The Four Pillars of Great Executive Search Processes
Global volatility is placing more stretching demands on leadership teams in organisations. Recruiting senior leaders today is increasingly complex and demands a higher level of strategic consideration. Successful recruiting means not just hiring what has worked in the past, but understanding and seeking out the competencies and intrinsic qualities that are essential to your organisation’s future. To achieve this, every executive search process should consist of four distinct essential stages.
Writing in HBR in September 2025, Ron Carucci, author and managing partner at leadership consultants Navalent, talks about the inner battles that are a constant presence in the minds of transformational leaders. Rather than seek to quell this tension, Carucci describes how if properly harnessed, the best ideas are borne from it. Does your organisation consider how a candidate manages this tension for good when hiring a new executive? The likelihood is you consider functional experience every time, organisational fit regularly and stretch potential occasionally. However do you consider the level of adaptability the leader must demonstrate - a prerequisite to leading change today - and central to assessing future leadership behavioural needs?
1. Discovery
The first stage in an effective search process is Discovery, the bedrock of executive hiring. Discovery determines not just how well the search process goes, but also the extent to which a new leader when they land, can have immediate impact, as well as longer term success. It considers the emotional capacity and individual strengths that are required to deliver in your organisation and against current and future performance expectations. Our own Discovery process begins with a structured client debriefing, designed to prompt a range of attributes you may need to consider in building out the hiring objective. This encourages a strategic perspective from stakeholders, necessary to ensure longer term value for both the appointee and your organisation.
The July 2025 edition of McKinsey’s HR Monitor lists five trends identified across Europe which HR functions in many firms will want to address as business expectations, employee needs and HR ROI demands change in the face of new and mounting challenges. The first of these is the need to address workforce planning more strategically. McKinsey’s second observation is that talent acquisition is becoming more complex, thereby requiring a more strategic and co-ordinated approach to sourcing new executive talent.
2. Reach
Building on the Discovery process, the second cornerstone of a search process is the depth of research and Reach undertaken by the search firm. Our research group devotes all its time to identifying high performing leaders in organisations with innovative processes, market-leading performance and highly-valued work cultures. While this team supports all our executive search and interim contractor assignments, much of their activity is undertaken through Talent Intelligence, our insights solutions offering, working with clients to extract data from specific talent markets to support talent planning for potential leadership needs in the near future.
3. Assessment
Once a collaboratively created long-list has been developed, short-listing should happen without delay, undertaking comprehensive Assessment, the third stage of effective search. Assessment design should draw on the output from Discovery delay, undertaking comprehensive Assessment, the third stage of effective search. Assessment design should draw on the output from Discovery and involve a variety of methods to create a clear and objective picture of the candidate’s likely future behaviour and performance in the role.
Many firms hiring today face a different set of challenges. In an article entitled ‘Five leadership skills for the future’, Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, identifies the many changes companies must address and how leaders need to become more adaptive, instilling adaptability within their organisation culture. Ibarra’s five skills critical to making this happen are:
Cross cutting – the capacity to build reach and diversity by constructing cross-cutting human networks. This enables the leader to develop a diverse array of knowledge and expertise, prompting more effective challenging of assumptions and engendering new ways of thinking in the face of reoccurring or unexpected challenges.
Collaborative – collaboration aligns and activates the value of diverse and divergent thinking.
Coaching – employee empowerment is essential for organisational shift from “know it all” to “learn it all”. Ibarra explains that this helps employees to bring their own creativity, innovative thinking and solutions.
Culture shaping – sometimes, Ibarra indicates, you need to take a wrecking ball to those things that are no long adding value. This necessitates having the courage to shed hallowed processes and systems in favour of new ones and making that an organisation value in itself.
Connecting – valuable connections are built by leaders through their authenticity, ability to build trust, transparency and willingness to show vulnerability. Connecting fully with employees enables leaders to bring them on a shared journey, ensuring they buy in to the leaders vision and align their efforts accordingly.
4. Impact
The fourth and final stage of a strong search process is Impact. A true search partner wants to know if their candidate is making a difference. Is the appointee delivering at the level the Discovery output specified and in the manner required? Have they brought additional value to the organisation? How well are they aligning to culture and what are the implications from that for long term contribution? Meeting to discuss the candidate in this manner, to provide feedback on the process and to discuss other future talent challenges is essential to you maximising the value from the relationship with your search partner.
