Recruiting the right people is probably the most important factor and most difficult challenge for all successful businesses. Review the following check list to develop your “winning team”.

• Before devising a “Job Spec”, spend time in confirming the real purpose of the role.
• The key challenges, not the routine duties, represent the “added value” contribution to the business.
• Always consider internal applicants and actively encourage career progression.
• Don’t make the mistake to recruit in isolation of other factors – ensure that the new individual / role provides positive synergy with the rest of your team.
• Assess realistically the time and resources required to conduct the recruitment campaign.
• If you decide to use a professional recruitment firm, make sure they “earn” their fee by providing a comprehensive service – so that they do the pre-selection work, not you!
• Remember, recruitment is a two way process – you will need to sell yourself and the company if you want to attract the upper quartile candidates.
• Get a clear verbal acceptance before sending out an offer letter.
• If you don’t receive a clear, unconditional acceptance, consider the alternative merits of your 2nd choice candidate who may really want the opportunity – genuine desire is a key issue in successful recruitment.
• Finally, remember that recruitment is only the first stage – organise induction training and put mechanisms in place for regular review of progress and career development.

The single biggest issue today for most Directors or Senior Managers of businesses which aspire to out-perform their competitors is the competition for talent; and this does not only mean recruiting but also retaining and developing the ‘best’ people.

As Warren Bennis observes in his book ‘Old Dogs, New Tricks’. “Today’s leaders must not only have the stature to attract top talent – they must have the character to retain it. Talented people have options. They can walk out of the door at any time to go to a competitor or to become a competitor. In this environment, leaders do not automatically command respect. They have to earn it.”

The pool of top talent is, by definition, very small. Strong technical proficiency is only one ingredient – what marks out the ‘best’ is that elusive spark to make things happen, to turn strategy into results, to inspire and lead colleagues to achieve challenging corporate goals.

To attract the ‘best’ in the first place, you need to be flexible and effective at all stages of the recruitment process. The most successful companies are becoming increasingly innovative in their methods to woo talented people.

2 examples of this include:

a) Selling the prospect not only to the targeted individual but also their spouse / partner. This is often backed up with hard cash – accommodating the “other half’s” needs, for example, through a one-off five thousand pounds input to fund that long dreamt of MBA can be viewed as money well invested. In other words, more employers now recognise the need to tailor arrangements to suit an individual’s overall life / family situation if they wish to attract the best.

b) More employers are now using current staff as ambassadors and potential recruiters. A direct, positive recommendation is often far more powerful an inducement than any amount of corporate marketing. Think of it, would you be more likely to go to see a film a friend says “you must see” or which you have seen advertised on a billboard?

c) For such successful direct referrals, figures of £10,000+ per hire are becoming increasingly common.

But, remember, attracting talented individuals is only the start. For these people to realise their fullest potential for the benefit of your company, you need to nurture their talent and listen to their individual needs. Put another way, if you are not in regular dialogue with your high performers you need to wake up to the fact that your competitors, and search firms, certainly are!

One of the tricks is to ensure regular personal reviews, not only of current performance, but also to identify what will keep them motivated – then to do all you can to deliver.

Keep in mind that money is not the only motivator – in fact, high performers tend to take for granted they will be financially well rewarded! Key additional factors which make high achievers tick are likely to include: recognition, empowerment, new challenges, opportunities for personal development, ability to make a real impact on the business and work – life balance.

In conclusion, you need to invest in your best people – that way you are much more likely to win loyalty from them and create a community of talent and high performance that will maintain your competitive business advantage.

Well, the answer, as with many things in life, is that it all depends! On the one hand, an effective Interim can have a critical impact in salvaging a business or lay the core foundations for sustained success; on the other hand, the wrong person can go a long way to killing off a business.

An Interim Manager should be viewed as a highly skilled turnaround specialist and not be confused with a glorified temp; an appropriate need for a true Interim may include some of the following critical business scenarios;

• A corporate rescue bid.
• Change management programmes, involving re-structuring, business re-engineering or possibly an acquisition or disposal.
• Specific expertise during a defined period, such as the life cycle of a single major project.
• Holding the fort while you look for a senior key replacement.

The Interim market has certainly matured over the last 2-3 years. However, without slipping into the temptation of too much direct selling of Morgan consultancy, many of our competitors still do little more than read CVs and pass them, and the Interim, on to the client. We are pleased, but not altogether surprised, that we have managed to become a strong service provider to this market.

