“Few great men would have got past personnel.”
Are we as interims in danger of this as companies are “interviewing” rather than engaging with us? Martin Dorchester
Interim management is a strategic decision to which HR departments in the main add little value. HR departments are forced down the “standard box ticking scenario” as that is the only means of processing and evaluating the responses.
Of course HR departments should be the core of managing the organisations human capital; what amazes me are those organisations that outsource their recruitment!
There are of course very good HR directors, although in the main preoccupied like procurement departments with transactional activity which often includes recruitment.
Unless the lateral aspects are managed very intelligently, this creates a false roadblock. This false roadblock is a non value add stage that should be cut out of the recruitment process of interims. That misses the intangible value of lateral sources of value – the core value as you suggested earlier. By cutting out the HR stage entirely the recruiting exec can use their own judgement, which is network link, can they do the job (case studies), & can I work with them? (Because the interim – CEO relationship tends to need to be very strong)
In my view the buyer and recruitment process manager of interim management should in fact be the CEO who does not use tick boxes and understands intuitively who can make things happen and who is best. The HR step tends therefore to be another unnecessary hurdle that is created by large organisations.
The very process of writing an advert is therefore squandering the lateral value and limiting the solution.
You can see the dramatic failure of the public sector forced into standardising process driven systems, and the consequent failure of some many of their procurement programs. What is worse it is so prevalent when they source interims into the public sector, engraining more of the same.
This is a challenge to overcome is considerable. For example “the standard interim provider world” is preoccupied with the executive sourcing model. This is in a vain attempt in order to meet the clients requirements by ticking the client’s boxes. In reality they should offer a far more strategic service and challenge, in order to deliver a whole load more value, rather than as Anne and Bradley suggest fall into the same process driven trap. BTW – There are some very good interim providers : ).
So i’d suggest in order to deliver the best value interims need to focus on finding “the organ grinders”.
As a check looking back whenever I hired a senior manager in a corporate role, I have stayed very close to HR identify those candidates that would bring and edge something new, to take the business to the next stage rather than more of the same. There is also a case for rigorously road testing a candidate’s capability too, much of which is pretty obvious from what they have achieved.
