What You Need to Know About Executive Recruiting

Deal is not just another payroll platform. It's one your team might actually enjoy. HR, IT, and payroll together finally. Built in house, built for peace of mind. Visit deel.com/hbr. The best b to b marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. When you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/ideacast. That's linkedin.com/ideacast. Terms and conditions apply. I'm Allison Beard. And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast. Adi, so many of our listeners, many people who read HBR, who go to business school, are or have aspirations to be senior leaders in their organizations. Maybe c suite, maybe they even wanna be CEO someday. And that, of course, means building a resume that will impress a lot of stakeholders. But one increasingly important group is executive recruiters. Look, I I co ran HBR for a long time. And, you know, we're a different organization from a lot of corporate entities out there. But even we bring in executive search firms for the big roles. And, you know, the senior leaders I talk to, these are people who have great skills, great experience, they're politically savvy, they've made all the right career moves, even they say they need to figure out how in the world to persuade recruiters that they are c suite material as both internal and and external candidates. Yeah. Exactly. It's a tricky process. And today's guests say that companies are bringing in search firms more often than ever, in part because it's so hard to discern who is really ready for senior leadership in a business world that's changing so quickly. They need objective independent advisers to help them not just see what someone has done in their past, but also gave their potential for growth into the future. And so anybody who wants a senior role has to be ready for the recruiting process. And the process, I assume, means the behavioral interviews, the assessments, the reference checking, all of that. Yes. It is an onerous process, but thankfully, we have some experts here to talk us through how to navigate it. Mark Thompson is chairman of the chief executive alliance, and Byron Laughlin is global head of board advisory at NASDAQ. Together, they wrote the HBR article, How to Stand Out to C Suite Recruiters, as well as the book CEO Ready, What You Need to Know to Earn the Job and Keep the Job. Here's our conversation. So, obviously, there's a lot that goes into positioning yourself for senior leadership in any organization. But why is understanding the executive recruiting process so important, especially today? Mark, why don't you start? It's changed dramatically, I think, in the last five years, particularly, where they've played a much, much bigger strategic role in vetting the talent internally. And, historically, we've always thought about them vetting external talent. And so …