To Master the Basics—Start Here

The basics of a solid job description include title, to whom the position reports (in the case of Tulip, it's the CEO/owner and board of directors), a summary of the position, the specific functional requirement for the job, and the education and specific experience necessary to fulfill the role. Whenever it's possible to detail the organizational reporting structure you should do so, but keep in mind this information will almost certainly fall into the hands of a competitor—so err conservatively.

The job description is the tool you need in order to craft your position profile (PP), which is for public consumption. And even if you choose not to include these in the job description, detail the accomplishments your ideal candidate should have to be a perfect fit. You'll use that information when you construct the PP. Remember: you're not only searching for someone with the correct education, impeccable qualifications, and who would be a good fit with the organization, but also someone with a verifiable track record of success in the role.

Because a COO's role can vary from company to company you must assess which departments in your organization the COO should oversee, be it all or just a few. The same can be said for every other executive role. At a minimum, though, no matter what stage of growth the company is at, you need to appraise the following.

Responsibility

• Start with your goal in mind, which must be agreed upon by everyone involved in the hire. Disagreement will be flagged by an intuitive candidate and may sideswipe your hiring initiative.
• What does the business plan call for from this role? Exactly what results are you looking for the new executive to produce? Build the business? Turn it around? Flip it? Modernize it? Stabilize it? Talk through the job's expectation at length with your goal in mind. Don't be in the least bit fuzzy.
• Lay out the specific activities involved.
• Is it a new job or an existing one? Stay specific. Detail where there's overlap with other executive functions and determine who owns what.
• What are the contact points with other positions?
• Does the role require the hire to carry on with an established foundation, or start from scratch?

Leadership

• What is the role's predominant or preferred style of leadership? (By the way, leadership is situational as companies are in constant flux—now more than ever. However, most people have a preferred/dominant leadership style. What style does the role call for now, along with three to five years from now? Best to know what you need before you go any further.)

Authority

• Draw up the org chart. This is not for public consumption, but will help determine the touch points throughout the company and flush out any considerations that need to be weighed. For example: In some cases the COO handles HR directly, but the VP of sales may have recruiting reporting to them. You need to account for that in the role.
• Also, spell out the informal networks that keep the organization humming. Who's on the side? Who's not? (This is especially important with a family-run business.)
• Which departments are strong and which are weak? Where does the company need to add bench strength?

Performance Requirements

• Establish and agree upon observable and measurable performance requirements. You should start your relationship with all new hires with observable and measurable requirements in place. Due to the fact that observable and measureable performance standards are purely objective, not only will you know where the new hire stands but so will they when it comes time for the yearly review without prejudice.
• Codify the hard skills needed for the job.
• Soft skills.
• What's more important in the role today: industry knowledge or industry contacts?
• List experience requirements in detail.
• Must candidates possess experience in your industry? To what degree must they have already been in a comparable role elsewhere?
• What specific experiences are absolute must-haves versus nice-to-haves? Make sure you spell them out and document it so this is clear to everyone involved in the hire.
• Also list execution parameters that are flexible and those that are not.

Personal Qualities

• Define the essential personal qualities required for the role.
• Consider the environment, culture, and personal styles that work best in your organization. Do you want more of the same?
• Decide the degree to which a compatible style is of importance. Are you looking for a change agent? (Actually, “change agent” is an overused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted term, so scrub it from your job description or fully define it.)
• Do you want a person who will be counter to the established company culture or someone who will promote it?

Fit—How Well This Candidate's Personality and Management Style Mesh with Superiors, Peers, and Subordinates

• Reflect on who succeeds and who doesn't in your company. Why do people leave?
• What is the management style of this person's future boss?
• What styles won't work with their future boss?
• If the job requires a high degree of contact with customers and outsiders, think through the image and approach that work best in your market space.

