Best practice recruiting involves two things: a sound strategy, and good execution of that strategy.

Earlier this year I outlined an approach to ensure best practices are applied when recruiting the interpersonal roles of professional services marketing and BD people. I now share some key factors to help implement that approach.
​
Recap on strategy
             
By way of a quick cap, an effective best practice recruiting approach to attract the right marketing and BD professionals includes:  

• Conduct meetings, not interviews
• Plan out the meetings
• Set your candidate’s expectations
• Include the key people from the start
• Have one meeting out of the office
• Ask questions that give you the right information

 
Effective execution

Here are some ways you can ensure effective execution of this approach. Keep in mind that all of these require only minimal planning, and will ensure a seamless, sophisticated and thorough interview meeting process for all involved:

• Assign different questions and discussion points. There will likely be marketing and BD team leaders, HR professionals, and partners all involved in these meetings. Whoever is coordinating the touchpoints with a candidate should assign different questions and discussion points between these people. This ensures candidates aren’t being asked the same question multiple times throughout. And importantly, you can learn more about your candidate as each question will have a different focus, allowing you to gain a complete picture of the candidate.
• Consider the logistics. Consider any interruptions to the meeting process. For example, who is going on vacation and can’t participate, who is traveling to other offices and will be hard to reach and follow up with, and who is simply too busy. Plan this going in, and then talk to your candidate about the logistics and timing.
• Who is assigned with the follow up. Someone needs to take the lead on communicating with the candidate. Particularly when there’s marketing, BD, HR and partners all involved, often everyone assumes someone else has the lead. The candidate deserves to have a central point of contact and also to understand where they are at in the process. I see too frequently candidates getting disengaged from the process as the firm forgets to do these simple updates. And that’s when candidates will look to other firms who do have these best practices in place.
• Interview training. Most people don’t conduct interviews as a part of their daily lives. Particularly partners in law and accounting firms. When people are not used to conducting interview meetings, they can be unnatural or overly formal. Others mask their own unfamiliarity with either aggressive tactics or by talking too much. The role of the firm here is to prepare people who will be speaking with the candidate on how to conduct an interview meeting. It should involve these things: information gathering, information sharing, testing on technical abilities, and cultural alignment discussion points. Attempting to ‘catch the candidate out’, or proving you know more than them aren’t conducive to an effective interview meeting.
• Formal v informal. Hopefully time permits for you to have one interview meeting out of the office. Mirror the circumstances of these meetings with your style. For example, an in-office formal interview meeting will naturally be more structured. An out of the office coffee meeting should be deliberately more casual, trying to build rapport and get a sense of who the candidate is as a person. Find out what they do outside of work, what community efforts they’re involved in, what sports they like to play. All of this tells you more about the candidate and who they will be each day in the office.
• Share as much as you ask. Candidates often have just as many questions as you do. They have thought at length about the potential of the opportunity (and how it fits with their personal career goals), your team structure, the firm leadership, and the future goals and trajectory of the firm. Don’t make the mistake of thinking these meetings are just for you to gather information. Purposefully make a point of allowing a good amount of time to ask them what you can share with them.

 
Summing up     
 
Interview meetings, and the whole process of conducting these meetings, is not easily done. There’s planning, logistics and effective execution to all happen at the right time. But importantly, you, at your firms, have to judge a candidate and make a call about whether they are right for you while they are doing the same in return. If you follow this approach and execute effectively, this hard decision does become a little easier. Make it as easy as you can: arm yourself with the right information and plan accordingly, involve the right people, and ask the right questions. You will then feel fully informed to make the right decision. 

Co-authored with Trisha Daho, Founder & CEO, Empowered

What confounds Managing Partners?

In so many conversations that we have with accounting firms, law firms, and similar professional services firms, managing partners seem confounded by a series of challenges affecting their firms:

• How do we grow sustainably and create a powerful brand presence in our market?
• Once we have a strategy, how do we make sure it’s implemented well?
• Who is going to do all the work to make sure we are accountable as a firm to our vision?

Stopping the cycle

Many firms, even smaller to medium sized firms, have contemplated how to best attract the clients they most want. They get training on business development, they go out into the market, and they hustle to put into practice what they have learned. Sometimes. Until they get busy. And then, marketing and business development fall quickly off the table for a while. By the time most firms come up for air, they are hitting another dip in revenue growth, and the cycle starts all over again.

In order to create sustainable, long term, vibrant growth, firms (no matter how small), need to focus on creating a brand that is clear, desirable to key target clients, and executed with precision and diligence. Few firms manage this to an outstanding degree. But it is absolutely possible and the best firms have already figured that out. It all starts with a strategy. 

