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The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad

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FINANCIAL CRISIS SPOTLIGHT

The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Boris Groysberg, and Nitin Nohria


Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: 1 Article Summary The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 2 The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad 12 Further Reading A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

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FINANCIAL CRISIS SPOTLIGHT

The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad
The Idea in Brief
Recessions present an unexpected opportunity for companies to snap up the toplevel talent needed …show more content…

Even now, before the recession lifts, our research suggests that most global companies are running into staffing problems in emerging markets, and they are also having a difficult time finding talented younger managers to replace baby boom retirees. These problems will be made all the worse because, we’ve found, current hiring practices are haphazard at best and ineffective at worst. And even when companies find the right people, they have difficulty retaining them. This article offers our best thinking about the most effective way to hire top-level managers, based on a combination of our own and established research about the relationship between recruiting and long-term corporate performance (see the research sidebar). The following is, to our knowledge, the first time that an end-to-end set of best practices has been put forward in one place. Our compendium comprises seven steps, which cover the full recruitment spectrum: anticipating the need for new hires, specifying the job,

harvard business review • may 2009

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The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad •• •F INANCIAL C RISIS S POTLIGHT

developing a pool of candidates, assessing the candidates, closing the deal, integrating the newcomer, and reviewing the effectiveness of the hiring process. The focus of our research was on recruiting at the top three levels of organizations— C-level executives, their direct reports, and the layer below that. We call this the “top-x group,” where x is the

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