When you’re hiring executives, you’re walking a tightrope. On the one hand, someone with the right skills and experience can bring exceptional benefits to your business, but may well come with high salary expectations. On the other hand, a cheaper candidate might let you save some money but the costs to your business could be huge.
Let’s have a look at some of the reasons why it’s worth working with a high quality Executive Search firm. If you try to cut corners when you’re hiring at a high level, you are making the worst kind of false economy. Here are some of the costs of hiring the wrong person for the job.
Confusion
Your executives are like your generals in battle. You decide on a strategy, and they make sure every sector of your workforce is working towards that same strategy, even where it’s not obvious. A good executive will be able to see how they can shift behaviour in your customer service team to pull towards your overall strategy for the business. An inexperienced one won’t be able to communicate your overall policy clearly so while everyone under them may be working at their full capacity, their output won’t actually help towards your goals for the business.
Often the key to success in business is agility: being able to pivot quickly to take advantage of an opportunity. If your executives can’t communicate what they need clearly, and sow confusion instead you’ll lost this vital agility and fall behind.
Stress
It’s no secret that one of the main causes of work stress is poor management. Getting poor feedback, conflicting messages and unconstructive personal feedback are a recipe for poor morale. Unfortunately poor morale has far worse costs to your business than unhappy employees. When they’re badly motivated like this your workforce will be less effective, getting less out of every day. You also run the risk in serious cases of losing whole days of productivity to sickness: stress related burnout is very real and requires good management to avoid.
Another problem you risk is an accelerated rate of turnover. If your office becomes a toxic environment for your employees, the best will seek jobs elsewhere, taking their experience with them.
The higher up the chain a bad manager is, the more they can influence for the worse. If you don’t take care when hiring an executive you could give a destructive manager the greatest possible range of influence, with disastrous results for your business.
