Changing Fundamentals of Senior Recruitment

The time span of business cycles has changed. The business plan of today looks at a two-year horizon and with each strategy session, the outlook of the future has become narrower

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At a TiE entrepreneurship conference, a famous venture capital financier said, ‘Frankly, I have never seen any five year plan really come to fruition!’ It still does not excuse us from building business strategies because direction is still important. So is there an elusive panacea or a framework that will solve all your business issues? In my two and half decades of experience, I have not come across many. But what can weather the storm is the right leaders at the cockpit. We need CXOs who have the courage to change course, adapt quickly to the tailwinds and find direction aligning with the head winds.

So what does that really leave for the business heads do? To recruit the right people! This is of course easier said than done. We have continually started looking at this function as 'noncritical' and 'outsourcable' and this leads to a difficult trend. The emergence of the new band of professionals called ' Placement consultants' truly signify the flavour of senior management thought that recruitment is best left to experts outside the firm, who are widely networked and are likely to know where to find skills and talent. Some of it is true, some of the placement consultant, one had interacted with give you that confidence and also have the right experience to guide you in the same. But that does not absolve us from thinking more and spending more time for this important activity.