Proud to have been able to share some of my experience with Gina Riley for the March issue of Authoritii5.0 Magazine. Read the article here.
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executive recruitment
Marketing holds the potential to drive business strategy and growth for the long-term, but only if you have the right talent in your organization.
I had a chance to share some thoughts and techniques on how to hire marketers with great strategic thinking and business skills to build out your leadership teams. This keynote presentation is now available on OnConferences, a virtual conference featuring business leaders across multiple industries and functional disciplines.
In this talk, I share the advice I give to CEOs when they are hiring marketing talent. This same advice applies up and down the organization to make sure you have the strategic horsepower to fuel your growth.
When an organization needs to add leadership, especially in times of growth and change, the process is fairly straightforward: the senior leader crafts a job and gets help from HR or an executive recruiter to find the best candudate. But what if it worked differently?
What if you helped recruit and hire your own boss?
It is not uncommon for staff to be involved in the interview process and some companies incent employees for referrals, but I am thinking beyond that. What if you thought about what you wanted in a manager and what you thought the business needed in a leader, and actively helped recruit that person into your organization?
Here is 7 reasons why reverse recruiting makes sense.
1. You can make sure there is a fit
Each person comes to the job with certain strengths and interests. You have yours and your colleagues have theirs. Who better to recommend the kind of leader that will compliment and cultivate these strengths than you? What are you looking to develop and in what areas do you want to be mentored? Hiring your boss is a great way to ensure that you are getting what you need from your career. It is a wonderful thing when the development path of individual employees and the business needs align, for a long time. And being involved in hiring your manager can start building this tenure and growth into your career at your current employer.
2. You can be more successful
If you select the manager that is the right mix of mentor and challenger, you will be successful which will translate into more opportunities for you, and your colleagues. And if there is a good fit and complimentary skills, you may find yourself being able to focus on the parts of your job that you excel at, making you even more successful longer term.
3. You will be happier
Extensive research, like this article in Forbes, has been done on why people leave companies and the analysis shows that people rarely leave companies, they leave managers. Employee engagement begins, and can end, here. Your direct manager has more impact on your job satisfaction than virtually any other factor in your work life, more than compensation, work environment, or specific responsibilities. Choosing wisely, can have an impact on your life, stress-levels, and overall career success.
4. You position yourself as a leader
Let’s say you are a senior marketing director for a company who needs a Chief Marketing Officer, a Controller, or a head of operations at your company. Do you want to wait until the CEO appoints a new leader or brings in a few final candidates for you to interview or should you be more proactive? To make a recommendation for a new hire is a risk, but no matter how they ultimately end up doing in the role, you having a conversation with leaders in your company to make suggestions on what they should hire and giving them some people to consider, helps position you as a leader and someone committed to the cause of growth. If you go proactively to the CEO to find out more about the role and how you can help recruit the best candidate, it shows that you are a committed, ambitious, and high-performing employee who connected in the community.
5. You learn more about your business and the objectives of your boss
When you ask senior leadership what they are looking for in a new hire and how their performance will be evaluated, you are getting a fresh perspective on what a successful candidate might look like and how you can help them be successful once they are onboard. Many functional leaders or individual contributors are surprised to hear how much of their boss’ performance measures are based on things like enterprise value (ie, stock price, market share) rather than on successful execution of activities. This perspective can make you a better leader in the business, as well, able to tie your own activities with the overall business goals.
6. You can influence the company
Those conversations about the role and success measures, can also put you in a position of influence. What is missing from the job description that you think is critical, but that the hiring manager might not be aware? What competencies would make this person successful leading your team? Want more diversity in your organization? Hire a woman or person of color. Ask what is changing in the function or market that might cause the company to want to adapt what they are looking for and recommend accordingly.
7. You broaden your network
When helping to recruit, don’t stop with the people you already know. It is always better to build your network before you need it and there is no better way to do so than to reach out to see if people are interested in working for your company. You have something to offer them. If they aren’t interested, they might know someone who is who they can introduce you to. Ask your college professors for recommendations, see who serve on non-profit boards that you respect, attend networking meetings or industry association events and ask around. Scour LinkedIn. Referrals will lead to referrals and pretty soon you have met a dozen people who might be your next boss, at your current employer if things go well, or elsewhere in the future. Or maybe some of them may go to work for you someday.