The fact is an effective Interim is a rare beast with a number of finely tuned skills: a proven track record of change management to cut through issues and deliver lasting results – in a word, a trouble-shooter. To achieve a positive outcome, there are several things that both you and the Interim need clarifying right from the outset.

• A clear understanding of the nature of the business issues. There is no point at all in trying to gloss over or hide some of the real problems or difficulties.
• Agreement as to the strategy required to achieve the brief – this includes level of resource available, time-scales etc .
• Establishing the working relationship between the Interim and key members of the Board - a strong partnership must be formed.
• Up front reality check – often to achieve real positive ‘change’ there will be plenty of shorter term headaches. For example, it is likely people will leave, whether encouraged or not, and so you need to have factored this into the brief.
• An effective Interim will need to be given significant executive authority to succeed. You need to empower them and this means putting a high amount of trust in the Interim’s capabilities.
• Know the end game; the results should be entirely clear and measurable.
• Don’t be swayed to retain the Interim after the key brief has been achieved; remember, one of the key skills of an Interim is to move in fast and make a defined contribution – the career manager plays a different role and has different skills.

So, how much do they cost? Whilst there is no fixed figure, typically a proven Interim will charge roughly double the pro-rata salary of the equivalent career manager. However, when you bear in mind the many indirect costs of the full time employee, including car, pension, healthcare, training, holidays etc, then the real difference in cost is not great. It is also worth bearing in mind that the cost of an independent Interim represents a small fraction of the charges by a management consultancy outfit.

So, hopefully the point should have become clear that a skilled, effective Interim used appropriately is worth their weight in gold, whilst the wrong choice is not only a waste of money but may also leave a legacy of lasting damage to the whole business.

If you are considering needing to utilise the skills of an experienced and proven Interim Manager,
please contact us on 0845-330-0240.

A common mistake managers make when recruiting key employees is to concentrate too heavily on qualifications alone.

A better approach, in addition to purely acknowledging an individual’s “badges”, is to focus on their experience, approach to business tasks and key achievements in their career to date.

To lend support to this premise, consider the fact that ‘A’ level results have improved year on year for the last 20 years at a time when business leaders have never been louder in their protest that young people increasingly lack the basic skills to succeed at work.

A recently published study conducted at Yale University links success in the work place primarily with an individual’s level of “practical intelligence”. Surprisingly, perhaps, their study goes as far to suggest that practical intelligence, which predicts success in real life, frequently has an inverse relationship with academic intelligence.

The Yale research team back up their findings convincingly by listing a large number of prominent entrepreneurs and those who have built large business empires from scratch who possess few or no formal paper qualifications.

So, what lessons are to be learnt?

Certainly, it serves as a timely reminder to all of us as professional recruiters to look beyond the stereotypical assumptions of each individual’s worth.

As well as purely looking at academic intelligence (IQ), experienced HR professionals have for some years now used personality tests to measure an applicant’s emotional intelligence (EQ) to aid the selection process. This obviously has it benefits, providing at least some indication of abilities such as motivation of oneself and others, understanding and empathising with peers, avoidance of mood and stress swings which can swamp the ability to think and perform etc.

But this new focus on the importance of “practical intelligence” acknowledges the reality that not all real-life or work-based problems are solvable with a combination of academic and social skills alone.

Perhaps the most valuable and sophisticated interviewing tool to meet the needs and challenges presented by business today is CBI – Criteria Based Interviewing. CBI is an interviewing technique which aims to delve into an individual’s approach to a task, how they would go about solving a problem etc.

It is interesting to observe how often the “best” candidate has not necessarily covered all the areas within a new role. Rather, it is their assumed approach of how to tackle new issues and challenges in ways most likely to achieve desired business results within a specific environment or culture which clearly differentiates them positively over and above the other candidates. It is important to note that different business situations and cultures need different approaches.

So, to identify accurately the best and most appropriate approach using “practical intelligence”, the question needs to be: “In such a situation, how would you go about……….”, not “tell me what you have done”.

In today’s business world, we need to start looking at companies in a completely different way – seeing them as places where a large number of problems are being solved all the time and where it may take new eyes to deliver positive solutions using an innovative fresh approach.

As such, we need to be more creative in our approach to recruiting and selecting professional people. We need to focus on the level of an individual’s “practical intelligence” based on their relevant track record of success allied to how well that same individual would approach key challenges in your business going forward.