Guide on Hiring For Managerial Roles (How to Do it Right)

Hiring the right people for managerial positions is an important decision that needs to be done correctly. Managers are part of your leadership team and will and can have a huge impact on the productivity, company culture, and overall success of the company.

Remember: A “bad hire” can be far more costly than investing extra time and effort in finding the right candidate for your managerial/leadership roles.

In this blog, we will discuss seven essential tips for hiring the right people for managerial roles and how companies can build a strong leadership team for long-term business success.

Clearly define the role responsibilities

When posting a job online or through any hiring platform, make sure the responsibilities and expectations of the role are defined clearly and can be easily understood by potential candidates. This increases the chance of hiring managers who can effectively lead teams and contribute to the company/business growth.

Also, posting a clear and concise job description can help attract applicants who are qualified for the position and while lessening the chance of wasting time screening unsuitable candidates.

Thoroughly assess the candidate’s leadership skills

As we mentioned in the beginning of this post, managers will and can have a significant impact on the teams within the company because they are responsible for leading, guiding, and influencing overall team performance. So before you hire a manager, make sure you thoroughly assess their leadership skills.

Here are some quick and easy ways to do this:

Ask a few situational interview questions.
Review past leadership experience and ask for achievements proofs.
Ask the candidate to take leadership o1r personality tests.
Check references from previous employers or team members.

Look for someone that can fit to your culture

Look for candidates who you think values, work style, and leadership approach can fit and align with your company’s culture. One of the best ways to gauge if they’re culturally fit is through behavioral and situational interview questions such as:

“How do you handle disagreements within your team?”

“What type of company culture helps you perform at your best?”

“How do you motivate employees with different personalities and work styles?”

To know more about cultural fitness in the workplace, read this article: The Importance of Being “Culturally Fit” at Work

Conduct behavioral interviews

Behavioral interviews can help you understand how a potential manager has responded to real workplace situations from the past. You may also gain valuable insights on their leadership and management styles, as well as their decision-making abilities.

Here is how you can assess this:

Ask them to describe specific situations they have faced as a leader.
Use the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) to evaluate their response.
Assess how they communicate their thought process and outcomes.
Confirm if their past experience and behaviors match with the expectations of the role.

Conduct a thorough reference check

Reference checks help you verify if everything the candidate has said in the interview was true. Speaking with people they have worked with previously can help hiring companies gain a clearer understanding of the candidate’s leadership abilities, work ethic, and overall suitability for the managerial role.

Focus on character references that can give insights on their professional abilities, such as:

Their previous supervisors or managers
Senior leaders with whom they have worked closely
Colleagues with whom they collaborated on projects

Do not rely on:

Friends or personal acquaintances
Family members
References with no direct working relationship

Assess their adaptability skills

Managers are often in the ‘first line’ of employees to get affected when there are changes in the business priorities, workplace and unexpected challenges. Therefore, assessing their adaptability skills will help you determine how well they can adjust to new situations or setups.

The ability to adjust to new situations is important in order to maintain the team’s productivity, minimize disruption, and ensure that the business goals are still being met.

Hire an executive search expert

Partnering with an executive search expert/firm can help any company or organization to search, assess, and identify potential managerial candidates faster and more efficiently. Why? Because executive search experts have access to a wider talent pool of senior executives. They also specialize in hiring ‘passive’ senior candidates or those that are currently employed in a managerial position and may not be actively looking for new opportunities.

Hiring for managerial roles can be a time-consuming and challenging process, and this is where executive search experts can be really helpful. We have written this post so you can understand better: Everything you need to know about Executive Search

Common challenges when hiring for managerial positions and how to handle them

Hiring the right manager is not always straightforward. While a candidate may look impressive on paper, deciding if they can successfully lead a team is another box needed to be checked. Understanding the common challenges in the hiring process will help companies and organizations make more informed decisions and improve their chances of finding the right manager.

Hiring internally vs. externally

This is probably one of the most (if not the most) common questions when filling up managerial positions – Should you promote an existing employee as manager or hire someone from the outside?

Hiring internally allows you to promote someone who already understands your culture, how the process works, and what the goals are. However, the internal talent pool may be limited, and the best candidate for the promotion may not always be willing for it.

On the other hand, hiring someone from the outside can bring fresh perspectives, new ideas, and additional expertise and skills that your company may be lacking. However, the downside of this is that they often require more time to adapt to the company culture and usually presents a higher hiring risk due to their unfamiliarity with the organization.

The best approach we can suggest is to evaluate both internal and external candidates using the same criteria and assessment process. Do not automatically favor one over the other. Both candidates should undergo the same level of evaluation to help you compare their leadership abilities, experience, cultural fit, and whether they can respond to the specific needs of the role regardless if they are your current employee or someone from the outside.

Assessing a candidate’s soft skills

Assessing a candidate’s soft skills is challenging because traits and qualities like leadership qualities, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal abilities cannot be measured through resumes and interviews alone.

The best approach we can give is to ask them behavioral questions during the actual interview. Behavioral questions can make candidates share real examples of their past work experiences. Additionally, character reference checking may also provide insights and confirm their response.

Retention challenges

Finding and hiring the right manager is just one part of the process – retaining them is another. Highly qualified managers may still decide to leave when things do not go as well as they expected. If they do not see opportunities for growth or may feel unvalued, chances are you may be doing the search all over again.

Retention in management positions can be challenging because high turnovers can disrupt a team’s performance, delay current and on-going projects, and force you to spend additional time and money on replacing them.

To handle this challenge, you should set clear expectations during the hiring process and provide managers with the support they need to succeed. Regular check-ins and feedback, competitive compensation, and providing them with clear career advancement pathways can also improve retention and reduce turnovers.

When you focus on long-term engagement, your company can increase the likelihood of retaining strong managerial talent – not just filling up a vacancy.

Balancing experience and leadership potential

Another challenge when hiring for managerial positions is determining whether to prioritize extensive experience or strong leadership potential. Hiring managers are often torn between what to favor more between the two factors: Candidates with years of experience but lack leadership qualities VS. candidates with great leadership skills but have less years of experience.

The best solution we can give when dealing with this is to simply establish a clear evaluation framework before you start the hiring process. To do this, you should ask yourself: “what skills are more important for this role?” If the answer is leadership, prioritize candidates with good leadership skills and abilities even if they have fewer years of experience.

Pinpointing the skills that you think are most needed for the role simplifies this challenge and makes the hiring process easier.

Conclusion

Hiring the right manager will require you to do more than simply reviewing their resumes and experience. You will need to take a structured approach on evaluating their leadership skills to make better hiring decisions.

We hope this article helps you, as managers, in gaining insights into how to get the right candidate to work for your company and bring more success to your business.