The bigger you grow, the harder it is to keep up with yourself. Periods of rapid growth and expansion are exciting for any company, but they’re also fraught with risks and challenges. Besides potential cash flow problems, operational strain, and supply chain disruptions that can lead to quality or customer service challenges, there’s also the problem of ensuring that your workforce remains at the perfect size to handle the increased demand of your growing customer base and the expanding scale of your operations—and that includes your company’s executive team.
Without fast talent recruitment to carry them through their expansion, fast-growing companies can all too easily run aground on these challenges and scuttle their plans for future growth. In this article, we’ll explore why swiftness is such an important quality for fast-growing companies’ continued growth and success, especially in the leadership recruitment processes.
Why is speed important in recruitment for fast-growing companies?
Recruiters are known to work quickly—top candidates are quick to find new opportunities and change their minds, so the more quickly recruiters can steer them to businesses in need, the better their chances of filling a much-needed role.
For fast-growing companies, speed is essential. Rapid growth naturally involves increased demand for products or services, and growing one’s workforce quickly ensures there are no shortages of workforce to deliver on orders, provide support, and maintain operations without negatively affecting quality or overburdening employees.
Avoiding delays in hiring also means avoiding bottlenecks that can lead to inefficiencies and disruptions throughout your organization. In particular, fast-growing companies run the risk of a “leadership gap” without fast executive recruitment.
As the company grows and certain factors and stakeholder or investor demands shift, certain executive positions become more critical to fill. Leadership teams must grow accordingly to deal with more unexpected challenges, operational efficiency and productivity concerns, and legal and compliance issues as they crop up.
How long does it take to hire an executive?
Immediate talent hiring isn’t always easy, and it’s especially difficult when bringing on a new executive to expand the leadership team’s capabilities.
The average executive recruitment process can take anywhere from 30-40 days to 6-12 weeks or even 4-8 months, depending on a business’s size, industry, and the available talent pool for C-level leadership. Once a candidate is found, onboarding a new executive can take 6-9 months for larger businesses, and even for small businesses, it can take months for a new leader to become fully integrated into the company and provide optimal leadership.
All this is to say that whatever you can do to ensure quick leadership recruitment makes a world of difference for your business—and when you’re growing quickly, you need to take advantage of immediate talent hiring and fast executive recruitment to provide the expertise and leadership your organization needs to handle its growing pains and overcome whatever challenges arise.
How to Ensure a Speedy Executive Search for Startups
Time is of the essence for fast-growing businesses, so let’s take a quick look at the fundamental approaches to achieving fast talent recruitment in your organization’s C-suite. Following these principles will minimize wasted effort and dead ends in the talent recruitment process and speed up your search for new executive leadership so you can expand your C-suite with a leadership team that can continue to rise to meet every challenge in your business’s path to success.
Understand Your Growth Strategy
Before you start, make sure you have a deep understanding of your business’s growth trajectory, goals, and culture—essential bedrock for understanding what executive roles you need to fill, how they will drive growth and overcome your business’s growth-related challenges, and what to look for in terms of culture fit.
In other words, this focus ensures you’re searching for executives who align with your business objectives right from the get-go.
Develop a Targeted Strategy for Fast Executive Recruitment
Setting clear goals and timelines for executive recruitment and identifying the industries, competitors, and companies most likely to have the leadership talent you’re looking for is essential to building a targeted strategy.
Defining the parameters for your executive search and realistic milestones and expectations keeps your search for the perfect candidate on track and on schedule.
Leverage Industry Contacts
Finding a candidate pool full of executive talent that fits your business’s unique needs can do a lot to ensure a fast executive recruitment process. Industry contacts, including industry colleagues and employees and coworkers in your business, can provide inroads to these candidate pools by offering recommendations and referrals for potential leadership candidates.
When you partner with a talent recruitment consulting firm, you gain access to the firm’s extensive candidate pool of professionals, executives, and thought leaders in your industry to further guide your search.
Use Advanced Candidate Search and Screening Tools
In today’s digital world, advanced sourcing tools, databases, and platforms make it easier to sift through large candidate pools quickly, while applicant tracking systems streamline the application process and make it easier to focus on the most promising candidates.
Consider Both Active and Passive Candidates
Conventional wisdom says to look for executive talent among people who are actively searching for a new job—active candidates—but that conventional wisdom doesn’t fly anymore. Finding the best candidate means being willing to go after passive candidates, too—executives who are currently employed and not looking for new leadership opportunities.
It might take more elbow grease to persuade a passive candidate for an executive role, but in today’s labor market, even people in C-suite roles are more amenable to taking a new job if the offer is good enough. The unique skills and experiences your organization needs may be lying within a passive candidate who’s waiting for the right opportunity.
Fast-Track the Screening Process
Fast-tracking the executive recruitment process means setting up efficient interview panels, using structured interview questions, and making prompt decisions to evaluate candidates so you can identify top executive talent quickly, reduce the time-to-hire, and seize top talent before your competitors do.
The tricky part is to balance efficiency with comprehensive screening to quickly identify qualified candidates in possession of the exact leadership qualities and technical skills your business needs to succeed:
- Define clear criteria for and prioritize core competencies for the position, such as technical expertise, industry knowledge, and leadership skills
- Use structured interviews and behavioral interviews with standardized questions to assess technical and soft skills
- Involve key stakeholders, such as other members of the executive team and potential subordinates, in panel interviews to ensure a good fit with the existing C-suite team and larger company culture
Mastering these fundamentals for immediate talent hiring and quick leadership recruitment can sound easier said than done, especially for small businesses dealing with the challenges of rapid growth—which is why it’s important to keep in mind that you don’t have to go it alone.
By closely collaborating with recruiting specialists, you can offload the hard work of finding the next member of your C-suite to dedicated professionals who work closely with you and keep up-to-date with hiring and recruitment trends in your industry to ensure a perfect fit.
Take Advantage of Fast Talent Recruitment with JBN & Associates
Having an executive team that keeps pace with your growing company and provides the diverse C-suite skill sets you need to succeed makes all the difference to a growing company, but “immediate talent-hiring” and “hiring new executive leadership” make for a circle that’s especially difficult to square.
Working with a dedicated recruiting firm with expertise in fast-tracking the executive recruitment process and extensive experience in your business’s industry and market can make quick leadership recruitment a breeze.
At JBN & Associates, we have over two decades of experience helping businesses of all shapes and sizes across a variety of markets and industries—from agribusiness and consumer goods to manufacturing and construction to finance and tech—find the missing puzzle pieces for their organizations and build stronger and bigger teams, faster.
We don’t just fill a position—we look to bring in candidates with the best chances of success as long-term hires and natural fits by working closely with our clients and providing expert guidance tailored to the unique workforce and executive leadership needs of their organizations, from guidance on expected compensation for leadership roles to coaching on the right questions to ask in an interview. With our transparent flat fees, we ensure consistent service with no surprises.
Get in touch with our talent recruitment experts today for timely solutions to the challenges of the executive recruitment process.
