The System Versus Your Gut: Executive Recruiting Insights
Posted by Tim McIntyre on Fri, Jul 23, 2010 @ 10:06 AM
Most talent decisions are made on gut instinct
Not only are there few systems out there with good data on recruitment, promotion, and job performance but also the management culture in many organizations permits an intuitive approach to hiring.
Sounds good to me, and clearly we praise those with a "good eye for talent" 
-- but industry data shows that many firms often choose badly.
Statistics about washouts among new recruits failure of newly promoted exec and other human capital challenges abound, but many firms still lack systematically embedded, empirically based selection and promotion practices. The impact of executive search and selection is often overlooked as it relates to poor performance and flawed corporate leadership. This dynamic has far reaching consequences for an organization’s growth and success, or failure.
The Leadership Assessment Problem
With the premise that leadership failure is
grounded in the ‘mis-concepts’ of assessment
(i.e., how we choose our leaders), we offer a mini-model which helps avoid making poor hiring choices, and costly mistakes, which is dependent upon the acknowledgement of the three
assertions when in comes to talent acquisition:
1.) Exceptional leaders are made, not born.
2.) Building workforce excellence by design means recognizing that it takes time getting the right people on the team, and a concerted effort to cultivate a success oriented environment withbalanced, seasoned leaders. In other words, make executive recruiting a process, not an event.
3.) All of our advancement in technology has not
led to a corresponding increase in our ability to
assess and choose key business executives (to be continued...)