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.