What is the Impact of Delaying A Key Hire?
Before we answer the question we need to establish 3 important facts:1) No matter when this recession will end, your business can gain a big advantage over your competition now and in the coming recovery with only a single leadership addition or change.
2) Even during this tough economic period, it is still hard to find someone to fill that key leadership role or one-of-a-kind position in your company.
3) As the economy recovers, finding and attracting talented individuals to fill your key positions will become even more difficult.
As a result of the recession many businesses have been cutting costs, programs and even, people. Very few businesses are making new hires in the anticipation of a recovery, even though most of these same companies have at least one critical need which can be filled by hiring, or replacing, a key leadership position.
The leadership shortcoming could have become apparent when the economy softened. In other cases, the shortcoming was spotted during more favorable economic times, but the company could not find the right candidate. A frequent statement at your company management meetings may have been "If we could find someone with ___________ experience, we could take our company to the next level."
How did you fill in the blank? Did you seek more operational or technical expertise, sales capability, financial acumen, or possibly someone capable of leading an expansion into a new region? The need varied but the bottom line was the company was limited in reaching their full potential because they could not find and/or attract the right person for a key role, or they delayed the decision of upgrading a B player to an A player.
Recently one of Carl J. Taylor & Co.'s clients went in a different direction. Carl J. Taylor & Co. was approached by the President and Vice President of Sales at a company that wanted help adding several new Sales Directors for new territories they were planning to add. They also wanted to upgrade the quality of their existing Sales Director in an existing territory.
Like many companies, due to the economic downturn, this company did a lot of cost cutting and implemented several budget controls. They knew that the recruiting and compensation of these new people would have a significant negative impact on the company’s short term cash flow. Nevertheless, they moved forward with the hire of these new Sales Directors.
The VP of Sales for the company had this to say about their decision to work with Carl J. Taylor & Co. to find and attract these new Sales Directors during these difficult times:
"These are difficult roles to fill, and we did a thorough search in each market to find the right person for our organization. We have added some outstanding people that we may not have been able to entice at another time.
We have taken full advantage of this difficult time to let these people learn our sophisticated products and services and to integrate them into our company and culture.
The new Directors are developing important relationships with our current customers, and they are identifying and contacting a large number of new customer targets.
The visibility of our competition is noticeably reduced, or absent, in some of these markets, and customers recognize our presence is increasing.
Sales are hard to close, but we are selling more during this time because of these new people.
We are ideally positioned to take advantage of the recovery, and we won't lose sales or market share because we have to delay our efforts to find the right people."
When the economy has experienced a downturn, filling key leadership positions can create a strain on the company budget, but it's vital to keep in mind that delaying these key hires (or upgrades) can cost far more in terms of missed opportunities, negative customer relations, lost sales, reduced market share, delayed initiatives and/or improvements in operations.
Do you know what your competition is doing in this area? Are they investing in the top people now to take advantage of the current environment and to position themselves for the coming recovery?
The economy will recover and as it does your competition and other companies will realize their leadership voids and seek to fill these key leadership positions. The problem is at this time it will be even harder to find and attract the best people and as a result many companies will make hasty decisions which will lead to bad hires.
And, no company can afford to make a bad hire.
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Carl J. Taylor & Co. is an executive search firm based in Dallas. For over 20 years, the firm has successfully completed challenging search assignments for clients of all sizes in Texas and around the country. If you would like more information about this or other executive search related topics, please call Carl Taylor at 972 490-7697 or email him at ctaylor@carltaylorco.com. The company website is www.carltaylorco.com.