Succession Planning And The Need For Recruitment Process Outsourcing Connections

Every year it seems that some premiership managers will only last a matter of weeks in the job. There is a lot of criticism around these short tenures, many argue that managers should be allowed longer to achieve culture changes, or personnel changes required to achieve success, and others who are less forgiving say that you shouldn't put up with underperformance.

But if a football manager is fired after only a short time in their job, does that mean that no succession planning has been going on? The financial cost of failure and the opportunity cost of missed success can be so great that the pressures to find the right manager or a better manager are huge. So when a manager gets the sack after a short tenure, do the board and club owners suddenly start to look around at who is available for their next appointment. That has to be a resounding no. There has to be a continual process of evaluating who is available to take over before the existing manager is sacrificed. It wouldn't make sense to sack your manager without a replacement lined up ready to go. This must mean therefore that there is a succession plan already on place before the manager is relieved of their duties. So what forms the process of a good succession plan, and is it the same for the world of business and commerce as it is for Football?

Identify the critical positions

The critical positions in an organisation have to be the focus of succession planning. Without these roles, the organization would be unable to effectively meet its business objectives. To use our football scenario again, new appointments are usually handled by network of agents, who are associated with free personnel. The football clubs are in constant contact with agents whose job it is to inform the club at any time as to who is available in the marketplace, or who could become available at short notice.

Identify competencies

A clear understanding of capabilities is needed for successful performance and the setting of clear performance expectations, and for the assessment of performance.

Identify succession management strategies

Once critical positions have been identified the next step is to choose from developing or to look externally

Implement your succession plan

Once strategies have been identified, your succession plan needs clearly defined timelines and roles and responsibilities.

Evaluate Effectiveness

Like all good plans you need to systematically monitor all your performance data and make necessary adjustments. Using our football manager example again you may attribute points per game, as an effective measure of success, and in business you may use measures such as value of deals won or share price as your measures.

Now it is true that football managers work in a ruthless and impatient environment and business is probably more forgiving and slower to act. Nevertheless with increasing pressure form activist investors and pressure from employees and the media, chief executives have their own job security pressures. In the world of business the agents role in our football analogy is taken up by recruitment organisations, whose role it is to keep constantly up to date with the talent pool and provide the connections boards and organisations need when looking externally for executive replacement.

Having a methodical and assured process along with longstanding working relationships with recruitment companies is one way in which organisations can avoided calls of crisis, and retain the trust and confidence of shareholders and markets when changes in senior personnel take place.

It is therefore a responsible risk management approach to take to consider the process required to replace a senior person before they are lost to the organization.

One common consequence of failing to have a succession plan is that many boards panic and spend large amounts of money and time on rushed external replacements, with no affinity to the workings of the firm. This is why a well-structured and well planned succession is always preferred irrespective of whether personnel change comes from internal staff or externally.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is one of the best tools available for companies to cost-effectively focus on finding great talent today that will be with them for the future.
Omni are an award winning outsourced recruitment services provider. They have won the prestigious Outstanding Outsourced Recruitment Organisation Award at the 2015 Recruiter Awards after being recognised for multi-sector knowledge, employer branding, innovation, and the consistent provision of a first-class RPO service. You can find out more about them by visiting http://www.omnirms.com

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