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Two Key Elements To An Effective Talent Attraction Process | S1:E1

  • Episode 1
  • 'Inside Executive Search' Podcast

    Attracting, selecting, and retaining top talent is a challenge for many businesses. Join long-time executive search professional Scott Peterson, alongside Steve Yakesh, President of Direct Hire & Executive Leadership Search at one of the leading executive search firms, to discuss insights and techniques to assist companies to achieve their best results. If you’re an executive leader looking for advice on hiring the best talent for your company, you’ll want to hear this advice from these industry experts.

    Steve Yakesh | President, Direct Hire & Executive Leadership Search

    As President of Direct Hire & Executive Search, Steve Yakesh leads Versique’s award-winning permanent placement division with more than 20 years of experience. Additionally, he guides strategy for Versique’s twelve practice areas, including IT, HR, Finance & Accounting, Engineering & Operations, Sales, CPG, Digital Marketing, Executive Retained Search, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Family Owned and Demand Generation.

    Scott Peterson | Vice President, Executive Leadership Search

    Scott Peterson leads the Retained Executive Search division at Versique as the Senior Practice Director. In his role, Scott fills critically-important senior level positions such as CEO, CFO, CIO, COO. Scott has over 20 years of experience in executive recruiting. Additionally, Scott has also served on the Board of Directors the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Foundation, Medina Golf and Country Club, as well as several youth sports organizations.

    Podcast Transcription

    Speaker_1: 00:03 Get ready for your weekly dose of talent strategies and tactics from industry leaders to help you attract and retain your top talent. You are listening to Versique’s Inside Executive Search with Steve Yakesh and Scott Peterson.
    Speaker_2: 00:32 Welcome to the Inside Executive Search podcast. My name is Steve Yakesh and the show is for business owners, board members and executives exploring strategies and tactics to attract, select and retain top executive talent. If you’re not 100% confident that you have a plan to recruit the very best for your organization, keep listening. This podcast will help you get there. That said, I’d like to introduce Scott Peterson from Versique Search. Hello Steve. It’s great to be here with you again this week. For our first time listeners, Scott is a 20 year veteran in the executive search industry and leads Versique’s Executive Leadership Practice. So Scott, prior to recording this podcast, you and I debated arm wrestled all the different elements that go into talent attraction and there’s a lot of them and we’ll cover all of them in future podcast, but we’re going to stick with two today and those two are the executive position profile and the authoring of a compelling story. Let’s dive right.
    Speaker_3: 00:35 Yeah, so normal sort of job description, position profile, people think those are synonymous with each other, but they are not because position profile goes beyond just the job description, although that is part of the profile. A job description is your typical, what are my requirements, what is the job, those bullet point things you see on every background, experience, education, etc., but the profile itself goes beyond just the job description. So that’s the what is the job description.
    Speaker_2: 01:18 Okay. So the other two are more about the why, which is part of how you’re going to attract candidates. So let’s talk about the company profile and what goes into that.
    Speaker_2: 02:11 Right, so the company profile or the culture of the company, what makes it an attractive place to go to work in and have a leadership position? Companies have to understand the why in order to articulate that to their top candidates for the position. So going over things like, what’s the style of the organization, we use the word culture, but what’s culture? It’s really what the atmosphere’s like, what it’s like to work there every day. Things along those lines. Sure, shared values, pace of the organization, chaotic as laid back, all those company personality traits. We’re going to jump into how does a firm do this on their own if they’re going to, but before we jump into the how to get this done.
    Speaker_3: 02:54 the third element is really around kind of that career progression, correct? Yes, so you want to be able to articulate what’s going to motivate that candidate for this job. What’s the career motivational fit, if you will, for a candidate coming in. So that has to be in alignment with what that candidates looking for, so to create or develop that career motivational, um, um, piece of the, of the process is really important in order to have the alignment on all three of the items that we’ve just talked about, so job description, job function, the company or cultural fit, and then this career motivational fit piece. All three have to be in alignment and when you get that, you get high performance and high retention, which is the ultimate goal of, of hiring a top executive.
    Speaker_2: 03:00 Perfect, so it makes a ton of sense to me. How do you go about doing that and what are some warning signs if you don’t do this. Yeah, so if you’re doing it internally within your own company, I would mirror what we would do as an executive search firm and that’s really going on and understanding the peer group of this position. Potentially interview board of directors. If you’re a public company, interview people that might report to this position. You will be able to start the building blocks and what we’re going to talk about next to that compelling story, but really it gives you an understanding of the culture, the pace, the style of each of the individuals and see what type of person would fit best into those group of people. Yeah and I know when we’ve done in the past, if we are working with a CEO for his or her direct report, you bring back a lot of findings that are maybe somewhat surprising that you know, once you interview all the people up and down the organizational chart.
    Speaker_2: 03:51 Correct? Right! I think it’s just adds into finding that best fit for the candidate in the process. Perfect. All right, so we’ve done this, we’ve interviewed and you know, up and down the organizational chart, we know how we go to describe the position. We know how we’re going to articulate the company culture.
    Speaker_2: 04:45 etc. ,strategic Plan and we know the career path for an individual we’re going to bring in. How do you meld all that together and to this thing called a compelling opportunity and why is that important to have?
    Speaker_2: 05:29 Yeah. The compelling story, the compelling opportunity, is really the company’s opportunity to market their company. How do we differentiate from all the other opportunities to this candidate might be hearing about, what makes people motivated to be there, what makes them happy to be at the company, the pace, the onsite gym that they have to work out in. All those pieces are really building that compelling story. Really it’s your opportunity just like your company does marketing to their customers, you’re marketing to these executives about that opportunity. Absolutely.
    Speaker_3: 06:15 Awesome. Well, perfect, like we said, we’re going to try to keep this under 10 minutes, so we’ll kind of wrap up, but next week another element that we discussed that needs to go into attracting the right candidate is executive compensation, so we’re going to be tackling that next week. Absolutely. Another two-hour podcasts. We’re going to keep it high level and keep it under 10 minutes like we promised the listeners, so it’s all good. Awesome, again I’m excited to go on this journey in the weeks to come and if you want to get ahold of Scott, visit versique.com or go ahead and look them up on LinkedIn. And lastly, we’re excited in the next week or two, we’ll be live on all the major podcast platforms called Spotify, iTunes and or a Google play. So we’ll let you know when we’re live on those platforms and we’d love for you to go up and subscribe to our channel if you like what you hear. All right, we’ll talk again next week on executive compensation. Sounds good. Thanks for listening everyone.
    Speaker_4: 06:45 Great, looking forward to it.

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