(Originally posted January 2019, Updated April 2020).
For your business to thrive, every employee must be a good fit for your culture and values.
By and large, candidates for executive-level positions, such as a communications director, can have a significant impact on company culture.
Ensuring you have a solid understanding of how to hire a communications director is an essential step in your search process.
Not only will this communications professional be the voice of your company to the outside world, but they will also speak to your employees.
To help you get started with your search, we’ve outlined several effective strategies on how to hire a communications director below.
How To Hire A Communications Director
1. Partner With a Staffing Agency
As we’ve said, performing a comprehensive search is essential. However, conducting an executive search can be time-consuming and draw resources away from other company initiatives.
Therefore, partnering with a staffing agency is often a beneficial solution. Agencies like TruPath can use the expertise of its team to create a client-tailored search for your needs.
An additional benefit of partnering with a staffing agency is its candidate network. Your partnered staffing agency is likely to have a more extensive candidate network to search than you do on your own.
By focusing on the needs of your specific communications director role, a staffing agency can comb through its candidate network and provide timely staffing solutions.
2. Organize a Leadership Committee
In addition to the consultative partnership of a staffing agency, you can also put together a committee of your company’s leadership.
This committee is especially helpful when looking for higher-level candidates for a communication director role.
When it comes to hiring executives, it is crucial to get the options of those who will be interacting with this individual often.
The insight of this committee can help you identify which qualities that make a star candidate. In other words, you can use this insight to build a well-rounded ideal candidate profile.
Then, you can perform a focused search and comprehensively assess the quality of each candidate you consider.
3. Hire Internally
Often, companies feel that they have to hire executives from outside their organization to bring a fresh perspective.
While this may lead you to hire a great candidate, there are some challenges you might still face. One major challenge is the onboarding process.
When putting together an efficient onboarding process checklist, you naturally want to streamline the process’s timeline.
One way to achieve this streamlined process is by choosing to hire internally. There is a chance that your ideal candidate is already working for you, so don’t ignore any potential internal talent.
Additionally, employees hired internally already have a foundation in the company. While an external hire needs to learn the culture, an internal hire already has experience working in your culture.
Locate Star Communications Talent For Your Company
By and large, there are a variety of factors to consider when putting together an executive search.
First and foremost, though, you should understand what exactly your needs are. Do you need a communications director because you need a new department head? Or, are you looking for someone with unique skills to help your company grow in a new direction?
Once you understand what the expectations and needs of this role are, you can start your executive search off right.
For example, knowing the needs of a role can be beneficial when writing a comprehensive communications job description.
Let’s say you’re looking for a communications professional with unique skills. By determining this and sharing it with your staffing agency, you can rest assured that each candidate you receive has been assessed for those skills.
Are you in need of a quality communications director to hire?
Contact the team at TruPath today and receive fitting staffing solutions that go above and beyond your expectations.
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