Executive Recruitment

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 - Executive Recruitment

Executive Recruitment

As you probably understand, Executive Recruitment is not like the recruitment for other grades of white collar or management staff. Hence an effective Executive CV needs to address these issues.

While in a standard recruitment process you are applying for a defined position, selling your skills against a defined job specification; in Executive Recruitment you are selling your ability to achieve a required business result.

Your success therefore in Executive Recruitment is strategically defined by two criteria:

• Your ability to either be found by or be introduced to the board
• Your mental ability to accept the difference in recruitment approach, and hence research, define and sell (yourself) as the solution to the defined business problem

Executive Search firms

Executive Search firms – also called head hunters – take a clear and defined brief they have worked for with their client. This does not lead on defining the historic person specification, but the business results that the placed candidate will need to deliver. Secondly they want someone who will fit in with team, in the defined cultural way of that company, by adding a combination of: approach, attitude, knowledge, contacts and application.

Hence, successful Executive Search means that you need to be known and found by both your network – both personal and online; and with the right message or brand for that brief. The most successful way of achieving consistency in this message – a key issue in Executive Search – is to have a defined Elevator Pitch.

Executive Search

There are three ways that you will find suitable executive jobs:

• Approached by a Head hunter
• Approached through or via your own networking
• Direct application, using an effective Executive CV

The first two methods are about having the right reputation and results. The third is about knowing the business solution you can bring to that researched organisation, in which you have developed a network insider.

There is a fourth, indirect application, covering:

• Responses to job boards
• Through the employers website

If you were a junior manager or worker, these last two would be appropriate. I would just be saying to you that you should make employers your first priority, recruiters your last, and ideally avoid job boards – and we could move on.

However, for Senior Executive Jobs particularly, the Human Resources team and Recruiters are devils in the same boat: they will both delay your application and make you compete against others. In others words, you become a commodity over a valuable asset.

Do you want to be a commodity? If so, please apply for jobs via job boards and direct on the companies website. There are tactics to overcome this, but you have to use them only on head hunters – and you can only ever engage with three of them during your Executive Job Search

Executive Jobs:

The problem in Executive Recruitment is: if a company is hiring an executive, you don’t have time to learn the recruitment process, before you make enough mistakes, or one huge one, and are rejected from the Executive Recruitment process for that position.

For instance, one of the mistakes that many job seekers make in Executive Recruitment is assuming that the Executive Job Interview is like every other interview they have ever attended, but a bit longer. If you go in with that approach, you will be rejected.

Its not that you have to sell yourself, it is that you have to become an equal in the room quickly. To do this you must show you can do the job by showing that you: understand the business problem or challenges; and how they could be solved to deliver the required business solution.

Do that, and you become the owner of the Executive Chair: fail to do that, and you are just another want to be job applicant, who will be rejected.

Good Luck!

===================================================================

Exclusive executive to board level winning results with our Executive CV service

Executive employment via our MBA coached Executive CV Writing Service is personalised around you

We are also happy to provide confidential career advice and a free Professional CV Review

===================================================================

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Comments are closed.