Overview of Talent Services
We’re more than just an industry-leading Executive Search firm. Through our Talent Services, we provide Leadership Development and Succession Planning Services to attract and retain top talent, because it’s only half the battle getting them in the door. You also need them to stay—and help the rest of your organization thrive.
Executive Search
Executive talent is a high-stakes investment. Finding the right leadership for your organization can set the course for both immediate progress and long-term success, so it’s imperative to find the best person—with the right background and passion—to fill your open role.
OE’s PROCESS
Our executive team has extensive experience in Search and Talent Development for Global 500 companies and national brands. Today, we extend the same rigor and professionalism to serving purpose‐driven organizations of all sizes.
So how do we do it? Four simple factors that bring the best talent to your open roles:
Trusted Thought Partner
For executive level hires, it’s all about nuance and matching to your organization’s trajectory, so a great search consultant should have a deep understanding of organizational strategy and design. In this regard, OE’s expertise adds exponential value, enabling a far more nuanced appreciation of your needs than any pure search firm could assemble.
As a purpose driven management consultancy, OE serves as the strategic thought partner to some of the most ambitious social impact organizations in the world. This unique positioning allows us to leverage the power of our firm’s other services — board development, organizational design, strategic planning, business growth, and more — equipping us with the pattern recognition to distill sophisticated insights as we co-design and offer advisory support to create the requirements of the role. Many of us have actually served in positions similar to the roles for which we recruit, giving us a strong sense of what it takes to ensure success.
Tailored Design and Compelling Storytelling
If you want to set your organization apart from the hundreds of others vying for top talent, you’ll want a relationship with a firm that can authentically market the role. OE’s approach relies upon a deep understanding of your mission, compelling storytelling around the opportunity, and solutions highly tailored to your needs.
For our insights to be most valuable, we need to apply them to the specific context of your organization. Every engagement begins with OE listening and learning to get to know your organization. We’re a quick, but detailed study, reviewing key materials, interviewing leadership, staff, and relevant parties, and coming to understand your organization’s strengths, pain points and priorities. With this foundation, we are able to highly tailor our recruiting with authenticity identifying the role’s Key Pillars* to find the ideal candidate.
Proven Connector Approach
Passive candidates account for nearly 70% of the available workforce, so without a strategy for accessing that portion of the market, you’re fishing from a very, very small pool. The majority of OE’s placements result from active sourcing, and our proven approach relies upon our network of relationships with several thousand valuable connections. We are fortunate to enjoy strong relationships with well-positioned executives and influencers worldwide, who have come to view us as a source of highly attractive impact-oriented opportunities. These connectors further leverage their own networks on our behalf, habitually generating valuable referrals for our searches.
The value of retained search is the identification of the best person at the best time and place. Many search firms emphasize their “candidate database,” and, we too have a database and network containing many thousands of candidates, extending across every major executive function, and hailing from a variety of sectors. However, such repositories are by definition a list of people whose status was known as of a certain date in the past. Consequently, any firm that today advertises their candidate database more prominently than they advertise their depth of relationships with executives in multiple industries and their facility with dynamic research platforms is resting on an old approach.
Dedication of a Full Project Team
For hard-to-fill executive roles, it can quickly become a resource intensive activity, and you want assurances that your search is appropriately prioritized. With OE, you have the luxury of a consistent and customized project team specifically assigned to the search, coupled with the personalized attention and hands-on involvement of our senior leadership.
You will enjoy the support of a lead consultant, an expert project manager, and an experienced team of researchers to attract the right level of talent to the role. Our firm’s size is an asset in that, compared to many large corporate firms, we are small enough to give your organization the senior leadership and personalized attention it deserves; by the same token, we are large enough to deploy highly focused and comprehensive resources, far more so than an independent consultant or solo-practitioner can dedicate.
Leadership Development
Continual improvement at all levels leads to enhancing individual careers and cultivating a culture of learning and excellence throughout an entire organization. Our Leadership Development program focuses on growing talent, providing thoughtful feedback and ability to develop within the organization.
Solves for:
- Lack of clarity about the essential ingredients to career progression
- Lack of continual improvement and growth in leadership
- Overemphasis on the quantitative elements of job performance
- The Peter Principle – allowing people to rise to the “level of their incompetence”
While there is such a thing as natural leadership, the practice of true excellence requires conscious and consistent effort. OE Consulting helps to develop frameworks, rooted in best practice and customized to your organization to understand key factors for success, your organizational core values, and effective division of labor. OE then supports leaders through customized coaching, and adaptation of best practice concerning team effectiveness. OE Leadership Development services are also designed to enable a seamless performance management system.
Succession Planning
While the classic definition of a succession plan is the process of identifying talent, internal and external, to fill future leadership positions, we take things further. We approach succession planning by identifying the elements important to unifying an organization, and providing an incoming leader with the knowledge of and clarity to be impactful.
Solves for:
- A strong degree of risk management, increasing chances of both a longer and more successful tenure for a new leader
- Shortens the time a new leader needs to get a clear understanding of all of the elements that will contribute to the organization’s success
- The staff and board are highly familiar with the traits and qualities required for a new leader, thus paving the way for their quick acceptance
The organization is set up for success from day one with proper succession and strategic planning in place. Every major contributor in a client’s organization shares a clear understanding of the functions, dynamics, gaps, patterns, relationships, and cultural practices that will be critical for the future growth, not only of the incoming leader, but of the organization as a whole.
