Chris Spagnola and Jessica Martinez, Partners in ThinkingAhead's nonprofit practice, explain how when you're itching to get ready, set, and go on a search, the "ready" and "set" parts of that equation are often the most critical. Here's what they do prepare...
Prior to taking a search to market, we conduct calls and surveys with stakeholders, board members, staff, uh, important partners to the organization.
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And then we review a summary of all of that information with our hiring committee, and that is to really determine as a group what the most important qualifications are that their new leader should bring to the organization, and that's soft skills and technical skills.
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And then we help them map back to that throughout the process and refer to it, and this helps us have a balanced evaluation of candidates, both subjectively and objectively, to help them make a very
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well-informed decision on who they want to hire to lead their organization.
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During that discovery process, we're talking with stakeholders about strategy, we're talking with them about challenges, um, we're understanding what the organization is facing within the next two to three years, and not just today.
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So surfacing also some misalignment if there is any early.
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It's good to catch it so that we don't have to recalibrate in the middle of the search.
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We translate a lot of those vague needs into real competencies.
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And a job description can't necessarily capture what success looks like after a year, so we love to capture that as well to be very clear and transparent with candidates about what's expected.
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We spend a lot of time also talking through the challenges and asking them questions about their experience.
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It's really important for us to understand what they've been through and the problems that they've had to solve so that we know if they can hit the ground running in our new organization.
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Our willingness to recalibrate when needed is so high, but we also want to make sure that we're understanding everything from the beginning so that we don't run into any surprises during the search.
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Most of our searches are completed in about twelve to sixteen weeks, but speed is never the goal.
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We do work with a full team of researchers.
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We have three researchers that we partner with.
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We have someone who specializes in marketing and someone who specializes in content as well.
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I think that we have had to pause a couple of searches.
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It doesn't happen very often, but when we have and recalibrated, it's made a huge difference.
