Any time an executive takes a new job, it’s a big change—for the company and for the executive. For a CEO, executive hires are among the highest-stakes hires you will make, with implications for your organizational design, leadership team dynamics, and the future growth of the company. For the new executive, it’s a huge decision to leave a role where they’ve established themselves as a leader with influence and credibility for a new organization where they’ll need to get up to speed on a new company and its culture, establish relationships and credibility, build out teams, set up new processes, and more.
With such high stakes, it’s not surprising that, in our experience, the average executive search takes 130 days, and it’s not uncommon for some searches to take 6 months or longer. If they’re open to new opportunities, the most in-demand executives are likely interviewing with multiple companies at once.
Yet as important, competitive, and time-consuming as executive hiring is, many companies don’t have a formal hiring process. A well-designed and executed hiring process, driven by an engaged CEO, will give you an edge in recruiting and retaining top talent, shorten the time it takes to hire and onboard an executive, and set a new leader up for wins within the first 100 days—which is, in our experience, the leading indicator that an executive will work out long term.
Of course, no methodology guarantees a good hire every time, so free yourself of the idea that you’re going to always get it right. If you hire 10 leaders, not all 10 are going to work out—but an effective hiring process and a determined CEO will increase your batting average.
In this post, we go step-by-step through the hiring process we use at a16z, based on thousands of executive searches with hundreds of companies.
A high-quality process is useless without a strong leader to drive it. The companies that are most successful at executive hiring have a CEO with a strong recruiting mindset. These CEOs know: if you can’t define it, you shouldn’t hire for it. They understand that most searches fail before they even start because there isn’t a clear answer to the question, “Why are we hiring for this role?” They also realize that this can be a deceptively difficult question to answer because they’re in the tough position of hiring someone to do a job they’ve never done.
At the start of an executive search, we usually tell CEOs to talk to people who have been in that role at companies they admire. Spending an hour with someone who is a great CRO, VP of sales, or CHRO will help clarify what exactly the role is, what great looks like, and what an incoming leader will need from you to be successful. These executives are also likely well networked, which can also help with sourcing quality candidates. On occasion, we’ve even seen executives become interested in a role after talking to a CEO. But the primary goal of the conversation should be tapping this experienced executive’s expertise to get crystal clear on why you want to hire someone in that particular role. What do you hope a particular executive will fix? What outcomes do you want them to drive? What can (and can’t) you expect them to deliver? What do they likely need to be successful?
Once a CEO is clear on why they are hiring a particular role, we have them write a MOC—a document that outlines the mission, outcomes, and competencies of the job, helping to articulate the business case for hiring an executive and what, specifically, the new hire will be expected to accomplish over the next 12–18 months. In short, it lays out the stuff you need that executive to get done.
While it outlines the role, the MOC is not the same as a job description. Whereas the job description is posted externally for potential candidates, the MOC is an internal, more detailed source of truth that links the role’s intended outcomes (the actual work to be done) to explicit numbers and specific projects to align everyone at the company—and the eventual new hire—on what the executive will do.
In the course of drafting the MOC, you’ll want to decide who is included in the interview team. These should be people who you trust to evaluate candidates and who will be critical to the hire’s day-to-day success. You’ll want to get their input on why you’re hiring for this role and what success looks like. Keep in mind, it’s unlikely you’ll have complete agreement on what the role should be up front. As the CEO, you are responsible for turning input from the interview team into a clearly defined role for the MOC. Once you’re confident that your MOC reflects why you are hiring for this role, everyone else should align behind the MOC and commit to evaluating candidates based on the criteria laid out in that document. And though the team should commit to hiring a candidate based on the MOC, the CEO should know going into the search that not everyone will agree on which parts of the MOC to prioritize or who to hire at the end of the process. The CEO must make the ultimate decision, get everyone else on board, and then set up the new executive for success. (More on this in the Onboarding and the first 30/60/90 days section.)
The level of clarity provided by the MOC sets the foundation to attract stronger candidates, provide a consistent candidate experience, shorten the hiring process, and better integrate new leaders into the org. The best candidates will be those with the highest probability of accomplishing more than 90% of the outcomes in the MOC. For instance, if you know that you want to hire a CRO to expand internationally with strong channel partnerships, a CRO from a $200M business with complex original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partnerships and channel sales is more likely to succeed than a CRO from a $1B business based predominantly on a product-led motion.
At the beginning of the hiring process, one of the first decisions to make is whether to use an external search firm. In our experience, most companies opt to work with an external executive recruiting firm, though we’ve seen both internal and external recruiters make successful hires. Internal recruiters may know the company better, but they might not have the necessary network to recruit the desired profile, or may have their hands full with director- and manager-level searches.
Your recruiter will potentially be the first and primary touch point for candidates. Once you hire the recruiter, you should meet with them regularly—ideally weekly. The best recruiters are active participants in the interview and reference process and help with communication through negotiations and candidate onboarding. Search firms aren’t cheap: you’re paying for access to the right network, commitment to a process, evaluation of candidates, and general counsel on why different candidates are and aren’t a good fit. You want to take the time to review profiles and make sure they can accurately represent and assess what you are looking for. The firm can then perform the initial screening and present a small number of qualified candidates to interview and choose from.