Compensation—For a Complete List of Compensation Issues Consult the Website for a Free Download

• Specify all elements of the compensation package.
• Gather objective, competitive market data.
• Think about the upper limits of compensation. If the absolutely perfect candidate came along, how far are you prepared to stretch—if at all?
• Besides base salary, what do people in your company receive and what do they value?
• Will you pay relocation costs?
• Is relocation absolutely necessary?

Also, consider whether you want to allow some flexibility in hiring based on the strengths of your best candidates. At the end of this process, you and the Search Committee should have a crystal-clear job description complete with roles, responsibilities, authority, and desired qualifications.

In constructing a job description, is there necessarily one right way? Is there magic involved in finding talented executives? The answer to both of these questions, of course, is, “No.” There is no one way. The secret to long-lasting results rests in the hard work, good judgment, follow-up, and attention to detail on the part of everyone involved. It's a meticulously detailed process, which needs to be executed with the highest degree of skill and precision. This starts with your job description.

The degree of specificity and clarity required in the language of the job description is absolutely essential to a successful recruiting process. I honed the ability to draft succinct job descriptions while brainstorming for over three years on task force committees for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), developing ANSI and ISO human resource standards. I can attest there's a lot of language used in job descriptions that gets left open for misinterpretation.

The need for clarifying job descriptions through standardization throughout the recruiting industry is recognized by Lee Webster, who notes that:

Drive to Own the “Means of Employment”

We're currently riding a great historical trend: the compelling need everyone feels for control over their own fate. People are taking control of their lives, and this means ownership of the means of employment. The mere thought that people might actually want to control their own destiny would befuddle Henry Ford to no end. But taking control of one's employment is especially important in today's demographic, because so many people are looking for new kinds of work—work that has meaning for them. Our population is getting older—for the first time, there will soon be more people over 65 than under five— and older people are more reflective. They want to know they're doing something meaningful.

Some 87 percent of the 140 million working Americans want a different job. This costs the country trillions of dollars in foregone productivity. Gallup research shows that in the United States, more than half of employees are not engaged at work—and 20 percent are actively disengaged.¹ The cost of all this disengagement in lost productivity is about $300 billion a year. This can only be solved at the most basic level; each individual has to find his or her own specific road to job satisfaction, and that requires individual ownership of the means of employment!

The nature of work is also changing as people seek control. A new business model for the twenty-first century is arising. Enjoyment-based motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive drive for many workers today. Control over your work leads to the pure joy of creating. As the economy moves toward more right-brained conceptual work, the motivators presented to those stressing self-satisfaction and self-motivation must also change.

More and more people are working to their own tune: 15 million people telecommute every day, which is a large part of the workforce beyond the gaze of a manager. Employers therefore need to adjust their tactics to get the attention of high performance people. Organizations also need to hire leaders who “get it” and can engage employees to bring their A-game to work every day, because employees typically don't quit companies—they quit bosses.

What's in It for Me?

So before you risk losing your next great prospect, take your boring job description and breathe life into it so the potential executive you approach understands the depth of the opportunity and is at least curious to learn more. That's where the marketing comes in. You may have noticed that all cars have four wheels, seats, and an engine. With some differences, arguably all cars are the same: Ultimately they're designed to take you from point A to point B. Yet they sell at different price points, and some are so coveted they have waiting lists years long just to test-drive them. It's great marketing that will create the same type of longing for your job opening.

Here's how to do that. Keep in mind that your cleverly crafted position profile (PP) may be considered what Seth Godin calls “interruption marketing” in his book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends Into Customers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). You don't start by asking them to interview for your job on first contact. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.²

To attract the best talent, your job description should market your company as a great place to work. It must be appealing, attractive, as brief as possible without leaving out the essentials, and true to your brand. Make no mistake, you have a brand—whether you consciously created it or not—and you can bet that if your potential candidate doesn't look online to see what people are saying about you, someone in their family may. To better understand the implications we invite you to download the supplementary piece on “Branding for Executive Attraction” by Rayanne Thorn, from this book's website. In this case the job description should start with a tightly worded yet interesting overview of the opportunity, one that piques the prospect's curiosity and either qualifies or disqualifies them from consideration straight off. We've found that if you do your research correctly and reach out to a carefully targeted list of people, you'll be speaking to qualified candidates more than 99 percent of the time.