In his book, Under New Management, David Burkus describes how teams are built at IDEO, the legendary industrial design firm. The teams pick their leader, the leader doesn’t pick the teams. The talent gets to pick their place in the organization chart, under the manager and on the projects that make the most sense to them. Managers who find themselves without teams, can’t execute projects and are probably not in the organization long. I imagine those with too many employees, find themselves with more interesting work and bigger responsibilities and reward. What started as an experiment years ago, still permeates the culture. Perhaps it is time for your organization to do an experiment of its own.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
You are looking to grow your business and your executive team. You want to add another voice at the table to represent strategic marketing. Communications and brand are becoming more important and you want the organization to be more thoughtful and integrated in your approach. You want to add some diversity to your executive team, in which finance and operations are heavily represented. Perhaps this is your first CMO role and you want to hire right.
You have worked your network, promoted a job and possibly even hired a recruiter to broaden and deepen your search. You have a list of key candidates who might be perfect for your new role. You know, as we all do, that interviews are horrible for assessing talent and fit, but that is the tool you have at your disposal, so you plan to use it to its fullest potential.
Here are five questions you should ask in an interview and what to listen for to help you find the rock star marketing executive who can help take your organization to the next level.
- What was your first professional “win” in marketing and what made it successful?
I am a big believer that how you do anything is how you do everything (which is a tenet of the Effective Interviewing curriculum that I highly recommend). Making someone go back to their memory banks, reaching back early in their career (or even college), tells you a lot about how they approach problems, find resources, and how they assess their own strengths. For this question, listen for the role that they played, how they measured success (was it a feeling or data), and how those same patterns show up in their later successes. - What is on your dashboard?
Assuming they have done similar work in the past and that is why you are considering them for your open position, ask them how they measured success in their last role. Listen for metrics that are not activities based (ie, number of campaigns, shows, or product launches), but results based (ie, sales-qualified leads, conversion rates, opportunities, coverage, etc). Listen for a mix of qualitative and quantitative. Ideally, they would have financial measures that relate to revenue and profit generation, not just budget management. And if you want to inquire as to their technical skills on some of the marketing systems that might be deployed, ask about how the metrics were set-up and delivered. - What marketing metric should be on the CEO dashboard?
This question helps you get a sense of how the person believes their work should be measured and how collaborative they will likely be with you and others on the staff. They should be able to provide you with a few key metrics that are measurable and meaningful to the business. Not just benchmark metrics like marketing spend as a percentage of revenue, which are useful, but not terribly actionable. Each business might call for different metrics, so listen for the logic behind the answer and probe into that if anything is unclear. - What do you consider best practices for building a winning team and how have you deployed those successfully in the past?
In any executive role, one of the key measures of success is how well they can recruit, empower, motivate, develop, and retain high-performing teams. This question allows the candidate to talk about their previous teams. If they are not specific in their answers, be sure to press them on where they found their key performers in the past, how they developed them, and how they delegated authority and responsibility over time. You should also listen for how they describe the teamwork among the executive team – your direct reports – which are critical for the company’s success. Patrick Lencioni in his book The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, talks about the importance of having a first team that is your peers, not simply focusing on teamwork within functions or groups. As a member of the executive team, it is critical that your CMO understands their first team responsibilities and knows how to team up and build trust among their peers. - From what you have learned about our company and industry, where are the most impactful points of leverage in our business?
This question requires the candidate to put on their management consultant hat and it tests their situational analysis skills, as well as the research they did prior to the interview. Do they understand your business well enough (or ones like it) to identify a few things that would be of key importance to the business. This is also a place where they could reference your financial reports (if those are public or provided) and provide you their analysis of the leverage points in the business model.
These questions get to the heart of what you want in a marketing executive. You want someone who knows their stuff from a marketing perspective and can lead the function with the capabilities, credibility, and confidence you need for the investments you are making. But you also want someone who is an effective member of your executive staff and can help you lead the business to new heights.
This article was originally published on The CEO Magazine.