What Recruitment Lesson Can You Learn from Apple?

When Apple put their hand up and admitted they’d made a recruitment mistake, companies stopped to take note. Tim Cook confessed “I hired the wrong person for retail initially. That was clearly a screw-up. He [Browett] didn’t fit here culturally is a good way to describe it. We all talked to him, and I made the final decision, and it was wrong.”
 
In recruitment, we follow businesses hiring decisions over many years and unfortunately we see this all too frequently. Poor decisions are often made around cultural fit which can be extremely costly from a productivity, team morale and ultimately a business performance perspective. It has been said that the cost to a business of a bad executive hire can be up to 15 times their annual salary.
 
As an executive search firm, our reputation is built on long-term relationships and repeat business. It is our job to find the perfect technical and cultural match between candidate and company. A bad hiring decision affects our reputation.
 
Sadly we often see unconscious bias in the first interview stage(s) and it’s our job to ensure that there is a much more robust recruitment process in place to avoid this. Affinity (like-me) bias occurs when we are drawn to people that appear to be similar to us. These assumptions are formed through many factors throughout a person’s life and can strongly influence who they believe to be the perfect fit. However, once the interview stages are over, the most similar person might not actually be the right fit for the business.
 
Likewise, we often see candidates are drawn to attractive companies and are not entirely honest (even with themselves) about their fit within that company as they are unable to see beyond the prestige of the brand.
 
A good executive search firm that specialises in their field will work with a client to look for other businesses that are a good cultural fit in order to approach only the most relevant candidates.
 
Such candidates will then go through a thorough interview process including psychometric testing to ensure they are on the same page as the company. 360-degree references and endorsements will be obtained. Finally, but crucially, a search firm can get honest feedback from both the candidate and the company, the responses that you don’t hear during the interview, to ensure a mutual match.
 
The ability to culture match is one of the crucial skills that an executive search specialist must have in order to be successful. If you would like explore recruitment options or have any further questions please contact Nicola Wensley, Director at Page Executive, for a confidential discussion.
 
Nicola Wensley
T: 01932 264 059
E: nicolawensley@pageexecutive.com