More specifically, in five to seven pages, the position profile includes:

1. A cover page with the title of the role and your logo clearly displayed on it, preferably with an attention-grabbing graphic that conveys the essence of the company or the role.
2. On the first page, an opening statement of no more than five to seven paragraphs describing the company, its product or services, mission, and vision. It positions the company within your industry and, above all else, creates curiosity. This is a tall order for most people and we suggest you allow marketing experts help with this. Other useful details might include stats such as number of employees, annual sales, industry accolades, and so on.
3. Details about the role. With the job description you just created in hand, write a brief description of the position and its major responsibilities or goals. Keep it short and to the point and focused on outcomes for the role. Candidates need to understand how their contribution will be measured and what constitutes success in absolute terms. So tell them.
   • Title, roles, and responsibilities and what they'll be doing (objectives). Whenever practical, include details on who the person's peers are and the org chart for the department or division. Alternatively, you may want to keep this hidden from prying eyes until you're down to your final selection. Let the candidate ask questions about it in the interview but understand ahead of time what you need to guard as confidential in case you do not bring this individual forward.
   • Any specialized knowledge, skills, or abilities. List all qualifications that are absolutely mandatory, along with those that are preferred. Your list of qualifications should include specific skills, years of experience, certifications, licenses, education level (though this is less and less an issue with senior executives), and necessary technical proficiencies. The laundry list of skills often present in cleverly written job postings found on job boards are designed to cast a wide net—exactly what you don't want. These catchall descriptions do more harm than good, and your preferred candidates will deem you “light.”

As an example, we specified these deliverables in the position profile for a vice-president of customer engagement:

1. Our Ideal Candidate: This is a concise description that blends the ideal hard and soft skills you believe will work best for success in the role. The section may run a full page and needs to cover accomplishments and previous responsibilities. Its purpose is to make the reader understand why he or she is qualified and “see” him- or herself in the role.
   • Qualifications and Core Competencies—The picture you paint about the ideal candidate should be desirable, and includes a bit of “stretch” to help pitch the role as something they would consider the next step in their career.
   • Your Personality Characteristics—Consider a candidate's behavioral and personality traits, as well as soft skills like communication, work ethic, attitude, and values. “Fit” is the most subjective part of any hire and is most often sighted as a reason for terminating a new hire. Why jeopardize months of work and potentially millions of dollars in lost opportunity costs by hiring someone who just doesn't work well with your team? Take time now to explain or characterize the type of people who succeed at your organization. This allows prospective executives the opportunity to screen themselves in or out from the start.
2. Next Steps: This is a brief explanation on how to proceed.
   • Be careful here. If you execute correctly on your search, most people you contact will come through research efforts (later in this chapter) and those people are likely to be fully employed and happy where they are. These types of people usually decline the first offer immediately because they'd rather have a root canal than write a résumé, so invite them to have a conversation first without the need for a résumé. The additional benefit to this is you'll discover what's most important to them during your first meeting or call. The questions people ask at this juncture are very revealing. They'll be relaxed and “real,” perhaps quite unlike their persona during a formal interview.
   • Detailed contact points to move forward are essential, so spell out with dedicated phone numbers and a personal email address how and when are the best time(s) to get hold of you or the ESP responsible.
3. Frequently Asked Questions: The final section is optional. This is the perfect place to explain compensation if you choose to use it as a filter. If you haven't hyperlinked them in your document this is where you may provide links to your website, company newsletter, annual report, and 10-K. Think hard about anything else you'd personally want to know or research at this early stage before you made a multimillion-dollar investment in a company. Five items are plenty.

Creating a candidate profile helps define a full, accurate picture of the ideal candidate. In the end you'll truly “know them when you see them,” because you understand the type of person you need before you start interviewing. Please see Appendix A for the position profile used for the COO search we created for Tulip or download it from the book's website at www.HiringGreatness.com.