The world has changed significantly in the last few years and we now operate in a permanent, albeit volatile, new economy with much yet to be defined. Uncertain times cry out for stable leadership. Through great market knowledge, extensive networking and developing technology, a strong search partner will help ensure you have the talent pool data and market reach you need to address competitive demands, technology shifts, economic shocks and generational influences on organisation cultures.
Get In Touch
To discuss how we can support your Executive Search and Contract & Interim requirements contact:
Ciarán McCaughey - Managing Director – Executive Search | ciaran.mccaughey@hrmrecruit.com | +353 83 1420673
Shane Browne - Managing Director – International Operations | shane.browne@hrmrecruit.com | +353 1 6321865
Arlene Moran - Managing Director - Contract & Interim | arlene.moran@hrmrecruit.com | +353 86 3656648
The Perfect Blend
The world economy has changed forever. Your organisation will need to rethink its workforce planning and organisation structure. How you blend permanent employees with contract and interim talent will be a key performance driver.
Re-thinking workforce design for greater agility
Some time back, our Talent Intelligence Team surveyed several hundred HR leaders to understand what portion of their employee base they would change overnight, if they were given a magic wand. Over 50% replied “the lot of them”! Real agility has been on the wish list for years, now it’s an absolute must have.
AI, world economy challenges, and the influence of global conflict are not temporary obstacles. These are permanent shifts. The landscape is evolving so rapidly, even organisations with progressive HR strategies are struggling to adapt. A bold transformation that blends the use of permanent, contract and interim professionals in your workforce is needed. This will ensure your organisation is continuously innovative, responds quickly to challenges and maintains competitiveness.
New talent model
The future of organisation talent structures centres around a blend of core groups of permanent executives and teams that mirror those functions that drive proposition into revenue. All other employees will be retained “as needed” and deployed in a secondary set of groups. This includes hires from entry level professionals to the executives that run these functions, who will be an interim or contract service provider. We know from our own work as a contract and interim recruiting partner, many of those with higher levels of specialist expertise choose to work this way. Research on the subject on Generation Z, indicates many strive for the autonomy and flexibility that contracting can provide. They are happy to trade career advancement for new experiences, learning and work that is meaningful.
The ability to predict the right blend of talent relationship based on a wide array of analytics is already available, but demands a close working relationship with a highly competent recruitment partner. Crucially the organisation must have the commitment and engagement necessary for high performance, along with the flexibility to scale up or down when plans change. The key to this is ensuring that culturally, socially, behaviourally, and developmentally, the permanent and agile sets of employees have similar employee experiences.
The blend
Permanent employees are typically valued for their organisation and market knowledge, their tenure and their commitment. By comparison, interims and contractors are valued for their expertise, skills and wider perspective. The latter also bring a reduced labour overhead given there are no holiday, benefit, or employer PRSI costs. Interims and contractors also bring experience of how they addressed similar challenges that your organisation might face, from other firms. They help to inject new insights and innovative tactics.
Building a blended workforce demands new structures and methods of engagement. To ensure cultural fit, recruit for the same value set and cultural fit as you would a key permanent hire. Invest in their learning, as you would with permanent employees, in core groups. The role specification should be specific to the need and not generic. It must include expected behavioural norms and level of decision-making authority so that everyone is clear where they stand.
The workforce of the future
Blending your workforce is no longer optional, it is essential. The talent you seek today and over the next ten years wants to work this way. Blending by using contractors and interims supports the elevated level of organisation flexibility, cost efficiency and rapid access to specialised talent, that your organisation needs for adapting to this strange new world.
Get in touch
To discuss how we can support your Executive Search and Contract & Interim requirements contact:
Arlene Moran – Managing Director - Contract & Interim | arlene.moran@hrmrecruit.com | +353 86 3656648
Ciarán McCaughey – Managing Director – Executive Search | ciaran.mccaughey@hrmrecruit.com | +353 83 1420673
Shane Browne – Managing Director – International Operations | shane.browne@hrmrecruit.com | +353 1 6321865
