It may not be business as usual, but businesses are still operating, and so having the right leadership at the helm is crucial – and may mean additional bandwidth to support a company during this time. Inflexion’s Talent Director has facilitated over half a dozen C-suite appointments since lockdown.

Has recruitment been put on hold for senior-level positions?

Talent remains crucial, crisis or not, and roles that were being hired for continue to be hired for.

Across the Inflexion portfolio, the early weeks of lockdown were spent focusing on ensuring our management teams were equipped with the resources and support they needed. This was often in the C-suite, with additional bench strength needed in areas such as finance.

That said, the profile of roles being hired for is evolving as business models and plans change.

People who have certain experiences and skillsets may now be more important, for example a track record in transformation, business model change, restructuring into growth or pivoting into online. Skills which can help firms come out of this period stronger are particularly in demand.

How has the process changed for seeking out new talent?

For Inflexion it’s all about innovating and being agile and working with the tools that you have. Lockdown hasn’t stopped our companies from moving things forward and hiring the individuals they need. For example, we’ve continued with succession planning across the portfolio and appointed a number of CEOs and CFOs.  

The interview process sequencing remains broadly unchanged, however there is benefit in it being more iterative.

We have augmented processes so that there are multiple reference points with the candidates so they can have different experiences of us throughout the process. This also helps them feel they’ve been socialised with the Inflexion team and with the management team they’d theoretically be working with.

We’ve really drilled down into the more structured techniques we’ve previously relied on, such as competence and skills-based interviewing. We’ve gone through the diligence such as psychometric testing and referencing – and we are giving candidates the opportunity to do proper referencing on us by encouraging them to talk to our advisers and introducing them to our management teams. Our final stage of assessment is running a theoretical virtual board meeting to see how they’d work with us. We’ve always done it, but the importance of it has been crucial now.

Is it harder to recruit the right people right now?

My personal view is that it is easier from a practical process perspective. People have more time, so scheduling interviews is much easier. You can be much more objective when you’re not sitting in a room with someone, there are no niceties and you don’t build the same personal rapport with them. You have to run very structured and joined up processes that treat the candidate very well if you want any chance of being able to work with top class talent.

Accessing the right talent is a different matter. Lots of businesses are going to underperform, many for reasons unrelated to poor-quality management, and people will come out of those businesses searching for new roles with companies whose models are better suited to the future. So on the one hand you have a wider pool of candidates, but on the other hand or you could say high quality managers won’t jump off a ship while it’s sinking because their loyalty means they are trying to help save it. Overall, I think people are more reflective and therefore open-minded about opportunities for the future, and this is helpful for building a network, which is always a good thing.

Might techniques used for hiring now carry on in the future?

We will definitely take learnings from current processes since it’s really valuable to create multiple reference points around an individual. Being more objective in the process at the outset because you’ve not met face-to-face and developed a personal rapport can help clarify a candidate’s skills suitability. Thereafter candidates can be brought into the process by socialising them more broadly around the team they’ll be working with.

I think that the behaviours towards the importance of hiring will change. People are realising brilliant CEOs and teams help their businesses perform really well and handle stress well, whereas where there are weaknesses, cracks form and expand.