Formatting Tips

The perfect PP is neither too descriptive nor too vague, uses clear language, and represents the ethos of the company. Here are a few formatting tips for improving your company's job descriptions:

• Bullet point when possible: As you did with your job description, make your PP easy to read by using bullet points within the responsibilities and qualifications sections and anywhere else that makes sense.
• Be specific: While brevity is a much appreciated art, it's also important to be as specific and transparent as possible in your job description. Vague descriptions make it difficult for potential applicants to imagine themselves in a role and decide whether they're qualified for or would enjoy the job.
• Use direct language: It's important to give potential applicants a clear idea of the responsibilities and qualifications necessary for the job. Organize the responsibilities and the desired qualifications by degree of importance to the role's expected level of success. Most people will automatically assume the first line they read is the most important, the second line the next most important, and so on. Use this to your advantage, especially if the bulleted lists run more than five items: They won't all have equal importance, and you need to make that clear or applicants will draw their own conclusions.
• Embody the company's character: When crafting your PP choose a writing style and words that match your company's culture. If your business is a start-up with a very distinct ethos, be sure to communicate that sentiment with the way you format your description, the words you use, and general feelings your writing evokes. If that means straying from the norm, so be it. In the end, the goal is to attract people who are right for the position and the company.

While it's true that any new employee needs to be part of the long-term corporate strategy, it's especially true when hiring a new executive. Outlining the specific accomplishments your ideal candidate should have on the PP will keep everyone in the interview process on the same track. Remember you're not only searching for someone with the requisite education, qualifications, and personal fit but also with a proven track record of success within the defined role.

How to Get People to Stick Their Hands Up and Self-Select

Early in my career as a headhunter, and decades before teaming up with Mark Haluska, I made a name for myself within the executive search industry by batting cleanup for name brand multinational search firms where a search project had gone off the rails. I had the good fortune of being asked by a very senior ESP, who had taken on too much work, to recontact potential candidates who had said no when he'd first contacted them. It turns out that I was good at turning NOs into conversations, and I developed this skill into a thriving part of my practice. “Resurrecting the dead” was what one search client called it.

For more than a decade in the late 1980s and 1990s, I was the guy search firms called when they needed to speak with a potential candidate who was continuously ducking their calls. As it turned out, I was good at getting people to say “yes.” My secret at the time was how I researched the passive candidate before picking up the phone.

Turns out, a little common sense research brings huge benefits. Those executives regarded most recruiters as pests who wanted something from them—the bounty on their head. Like the recruiters who had tried unsuccessfully to call them, I was an outsider, a stranger. They were correct in their thinking: I really had no right to talk to them. So what did we have in common? What value could I possibly bring to their life? When you figure that out, it's easy to start a conversation. And it's not that hard to figure out.

If you want to understand someone without their cooperation, you need to find people who know them and who will talk to you. Networking with the recently departed became a staple in my arsenal. Trouble is, the best candidates are usually being aggressively shielded by their employers and away from recruiters. Cloaked by call screening, e-mail filters, and ever-more-watchful HR departments, it's more difficult than ever to pry them free—assuming you can find them.

This type of arduous spadework was simplified with the advent of Google, online résumés, and newsgroup gatherings. The process was further accelerated by a company called Eliyon Technologies, now named ZoomInfo. It was ZoomInfo that automated a lot of this tedious research by making it blazingly quick to find nearly any executive I wanted to reach. ZoomInfo's database boasts over 138 million profiles of business professionals, with 8.5 million company profiles that can be searched by name, company, location, and vertical segments to generate leads. I used research to ferret out the people who used to work with the executives I was targeting and would then talk to them before I made that first call to the candidate.

