Hiring Top Executives at the Face of Competition - Some Issues

While hiring senior executives, every organization in today's highly competitive marketplace is looking for the "best" available candidate from the market. Companies are increasingly realizing that the newly hired senior executives present a significant opportunity to move the organization forward in implementing their business plan in today's fiercely competitive marketplace. Moreover by virtue of their nature, the senior executive experiences highly complex work environment. For example, they may be responsible for integrating and coordinating complex functions, have to cope with complex reporting relationships and deal with considerable ambiguity and change. Moreover, they make decisions which often affect a large number of people and are held directly accountable for results. Hence companies are making huge investment in recruitment campaigns and strategies to ensure that the newly inducted senior executives will be strong performers in the long run.

So what determines who is the "best"? Many companies have traditionally concentrated on the assessment of candidate's "Credentials, technical knowledge and skills competencies" during recruitment process. This approach has some fundamental reasons for wide acceptance. Credentials are very easily checked and the assumption is that candidates with the identified credentials will have more to offer than those without. It also allows a company to appear more "Professional" when employees have credentials. Knowledge and skills testing is the easiest to design, to administer, and to evaluate. These evaluations tend to be the least subjective, if well designed, and thus they are not very open to challenge. It assumes that recruits have the "right" underlying motive and trait competencies or that these can be instilled by good management.

However this approach has back-fired in many leading companies since knowledge and credential testing has been found to be one of the least reliable predictors of a candidate's future successful work performance specifically for senior executive level. While many companies have hired individuals based on credentials and knowledge, and promoted employees based on skills and abilities, they seriously neglect individuals based on values.

It has been widely found that when an employee has a value system that is intrinsically in direct conflict with the values of the organization, there will be serious problem in the individual performance regardless of their level of knowledge and /or skills. This syndrome emerges because underlying our perceptual processes are our values and beliefs which colour what we see and how we interpret events. Understanding these better may help explain why we choose some solutions over other. Therefore impact of values are more pronounced in decisions where there is ambiguity and consequently a greater degree of subjectivity. Hence in case this problem increases substantially among large number of employees and specially within senior executives of any organization, it looses its ability to compete in the highly competitive marketplace and becomes a sick organization.

It has also found widely that companies that use a broad base of assessment tools and techniques including elements of credentials, knowledge, skills and abilities miss assessing candidates in the value area. As a result company would identify candidates who offer poor long term prospects for the company.

Compounding this problem is the fact that in general, knowledge and skills can be imparted upon an individual in a relatively short time while values are developed and shaped over a longer period of time and are often affected by influence beyond the companies control.

To conclude, it has been widely recognized that the values and beliefs of the senior executives have more impact on the direction and purpose of the organization than any other single influence. It is important, therefore to have mechanism to select and recruit senior executives on the value based framework where they may be helping together in solving critical organizational problems. Certainly, good decisions are more difficult to make if executives do not know what their guiding values are.

Moreover by hiring and promoting only those candidates whose values are deemed to be compatible with the organization, it is hoped that performance problems created by "values" clashes will be lessened and managerial resources can be better focused on business critical issues. In addition newly inducted senior executives can serve as role models and influence the employees by their behaviour that has become critical to the success of the organization.