The importance of strategy

Firms must create a strong and compelling vision, one that speaks to every single stakeholder. Clients, of course, but also targets, networking partners, alliances, and their own team. This can seem daunting, but with the help of a strategist or management consultant, firms can determine how to communicate a vision that sings directly to their ideal clients and targets.  

Once a firm creates that vision, the work of living it begins. This means creating a strong brand presence in exactly the right market. Most firms see this phase as “marketing,” but it is so much more than creating a website and some marketing collateral. In professional services firms, every single person, from the janitor to the managing partner, must be living a clear, consistent brand for that firm every single day. The firms that do revel in their successes, and experience exponential growth. Those that don’t, flounder. And because most humans tend to focus on what they are extremely good at most of the time, those of us in professional services firms don’t focus on making strategic decisions about how to live our brand. We’ve got billable hour requirements, after all. 

How to move this forward

So, what to do? Hiring an expert who can knowledgeably drive the bus on execution is a powerful tool for professional services firms of all kinds.  But you have to do it in the right way for it to make a real difference in your results.  

For example, if you hire a marketing director or manager and then give that person no real authority to do a great job, it’s going to a be a giant disaster. The firm leadership must be comfortable with full empowerment to these people in these roles, especially with leading the strategic marketers that they hire. If this doesn’t happen – put simply – firms are wasting their dollars on these valuable assets. One of the most common reasons we see why senior marketing professionals leave their firms is because they lack the necessary authority and empowerment to do what the firm has asked.

If your firm is committed to creating a role for a person with the muster and acumen to execute a clear strategy, partner with the top brass of your organization on evolving that strategy over time, and inspiring the execution of that strategy by everyone in your organization. Then you really will have a powerhouse.  

You’re creating history in your firm

Think about this: When you’re hiring this powerhouse with the strategic vision required for your firm’s future, you’re creating history in your firm. And the effect of this is more so when you’re a small or medium sized firm. What you’re doing actually sets the scene for years to come. The pressure to get this right, and to get it right on the first try, is huge. You’re hiring someone who will set the pace and progressiveness of the overall marketing function.

Taking this one step further, you’re hiring this powerhouse to set the marketing culture in your firm. Many have (unfortunately) experienced a negative firm culture and know all too well the long-lasting effects a bad culture can have on the day-to-day reality and perception of working and living in a law or accounting firm.

Creating the right effect
​
The effects of a good or bad marketing professional can be felt more significantly in a smaller firm. First-time Marketing Directors have a big role to both curate and create. But both big and small firms always struggle when hiring the wrong person at any level of the marketing ladder.

The most important consequence is that the firm partners and leadership lose confidence in the marketing function and what it should be. They ultimately back away from investing in the function because they ‘have been burnt’ and are not sure how to course correct. Common consequences we see on this include creating a marketing culture that is only reactive in nature, a ‘yes’ machine, or a function that wrongly resembles something that is more administrative or junior in nature than it should be. More junior marketing roles often are administrative in nature, but the senior roles can and should be far from this.  Again, without a real and executable strategy, and without understanding what the end game looks like, this can be an expensive debacle.

Firm leadership is often not equipped with the knowledge to empower their senior marketers; so, they partner with a consultant or search professional to know what to look for and – importantly – what it should look like in their own firm.

How important is partner involvement?

Partners need to be involved from the very first steps in adding to or implanting the marketing function. This function should report into a marketing savvy partner who can advocate and help them in their success. The most senior marketing professionals in a firm need to have the eyes and ears of the firm leadership so as to help with accountability, empowerment and progress.

Partners must also get comfortable in hiring these powerhouses who they can learn from. Counter-intuitive to some, but absolutely necessary to give the authority to these worthy leadership roles.

Is resistance inevitable?

Given we should know all of this, why is there still some resistance from partners when working with marketing professionals on implementing and setting the marketing strategy? Is it because this function is still not a bona fide function of the revenue of the firm? Or is it that unless and until marketing roles are considered and remunerated with equal importance as the billable hour, they will always take a back seat?  

Whatever the justification, these perceptions must change. Business minded and client centric professionals – as marketing professionals are – have cemented their value in most firms. Firms and their partners who resist this are risking the future of their firms and undermining the value these respected players have earned.

In conclusion
​
These issues go to the very heart of your firms. It affects their structure, their culture, and their future. Non-accountant and non-attorney roles in these firms are here to stay and are gaining momentum at a significant pace in most large and global firms. The most successful firms already know this quite clearly. Hire the right professionals to help you get these leadership roles right from the start, and then enjoy the rewards. Trust us, they absolutely come.