So, with time, I became very good at getting through to executives and starting the initial conversation. My exploits went mainstream when CBC television followed me around on an actual search project back in the mid 1990s. But I needed to find a way to convert that first great call into a meeting with my client: A promising call often went nowhere when the executive candidate had to stop and prepare a résumé for my client. Truth be known, if you're not looking for a job, and not sold on the opportunity 100 percent, it takes a lot of energy to sit down and craft a résumé. Because they weren't looking, they always had to do it from scratch, which is even worse. People hate writing résumés. In fact I was once told by a CEO that he would rather have his wisdom teeth pulled than write a résumé.

The job of résumé writing often fell on me, and I too hated it. Fortunately, years ago I met Mark Haluska. It was when I partnered with him on our first joint search that I discovered a tool he had invented called the Confidential Candidate Brief (CCB), which let him allow executive prospects to screen themselves in, did all the grunt work for him, and gave a more accurate picture of the individual's qualifications relative to the job to be filled.

I quickly learned that Mark had been having the same issue with star performers having neither the time nor interest in writing a résumé, which I'm not afraid to admit is the single biggest obstacle I've encountered recruiting executives and bringing them forward in a timely manner. Mark solved this problem himself and shared it with me. I adopted it, with his blessing, instantly.

The battlefield strategist Liddell Hart summed it up years ago, when he coined the term “the indirect approach.” It means you don't keep banging head-first into the problem—that just makes it worse. Attacking the trenches head-on in World War I was a tragic example. Instead, do something surprising—something that maneuvers around the blockage. In World War II, the Germans attacked through the supposedly impassible Ardennes forest, sweeping around the flanks of the French army's famed Maginot Line and surprising them from their rear. This was a classic indirect approach. In our case, the blockage is always the executives' need to write a résumé to pursue an opportunity in which they're not sure they're even interested. Previous to your calling they were perfectly happy and content working at their present company. That's the inertia you have to overcome.

Mark's CCB answered the question of how to apply the indirect approach to recruiting. Essentially, what the CCB does is help screen the “I haven't got the time to write a résumé this week” executives into the search almost effortlessly. Instead of letting the résumé issue hold him back, Mark created a form he sent to the people he was most interested in, allowing them to answer a few questions and mail or e-mail it back to him. The CCB is comprised of a dozen or so questions that hit on the hot buttons or issues most critical to the employer's search requirement.

The CCB is introduced to the candidate at the end of our first phone call. Qualified and interested prospects are offered the opportunity to complete a CCB. The CCB is presented as a tool to replace the executive prospect's need to create a résumé. Answering the questions takes no more than a half hour for most executives to complete. The end result for us and our clients is a detailed account of the potential candidate's skills and experience as they relate to the exact position we're looking to fill. Our clients have become spoiled by the CCB, and don't want to see a candidate presented without an accompanying CCB.

The benefits are many:

• Explicitly focused on the needs of you, the employer, as detailed in your job description and marketed to the candidate's WIFM, as gleaned from their position profile.
• Unobtrusive.
• Fast turnaround.
• It acts as the candidate's first interview.

The lessons from this indirect approach are simple to state (albeit somewhat difficult to think up in the first place!):

• Understand your market, so you emphasize the strengths of your client company. An indirect approach that's badly focused will backfire.
• Know what would appeal in that market to the best candidates—what will drive them to admire your client?
• Above all: Sincerity wins. These days, people are dying for a hint of meaning in their lives. Connect your indirect campaign to your candidate's WIFM and you're golden.

The Confidential Candidate Brief (CCB) is not something we borrowed from another search firm. It's unique to our search practices. You can, however, create your own with the example in Appendix B and by cross-referencing the questions to both statements made in the position profile and requirements detailed in the job description. If you want to turn every passive candidate into a live prospect, use an indirect approach to position the company as we do with the confidential candidate brief. Ultimately, it's much easier to get the top people to call you than for you to chase them.

Surprisingly, Mark and I both have had candidates initially rejected by a company when they were submitted via a résumé alone. Many of those same candidates were then resubmitted, but this time the résumé was accompanied by the candidate's CCB. These same companies then decided that they did want to see the candidate, and many of those people were ultimately hired! This proves a résumé alone isn't enough, because that perfect candidate just might slip through your fingers.