucial question. How do you find out whether the person in front of you has these qualities or can develop them?

Finding managers: these are the challenges

The challenge in recruiting executives is to identify these skills in a person. You may already be able to hint at them in an interview, but only working in reality will show whether the hunch is confirmed or not. However, since you can only test this with difficulty in an application process, the preliminary work in the search is crucial.
It can be helpful to invest time in your application process. That means taking the time for several rounds of interviews.
Don't just rely on your gut feeling, use profiling tools in addition. It also doesn't hurt to get a reference. Talking to former supervisors, as well as members of the potential manager's former teams, can provide additional impressions.

In fact, there is no guarantee of the perfect choice, but you can minimize your risk....

The search for executives is especially difficult because the good ones are usually already in permanent positions and rarely raise their hands freely available on the market. This makes it a challenge to identify who is even open to a change.

Recruitment agencies can help here: We often already have contact with a wide range of executives and talent. A headhunter can make particularly discreet inquiries without embarrassing the candidate who is still employed and, above all, can scan the market without much fuss on your part. Personnel consultancies such as ours accompany you through the entire recruitment process and help from initial advertising measures to interviews and the conclusion of contracts.

Finding managers in your own company

In some companies, the solution may be closer than you think and the ideal leader is already on the team. They don't have to be loud and flashy at all and are therefore often overlooked in such matters. They often stay in the background and nevertheless lead a team already by their way, without having a corresponding title. They are there for the other team members, supporting and motivating them. In their actual work, they do not have to deliver the best results, but they enrich the entire team through their empathy.

And they have another advantage: These people already know your company, don't need a long training period and understand the structures and processes. Disadvantage: Unlike managers from other companies, they rarely bring new perspectives to the company and are more inclined to continue everything as it was before. Depending on where you stand with your company, new impulses from outside can be very useful.

Patience is crucial in the search for executives

A manager shapes the spirit of a company more than anyone else. Entire teams look to them for guidance and let them influence their work, positively or negatively. Her quality is reflected not only in her own personality, but in an entire group. In this respect, hiring the right person is particularly crucial and should be done after a careful selection process. Hasty decisions can lead to wrong choices that could cost your company a lot of money. Patience and the will to proceed thoroughly is a significant factor here.

Patience is needed not only in the selection process to determine a candidate's qualifications, but also in advance: the search for new executives should be carefully prepared and addressed early on when it becomes apparent that an empty chair is opening up. Because, as mentioned above, the search for a suitable executive is particularly time-consuming.

As soon as it is clear that you will need someone for your company, you should start your recruitment process. This can involve looking at the careers of several employees to assess who is best suited for the job in the long term - and at the same time prepare them specifically for the potential new role and develop them accordingly - if you see potential internally.

Use the time to develop a detailed requirements profile for the position and assess exactly who meets it - in addition to the professional component, the human one in particular plays a major role here. The corporate culture and how well a manager fits in with it is crucial for the morale of your employees and thus for their performance.

Conclusion

Leaders who enrich your company do not fall from the sky and do not develop overnight. You need clear structures and processes to find suitable candidates or to develop your own in your company. Don't promote by expertise, promote by leadership. Be patient and view finding leaders as a long-term process.

In this way, you will find real leaders who will inspire their team and have a positive and lasting impact on your company.