This week I am presenting a series on hiring in the compliance industry based on interviews I did with Maurice Gilbert, the Managing Partner at Conselium Partners LP. Today, I want look at the presentation of the job offer to candidates.
Yesterday I wrote about how Gilbert develops a source list of candidates for a prospective position. The work he detailed is usually far beyond what any company Human Resources (HR) professional has the time and expertise to perform in the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO)/executive search arena. That is one of the reasons I advocate that companies seeking to fill such a position look to a professional search organization such as Conselium to fill a CCO or compliance practitioner position. Simply put the expertise a professional executive search company can bring to bear is well worth the time and money any company will spend with them in the entire process.
After Gilbert concludes the step of developing the appropriate criteria to evaluate candidates, he is ready to make the presentation of the opportunity to potential candidates. This step requires that Conselium find out why the potential candidate might consider the opportunity to move into a new position in a new company. Put another way; is there anything about their current position that may not continue to meet their career needs? Gilbert explained, “Without that, there’s nowhere to go. You don’t know how to help them, in other words. But if they do identify, and there’s usually something there, because no opportunity is perfect, but once you identify what might be lacking, then that is “the hook,” and that’s something that needs to be vetted throughout the interview process. What we ask a professional who we deem apparently qualified, both technically and with the soft skills, we ask this important question: why might you consider leaving your present employer?”
Another important avenue open to Gilbert and his team at Conselium is speaking with CCOs or compliance professionals who may be referral sources. Since most of us in the compliance field know many of our colleagues, we can all be good sources for someone hunting for a candidate, even if we are not in the market or actively looking for a new position. I know I get a fair amount of calls in such veins. This also means there is always a back channel of information available about who may be looking or at least ready to seek another opportunity.
Every job search presents opportunities and one of Gilbert’s roles is to fit the job opportunity to the right candidate. Gilbert provided an example, “Here’s a case in point. We were vetting, or actually screening, one professional. This was a senior director position. The individual said, “Well, I’d like to gain more international exposure, because that will help me eventually position myself to be a chief compliance officer.” As it turns out, that’s what the opportunity was all about that we were searching for. It had an international component to it. Therein was the hook. You have to ask that question. It’s very important, because you have to know that: what the client is looking for and the candidate. Once we get that data point, we also have to articulate that to the client, and make sure that they address that head-on in the interview process.”
However, there is no way to do this without old-fashioned spadework. Gilbert related, “Everything is very, very deliberate and very strategic. There’s hundreds of hours that go into a search, because it’s very complex. This is not something where you pick up the phone, you make a few phone calls, and boom, you have the individual who’s going to be right for your client. That’s way too simplistic. Each search averages about, easily, 250-300 hours, because it’s so intense, what you have to go through, the volume of people you have to talk to. You have to screen to see if they’re appropriate. Then, of course, there’s other elements of the search that we’re going to get into in some other modules. This is very, very labor intensive.”
My observation on this process is akin to a funnel, where, Gilbert and his team start out with a large number of potential candidates to consider and then they winnow that number down. This is really simply old fashion labor work, but a fairly detailed interview process after you have reviewed the written resume, or other show of technical proficiency, to come up with at least a list of potential candidates.
Gilbert said that his experience is that companies want to review no “more than five professionals. It’s our job to whittle that down and present the best of the best. That’s when we’re doing our job appropriately. It’s not up to our clients to spend additional time. In other words, we don’t present 15 professionals for an opportunity. That wouldn’t be doing our job correctly. We have to present the best of the best, and we have to lessen the time that our clients are involved, because they’re busy. They’re busy conducting business. It’s our job to whittle down the best of the best, and present them in a nice short, succinct manner so that our clients could initiate the interview process.”
From this shortlist of candidates Gilbert and his team can present to their client, the company is now ready to begin the interview process, which will be the subject of tomorrow’s blog post.
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