Earlier in my career, I spent several years speaking to college students across the U.S. about how to get your dream job after college. After each presentation, I would also stick around to answer questions individually.
Inevitably, there would be a few students after each presentation who would come up to me, tell me what they wanted to do after college, and say something like “do you have any advice for me?”
Imagine that there are two external candidates (let’s call them “Tom” and “Harry”) who have applied for a VP-level position with your company. Tom and Harry each work for one of your top competitors right now, and each of them is currently a Director. However, the two men have very different levels of experience.
Tom has twenty years of total work experience, and all twenty of those years are in your industry. In comparison, Harry only has eight years of total work experience, and only four of those years are in your industry. Based on this limited information, which candidate do you think would be the better person to hire for your VP-level role?
Many people would assume that Tom would be the better selection, given that he has so much more experience than Harry. However, isn’t it curious why Tom has only reached the Director level after working in your industry for twenty years, while Harry has reached that same level in a much shorter period of time?
Many companies fail to recognize the primary purpose of a job description. The #1 goal should not be to inform candidates of the requirements for a position. Instead, the #1 goal should be to attract candidates to a company and a position.
Your job description must make it 100% clear why top candidates should want to work for your organization in a specific role. The most desirable candidates are usually not looking for another position. They need to be persuaded to consider a new opportunity.
When clients hire me to help them execute a search, one of our first steps is to work together to create a Stronger Job Description TM. In this article, you’ll learn how to create a Stronger Job Description TM on your own. Be sure to answer the following five questions if you want to attract high-caliber candidates.
One of the most difficult parts of executive recruiting is working out the numbers, so that both the employer and the executive are happy with the compensation package that is offered. Many times, an executive is looking for a base salary that is higher than what a company wants to pay. In this article, you will learn how to overcome this challenge. We’ll cover five ways to design a better executive compensation package (without offering a higher base salary).