Attracting and hiring qualified executives continues to be challenging for organizations across industries. The average time to fill an executive role is four to six months. Additionally, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment of top executives will grow six percent from 2023 to 2033, faster than the average growth across all occupations and reaching 343,800 roles each year on average.
Another challenge with recruiting executive talent is increased turnover, including senior leaders retiring at a rapid rate as part of the Silver Tsunami. Given this challenging and competitive market, traditional approaches to recruiting executive talent are no longer effective. The following tips can help you quickly attract and hire qualified executives to make a positive impact on your business in 2025 and beyond.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen increased adoption in organizations across industries in recent years – including in recruitment. According to research from Workable, more than two-thirds of professionals involved in hiring see their company increasing the use of AI in recruitment over the next five years.From an executive recruiting perspective, organizations can leverage artificial intelligence to streamline administrative tasks such as sourcing candidates, resume parsing, scheduling interviews, sending candidate communication, and administering reference and background checks.
AI-led candidate matching also enables organizations to more effectively identify and hire qualified candidates who align with their specific business needs. Rather than relying on traditional executive search firms, which operate primarily offline, leveraging AI-led platforms like SucceedSmart can help your organization reach a larger pool of millions of potential candidates and leverage sophisticated matching algorithms to match the right candidates to your open positions.
Most recruitment and talent acquisition strategies focus on evaluating candidates based on hard skills. However, this process doesn’t work when it comes to recruiting executive talent. Leadership roles require individuals who can drive innovation, inspire teams, and support strategic business objectives.
To hire the most qualified leaders, your organization needs to go beyond reviewing skills and instead gain a better understanding of candidates’ past accomplishments. Examples of leadership accomplishments may include:
Leveraging the right AI-led recruitment technology can help you effectively evaluate senior candidates based on their past accomplishments. By assessing proven leadership capabilities, you can identify senior-level candidates who are qualified to make positive long-term contributions toward your business success.
While artificial intelligence can help organizations drive hiring efficiencies and enable recruitment teams to make improved data-driven decisions, including expert human recruiters in the hiring process remains critical. Research from ResumeBuilder found that 85% of respondents believe AI can help provide data-driven recommendations on candidates, but final hiring decisions should be left to people.
Once AI and other technology does the heavy lifting—such as evaluating candidates’ accomplishments—expert recruiters and talent advisors can build relationships with executive candidates and review individuals for soft skills and team fit before making a hiring decision.
Hiring diverse leaders and teams as a whole from different backgrounds enables organizations to benefit from varied perspectives, experiences, and approaches, which can lead to more well-rounded problem-solving and decision-making.
Research from Cloverpop measured the decision-making capabilities of teams based on the gender, age range and geographic location of team members. The research found that the most diverse teams make better decisions than their less diverse counterparts 87% of the time. Additionally, research from Boston Consulting Group, companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation
By leveraging AI-led technology and evaluating candidates based on past accomplishments, your organization can minimize conscious and unconscious bias in the hiring process, which can help build more diverse leadership teams.
Whether or not you have immediate senior leadership or executive job openings, building a talent pipeline of qualified candidates can help you quickly hire the right talent when the need arises.
Effective talent pipelining focuses on building a network or pool of qualified candidates to fill positions in the future. With this process in place, you can avoid starting from scratch when you have a leadership team hiring need — whether because your business is growing or you’re addressing turnover or succession planning.
In today’s competitive hiring market, more organizations are prioritizing proactive talent pipelining, rather than taking a reactive approach to hiring. However, a survey from Symphony Talent found that while 48% of HR and talent see talent pipelining as a top priority, 68% find reaching the right target audience challenging.
Rather than relying on a traditional executive search firm, which often have limited networks of potential talent and often pass the same talent around between companies, by leveraging a modern executive recruitment software like SucceedSmart, we super-aggregate millions of profiles across the web. This ensures all relevant candidates are identified and considered, not only those in databases and known to people and recirculated often across companies.
Data from Development Dimensions International (DDI) found about half (53%) of HR leaders believe outside executive hires are failures in their roles. No matter how effective your process is for recruiting executive talent, ensuring they quickly assimilate to your organization and begin to add value soon after performing is critical. Otherwise, poor leadership can have a negative impact on morale, productivity, and overall business outcomes.
Each time a new executive joins your organization, offer personalized one-on-one executive coaching. This can help new leaders not only get up to speed on the company, but also discuss and address challenges and improve their self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and communication skills to more effectively lead with empathy.
As we look ahead to 2025, hiring the right executives will continue to have a significant impact on overall business success. By implementing the tips outlined above, you can hire qualified executives who align with your business needs.
SucceedSmart is also here to help you get the right leadership team on board fast. With our powerful blend of AI-led technology and human expertise through expert talent advisors, quickly identify and shortlist the “best-matched” candidates from a super-aggregated data set of millions of executive profiles. Our expert talent advisors then review top candidates to ensure only those who meet your business requirements are presented to your team.
With SucceedSmart, you can build a proactive pipeline of qualified executive candidates, scale your recruitment efforts up and down — without impacting headcount — decrease hiring time from 4-6 months to 4-6 weeks, and reduce executive recruitment costs by 70% compared to traditional executive search firms.
Get ahead on your 2025 executive recruitment goals — schedule a demo today.
