Like many of you over the past year, we at Growth by Design had to be nimble and adjust to the changing market, particularly, our search practice. Almost overnight, the number of open Talent Acquisition leadership roles dropped dramatically, while our People leadership roles picked up. And while the particular competencies, experiences, and characteristics of these roles vary from TA leadership roles, we’ve noticed that no matter what the role, there are four guiding principles for running a successful search.

There were two significant events that occurred late last year that set off compounding impacts across the tech community. The first was Twitter abruptly laying off nearly half of the company and setting off a series of deeper cuts across the industry. The second was the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which quickly became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history… until Threads launched this year that is. The net impact for many recruiting leaders has been the expectation that their teams will need to do more with less. As with prior tech cycles and platform shifts, a burst of new tools have come into the market while existing vendors are racing to innovate. All with the promise of driving higher quality and greater efficiency across the recruiting process.

With a general slowing of hiring across the industry, recruiting leaders and teams are re-evaluating their hiring processes from top to bottom. One area we see getting a lot of attention is the consistency of hiring decisions. Bar raisers, hiring committees and similar types of programs have been around seemingly since the early days of Silicon Valley. With the emergence of more tools and systems to better collect candidate assessment and performance data, the opportunity is there to modernize these programs. 

With hiring slowing across tech, many recruiting leaders are working through the “recruiting tech debt” companies have accrued over the previous period of high growth. Particularly, we are seeing a number of our client companies focus on quality of hire. With companies needing to do more with fewer resources, companies and recruiting teams want to ensure that they are hiring the right people for each role.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve met with some talent leaders that have had to significantly downsize their teams and are now faced with a lot of unpredictability and variability in hiring needs since they’re completely dependent on backfilling attrition. While other talent leaders we’ve talked to are at companies with healthy balance sheets that can retain more resources on their teams, but in the meantime are redesigning roles and reevaluating performance metrics given fewer roles needing to be filled in the short-term. Here are some takeaways from those conversations:

Through our executive people searches, we are are seeing one critical characteristic for talent leaders: a leader who is seen as a trusted advisor to the leadership team.