So, your company is up and running, you’ve built your business from the original concept and the green shoots of commercialisation are now beginning to appear.
The trials and tribulations you have gone through to reach this point have been shared with your close-knit team of founders, largely cocooned from outside influence. External consultants have come and gone, but the business’ journey belongs to this nucleus, the lives of its constituents have become one with each other’s, in pursuit of making the venture a success.
The business has reached a zenith in terms of what can be achieved with the skills of the current team, In order to evolve, a new permanent dimension needs to be added. All things considered, the benefits of increasing the skills diversity in the team now outweigh the costs, provided you can get it right. To ensure you make well-rounded hiring decisions which reflect not only the skills you need but the culture you have cultivated, follow these 5 crucial steps:
Clearly define your objectives and your expectations for the role from the outset
It’s about quantifying and mapping the everyday life and habits that you expect the new CxO to have in the company. When you picture the blueprint CxO, what activities will take up their time? what kind of persona do you imagine fits with the completion of these tasks? How does what they do and the habits they have formed augment the activity of the rest of the team? This will provide a logical starting point for developing the two key hiring criteria, skillset and cultural fit.
Make sure that these objectives and expectations are agreed by the entire team
It may well be the case that certain members of the leadership team see their skills far removed from recruitment. This does not mean that they should not be intimately involved in the design of the person and role specification! Everyone in the business will live with the consequences of the hiring decision and no vision for the position should be developed without the input and express agreeance of the entire team.
Define the process as clearly as you have defined the role
You want to generate the interest of the best possible candidates for the position and keep that interest until the end of the hiring process. The first real interaction candidates will have had with your business will be the process you put them through. Doubtless one of the key reasons that the candidates you have shortlisted made it onto that list is because of their desire for excellence, your assessment should mirror this desire by clearly defining an exhaustive recruitment chronology and sticking to it.
Don’t neglect quantitative assessment
Build in a selection of testing mediums with easy to interpret, objective results as an outcome to compliment the qualitative, intuition lead conclusions you are drawing from the candidates during interviews. The human mind is hopelessly fallible, quantitative assessment will enable you to consciously assess and stringently qualify the biases you have naturally developed during the process.
Startup as you mean to go on
If you have found the individual you believe is the right person to play a key role in the future of your business, make the right offer and get them on board. Delays at this sensitive stage of the process suggest a lack of buy-in to the candidate and can only lead to negative outcomes. Truly great talent is always in high demand, and if you fail to make a definitive play for your dream candidate in a reasonable time-frame, the chances are that another company will, leaving you to count the cost of the lost hire and ultimately fruitless commercial downtime of your team.
At Guided Solutions, we specialise in assisting small to medium-sized medtechs to identify, recruit and then retain, rare and specialist talent. To learn more about our range of recruitment services contact us today for a no-obligation consultation with a member of our executive team.