How Do You Find the Right Learning Leader?
Tips from Your Executive Search and Placement Experts
What makes a good learning leader and how can you hire them?
This is a question that continues to linger in the minds of many hiring managers and organizational leaders from the largest to smallest of companies worldwide.
The real question is, what defines a good Chief Learning Officer (CLO), Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO), Director of Knowledge Management or Director of Learning and Development for you which can vary based on your organization’s industry, size and corporate culture. Understanding who you’re looking for before heading out to recruit, is the key to saving millions down the road.
Aside from the money lost each year to poor hiring, there are other factors that could also cost the company.
If you seem to be rehiring for the same leadership role frequently it can significantly impact the morale of your employees. If there is poor leadership, or employees need to constantly learn how to work for new leaders they may feel less motivated to make an impact in their role. Even worse, they may start looking for a more solidified team elsewhere.
When teams are not led with clear direction, goals and expectations, productivity is sure to sink. Hiring the wrong leader or replacing executives who many be changing these KPIs or expectations can negatively impact the way employees work or the level at which they produce.
Aside from the employees the hiring managers’ reputation and confidence can also begin to plummet. Since they are the ones in charge of making the final selection their ability to identify what the organization needs in its leaders could come into question. The real issue, however, could be the process or the other factors that need to be revisited.
Depending on the role and how public your company is, having a poor executive search experience could lead to negative PR and social media as well. Keeping your executive hiring search private can be beneficial, in which case working with an external executive search firm for your search process can help.
If you’re having problems with finding top talent for your learning executive search, then it may be time to revisit the process overall. The issue may not be the experience or the skills of the people that you’re hiring but the lack of fit between them and your organization.
Have you clearly defined your corporate culture and is it reflected in the role profile for the person you’re looking for to come in and lead your learning teams? If not, take the time to identify what your corporate culture is and then examine your recruitment process, interview questions, onboarding process and hiring structure accordingly.
(Click to Download this free Organizational Cultural Assessment)
Another area to assess when it comes to improving your executive hiring process is the role profile and the training of your recruitment team. Is the profile clearly defined or vague in the overall description of roles and responsibilities? Are expectations clearly laid out or left to the imagination?! A concise role profile is critical to finding the perfect match for the right learning leaders.
Once you have an in-depth role profile, ensure that your recruitment team is trained on the right questions to ask in the pre screening process. Not only does this ensure that the hiring manager is meeting with a very select group of candidates suited to the role and organization, but also that they are not wasting valuable time with meeting the wrong people for the job.
Bringing in the best hire you could ask for may still end in disaster if you don’t have the right employee onboarding process in place. A common mistake for companies is confusing the two. Onboarding is not the same as training so its important to make sure that the two are treated separately. Pre onboarding can also be highly beneficial especially given the high profile of an executive hire and can be done a few weeks before the official start date arrives.
(Click to Download this free Employee Onboarding Checklist for Success)
With all the responsibility of recruiting all of the required roles across the organization resting on the shoulders of your human resources team, it can be difficult to prioritize hires. For example, the amount of time that would go into finding and hiring the right corporate trainer or instructional designer is different from bringing in the right VP Learning and Development
In addition, the expertise of the human resource department or the recruitment specialists may not include the specific insight required to hire such an important role with such specific requirements. In this case it could be highly beneficial to look to a third-party executive search and leadership consulting team with the expertise that you’re looking for.
TrainingFolks for example works with corporate learning professionals world-wide and has an existing network of over 30,000. Tapping into this sort of resource can significantly increase the success rate of finding the right learning leaders for your team.
(Click to Download this free Executive Search Services overview)
If you’re in need of further assistance with the recruitment of the ideal fit for your upcoming VP Organizational Learning and Development, Manager of Corporate Learning or other senior level executive role, get in touch with the corporate training experts at TrainingFolks today.
