What do I mean by exec hiring?
Most centrally, hiring a CEO.
But it could also be hiring another very senior role, or hiring for outlier talent (e.g. research talent). Some of the below also applies to hiring managers in general.
Why is it different?
I think executive hiring is very different from hiring for more junior roles.
For instance, often:
You will have very few plausibly qualified candidates.
You may well know all of them, and likely the top candidate is at most two connections away, because you’re hiring for expertise in a particular field.
Those candidates are likely to be very busy (because they’re probably already doing high-impact work).
You will be assessing their ability to succeed at tasks that take many months or years (managing people and teams, setting a strategy, developing a research agenda), so trial tasks won’t work for assessing their performance.
More of the alpha is in persuading the very best people to be excited about the role, rather than in filtering people (though filtering is still crucial!)
What does this change about how you should hire?
Filter first: You should do most of the filtering before you reach out to people, and then do a very tailored, white-glove process for those you reach out to.
How do you filter before you reach out to people? Ask people in your network for recommendations, then try to talk to people who have worked with them, and basically get an informal reference. Look at public track record where applicable (easy with researchers, harder with execs).
Then when you reach out you can say “You’re one of <10 people who we’re excited about after having combed through our networks. Would you be up for a call?”, which is more flattering for the candidate and means it’s more likely to be worth their while to engage with the process (since they have a >10% chance of getting the job).
Then the process should be extremely white-glove and tailored. You shouldn’t waste candidates’ time, and you shouldn’t test things that you’ve already seen. Instead, you should reflect on your key uncertainties and then do specific things to get more info on them. And you should ask about, and test, their cruxes.
References become much more important, because they help you assess candidates’ abilities at the longer-time-horizon tasks. E.g. you can’t get easily test candidates’ ability to do the full strategy-setting process at your org, because that takes months. But you can hear how well they did this at their previous company.
Getting useful signal from references is a skill, about which I might write more some time, but you can get useful info from references.
I think that this book is useful. It’s not perfect, but it is usefully different from “standard EA” takes (lots of work tests etc.) It’s more tailored to executive hiring, and has some useful templates for reference calls and interviews.
