Stakes Too High

Welcome back to Heylia’s blog page!

With a new year on the horizon, our team thought it best to spend December talking about recruiting. Success starts with the people at the foundation of your company, all the way to the top. Whether they’re working behind the scene, or facing customer-facing every day, your recruiting can make or break the goals you set for your team. Today, we’re focusing on what the best practices are when recruiting executives for your company.

Now, the end goal you set for different projects will always require different skills and energies. We’ll talk about strategies for that later in the post, but let's first cover some consistent expectations when examining the best candidates to become leadership. 

The big one here is that you always want to make sure you’re hiring someone with knowledge of whatever product you are producing. This is a great rule of thumb for anyone you’re looking to hire, but with leadership it is probably one of the most important points when it comes to recruitment. And it's not just about basic knowledge of your product either, you’re looking for someone who has a firm grasp on what the product is, the different ways it can be used, and a clear picture of what it can be. 

For example, if you’re selling encryption software and you’re interviewing someone with decent experience in leadership at a security software company, they might be versed in what it takes to build up your product, but do they know your product specifically? Think about questions in an interview that might draw on the specificity rather than something that could be answered by someone with broader knowledge of the sector.

The more flexible part of this point is the “what it can be,” part of the process. How do you want your leadership to approach your product? They could have a perfect idea of what the product is, and then turn around and tell you they want to take it in a direction that you’re not comfortable with. That is where we get into another recruiting point that needs to be considered in this process: company culture.

Think about what your company looks like right now. Does it run well? Yes? Maybe that's because you’ve been able to cultivate a decent culture with the workers in each department. This could be a culture of laid-back, go-at-your-own-pace attitude that enables your team an abundance of time to hone their craft and produce something that comes from the heart rather than their stress. It could be a more formal culture of strict deadlines and a consistent, streamlined workflow that allows each member of your team to put their best foot forward. In either scenario, you don’t want the ruthless, east-coast business CEO running the laid-back workplace, even if they’re the best in the industry. Alternatively, you wouldn’t want the crunchy granola Silicon Valley tech guru in the formal workplace, even if they’ve created multiple thriving ventures in their career. 

This brings us to some of the more flexible points that you might want to consider in the executive recruiting process. If product knowledge is the mind, and culture meshing is the heart, then the rest of this is what makes the whole recruiting system function; the blood, the muscle, the nerves. Figuring out the little details about a candidate needs to be a priority in order to round out the recruiting process.

Individual leadership style, a sub-function of culture mesh, needs to be explored during this process. What makes this person a leader? Their ability to organize their team? Maybe it's their ability to take feedback from their members, and create a more democratic process. Whatever the case is, it's up to you which answer you feel would be the best.

Another good example might be questions about their past failures. It's an age old recruiting trick, of course, trying to catch the candidate off-guard. Who really likes answering that question anyways? But it is important, like it or not. Testing a candidate's response to a question that may paint them in a negative light is important; especially in the case of an executive, where they may be customer-facing, and may have to deal with unflattering moments. Whatever the correct answer is to a question like this is, again, up to you and what you’re looking for in a candidate. But a good universal rule of thumb: if they say they have no weaknesses or notable failures, they’re probably lying.

Depending on who you are and what’s important to the role you’re looking to fill, you might ask these questions in a very different way. You might even ask completely different questions! The point of these is to get the details that might be missed if you’re just looking for someone that is a good fit. Going back to the analogy about recruiting being a living, breathing thing: a brain and a heart are no good just by themselves.

The point is that product knowledge, how an executive fits into that culture, and even the little details of how someone functions as a leader are all more important than just getting a flashy CV or a big name recruited into your leadership ranks. In fact, if you could take one thing away from this post, let it be this; placing someone in a leadership position solely based off of a name or prior success can quickly become a recipe for disaster (as exemplified in how things have been going in the social media-sphere recently).

Oftentimes, the leader who will be the most passionate about your product is the one that is looking for a chance. Today, in the face of mass layoffs and an insecurity in the markets, you need reliability and security, and there’s no better place to vet executives than Heylia.