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| Author | Leonard, Orla |
| Position | Brief Article |
Candidates may have the right qualifications but, if their attitude conflicts with your firm's culture, hiring them could prove an expensive mistake. Orla Leonard offers tips on how to get recruitment right first time
Every time your company appoints a senior manager who leaves after only a short time it has wasted a considerable amount of time and money. Knowing how to select the right employee first time is fundamental for any organisation if it is to win that all important edge over its rivals.
In some cases, training can help a new employee to accustom themselves to a new environment and to adapt to an organisation where the priorities may be very different. Indeed, training can be a crucial part of integrating senior staff. But coaching can only go so far. Ultimately, the wrong person will remain the wrong person, and preventing a problem from occurring is always preferable to curing it once someone has been put in a high level position.
For a start, you should take a careful look at how well an individual matches the requirements of the position -- not just in terms of skills, but also considering the team that is already in place and the current company strategy.
An organisation that wants to appoint a new financial director, for example, needs to look beyond the strict requirements for the job and ask itself some specific questions. What are our organisation's key priorities? What is our company culture and personality? What kind of executive will help us to compete in the future? Should the person we appoint have a similar style to the last one, or is it time for a radical change? How will their style conflict or complement the teams they work with? And what have we learnt from hiring financial directors in the past?
Coming up with effective answers to these questions will help an organisation to develop a list of must-haves -- a template for success that will allow it to screen out candidates who would not fit, whatever their technical knowledge and experience might be.
In reality, of course, it's unlikely that your organisation will ever find the perfect candidate. So look for people who come close enough to the ideal and whose developmental gaps can be addressed on the job. A success template can be created by answering questions in three key areas:
* Organisational imperatives -- the business objectives, challenges and areas of change that the organisation needs to achieve to be successful now and in the future.
* Success...
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