With the ongoing Great Resignation, it’s no secret that there are plenty of job openings. Finding the right executive, however, seems like an age-old mystery.

Here is the typical scenario we hear about all the time. An executive’s resumé is strong: It hits all of the backgrounds and keywords the CEO has identified as success factors for the open role. The interview could not have gone better. The CEO feels the candidate is his or her new best friend. They get along so well that they are practically finishing each other’s sentences. The executive starts work.

Three to six months later, the CEO is looking back, trying to figure out what was missed, because it seems as though the executive the CEO is working with today is a completely different executive.

The most frustrating of situations is misalignment between the executive you think you are hiring, based on the resumé and interviews, and the executive you actually hired, which is only revealed in actual job performance.

It is understandably tough to get past disappointment when the right executive on paper was not the right fit in practice. Then there is the added stress and expense of beginning a search all over again. Hiring the wrong executive can be costly, from five to fifteen times the executive’s annual salary if you include performance, reputation, waste, separation, and replacement costs.

Sourcing the right executive for the job at hand is neither a science nor an art, whether interim or full-time; it’s a little bit of both. Everyone in the talent acquisition or recruiting business has their own tricks of the trade. So, if you don’t do this for a living, how do you increase your chances of hiring the right executive?

Finding the Right Executive

At Cerius, we have been vetting executives for over ten years to reduce the risk of companies bringing in the wrong executive. If you decide to engage an interim executive on your own, we have put together and will share some of our best practices to help minimize your risk when searching for the right executive expertise, whether it is on a part-time, temporary, interim, or project basis.

Through a deep resource pool of thousands of vetted executives, we offer full interim staffing services across all management disciplines. From our network, we develop a customized interim executive solution tailored to your needs. You gain immediate access to a carefully selected skill set with the additional leverage to reach into the larger pool of Cerius executives as needed — all to secure new growth strategies, carry out organizational or cultural change, manage complex projects, or fill business-critical vacancies.