The Best Leadership
Recruitment Methods

As part of our guide to leadership recruitment, we will discuss various recruitment methods which will help you to hire the very best leaders for your company. Uber’s continued leadership struggles demonstrate how crucial it is to find the most outstanding leaders who’ll create the right corporate culture to help engage and grow your employees, as well as driving continued performance.

Hiring the wrong leaders can cost your business a serious amount of time and money, as well as the potential of a damaged company reputation. We don’t want any business to have to go through this.

These methods can help to reduce the chances of hiring the wrong candidate for a leadership role. We outline methods used by business psychologists to help you select the right person for the position.

It’s important to note that these methods are suitable once you have selected your potential list of candidates. They do not help you with selecting candidates based on their CVs or job applications. When it comes to sourcing the best candidates, there are numerous ways to do this. This guide will concentrate on the assessment of candidates for selection.

The recruitment methods outlined below can guide your process to find the finest and most suitable leadership candidate.

Recruitment Method #1: Competency-based Interview (CBI)

Interviewing is a bit like driving. Everyone likes to think they’re great at it! But most interviews are often poorly planned and conducted, without due concern for the candidate or the role they’re applying for. Such unstructured interviews tend to be unpredictable, subjective and susceptible to bias. If we want to significantly improve the chances of hiring a top-performing leader, then a competency-based interview (CBI), based on a thorough competency and job analysis, is the way forward.  A CBI delves into examples of a candidate’s past behaviour as a means of predicting their future performance.

What is a competency?

Recruitment Method #2: Psychometric testing

Psychometric tests can be a great way to get to the heart of what makes your candidate tick. What their likely personality preferences, thinking style, values, motivational drivers, managerial judgement, emotional intelligence and cognitive abilities are likely to be can all be assessed.

Psychometric testing in selection has become increasingly prevalent. However, as some of them are ‘self-report’ tools, they should be used with caution and as a means of supporting your recruitment process, especially at senior level, rather than a sole means of evidence.  The reliability and validity of such tools also varies hugely.

In order to truly reap the benefits of psychometric testing, then the results are best analysed, probed and reported by an expert business psychologist. Having such an in-depth analysis of the results can help a company immensely, especially in terms of how these tools work and how they can and should be applied, as well as a detailed and objective understanding of the psychology and commercial relevance of the results. This is where the real value lies in this recruitment method.

Recruitment Method #3: Executive Assessments

You may have come across the terms executive assessment, recruitment assessment, management assessment or leadership assessment before to describe a particular selection methodology. Essentially, these terms mean the same thing and define a highly tailored, intensive means of assessing a candidate on a one-to-one basis, across a wide range of competency-based exercises. As such, they are often reserved for final stage recruitment, whereby you’ve whittled down your list of candidates to the last four or five.  

This recruitment method may be more labour, cost and time intensive, but it can reap a significant reward in terms of the benefits of taking such an approach, particularly for your managerial and leadership positions.

Recruitment Method #4: Assessments Centres

This recruitment method can be used for various positions — not just leadership roles. Much like an executive assessment, it involves testing and assessing whether a candidate is the best person for the position. Results can be measured and compared.

An assessment centre gathers additional information beyond what can be gauged from a simple interview. Multiple candidates are compared at the same time, usually on one day and across a range of exercises, such as presentations and role-plays. This might also include a group exercise, whereby candidates are observed completing a task or solving a problem as a team. This will provide some observable evidence across a range of competencies, such as how they lead, relate to, interact and communicate with others.

So, using recruitment assessments and assessment centres can be very beneficial. They help to give a better overall view of a candidate and their likelihood of performing when in the role, rather than simply looking at past experience and asking generic questions.

Next Step? An Executive Interview Guide

As discussed in Recruitment Method #1, the interview still plays a pivotal role in the leadership recruitment process. Find out how to conduct the very best interviews with our executive interview guide. We’ll also discuss the best questions to ask to help you identify which candidate will be the perfect leader for your company.

A top HR Consultancy can guide you through all of these recruitment methods — and Davis Associates are experts in the field. Call one of our HR consultants today on 020 8398 6644 or apply online.