Recruiting executives: what does Carol do?
- Recruiting-Carol offers a boutique talent solution at Vertical Elevation that has a unique and customized talent recruiting strategy process. As an adviser, she is in demand by executives looking to build better organizations, improve their leadership and communication skills, and advance their careers. Using her expertise as a recruitment process optimization strategist, she is able to improve the number of performers in organizations, substantially increasing company revenue.
Who does she serve?
- She serves primarily high-tech clients, both startups and mid-sized companies, sometimes large companies.
When do you use a retained recruiter?
- Any time they have an important hire to fill. I’ve been hired by startups who need software engineers. I’ve had people ask, “Why would somebody hire you to do that?” Well, because it’s an important hire. I mean, with high-tech startups, it’s very critical. On up to VP and CXO level.
What is your process?
- Regardless of the size of the company, I sit down and do a kickoff meeting with them, and each of the stakeholders that I meet with on the particular search gets…prior to that gets a document with a list of maybe 40 or 50 questions to be prepared for as we talk. And in all of those questions… Some are geared around the company, some are geared around competitors, some are geared around the actual job; all the answers to that allow me then to write a position description.
- I was busy taking my notes from nine hours’ worth of meetings with eight different people and putting it into the first draft of the position description, which I then sent to the CEO. And then we went through a second draft. And between the second and third draft, they decided that instead of looking for this level of person, we needed to look for a different level of person.
Finding talent
- That process starts with the position description and me understanding their needs. And it’s not just about what they want. It’s about me asking hard questions to them to determine, is this reasonable, given who you are as a company? Some people will say, “Gosh. Well, I want this.” And I will say, “Well, given who you are and the size of your company, how long you’ve been around, do you think that person wants to come work for you?” So it’s all of those things.
- Once that’s determined, I start sourcing—I also have a sourcer that I employ to help me—and we start looking for people. And that first list, it’s usually in the neighborhood of a hundred possibilities.
Narrowing the Talent list
- The people could come from consulting firms or they could come from industry, and before industry, the vertical market that they’re in. Or we could go to industry, and then maybe they work for a consulting firm before that.
- So, to give a CEO a potpourri of candidates that are all great quality is what’s the most important thing to me, so that they can now look and judge people.
- We also built… I built—and the CEO approved it, of course—a competency model. So that when each person interviews, if the company wants a competency model—they don’t always want it because they don’t always want to use it—the competency model then allows the interviewer to make sure they’re asking the questions that are important to the position, as well as each of the competencies that we’ve now come up with are ranked low, medium, or high...
