Hiring talent assertively is one of the most critical skills for a leader, and this mission is often a thankless one.

It's unpleasant because it's almost impossible to have 100% conviction in a decision like this, since you only get to know a talent deeply after living with them for a long time in different situations. In my experience, the leaders who make the best hires see this challenge as a statistical game, where the aim is to reduce the margin of error of this decision as much as possible, knowing that it won't be zero. In this article, I share what we are learning about assertive matchmaking between business challenges and talent.

Especially when we talk about senior talent, which is our focus. Considering that we had to deliver three main elements to the market - profile assertiveness, speed and financial efficiency - we had two key moments when we defined Chiefs.Group's value proposition.

‍Thefirst moment was when we had our first dozen clients and we went to listen to them individually to understand what motivated them to work with us and what they saw as the main value after working together.

The conclusion was unanimous: quality matchmaking! The second moment was when it dawned on us that several of the businesses we support have said phrases like: "I've been looking for this person on account for three months, I haven't found them and my business roadmap requires this person to be here next month. Will you save me?"

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‍"I know this profile is difficult, I've hired and had to fire a few people in this position myself. I've been changing the structure and profile of the person for a year now and I still have the same problems."

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These people couldn't wait any longer and still needed the ideal profile. After solving both cases, we heard the same question: how did you manage to be so quick and assertive?

‍Weasked ourselves this same question while building Chiefs.Group, but in a different way. If "matchmaking quality" is the main value proposition: What is this matchmaking quality? How can we replicate these successes?
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From this we understand that there are three fundamental factors:

‍Abilityto understand the minutiae of a context: What is the profile of the founder, CEO or business leader who will interface with this position? What is the timing of the business? Is it in a phase of validation, growth, maturity, decline/reinvention? What movement does the business need to make? What assumptions are used to make decisions in this company? What is the culture practiced and necessary for the desired objectives? What problems are the root causes of the barriers faced by the business? All these elements help us to define the second factor.

‍Anatomy ofthe ideal talent: Which segments/markets can generate value when plugged into the business challenge? Is there any business model knowledge that can accelerate value generation (e.g. SaaS, ecommerce...)? What business moment does this person need to specialize in (taking business from 0 to 1, organizing growth from 1 to 10 or scaling business from 10 to 100)? What main expertise is required? What about their sub-expertise? What cultural and relational skills does this person need to navigate the context well? Given the constraints of the business, what is the ideal seniority and investment capacity for the position? Do we need this person full time or can we solve the problems with financial efficiency by working less than 40 hours a week? Does this person have a relevant success story at a similar time in the business (I call this "been there, done that")? In other words, have they experienced the pain and led the change in other experiences?

‍Assessment capacityto validate the anatomy of the talent: Technology has been a great enabler for us to do what we do, but we understand that it alone will not solve the problem in the most assertive way possible. That's because humanized matchmaking brings great value at this final stage. This complex capability can be broken down into different sub-capabilities:- Delving deeper into the other person's context- Communicating expectations and ensuring consistent alignment of what you're looking for- Asking excellent questions and listening until you capture any and all information that mitigates the risk of your decision- Finding out if that talent really has what you're looking for by aligning the business context and ideal profile- Making decisions and taking risks by weighing up any trade-offs (hierarchy of requirements, time, investment, internal capabilities that influence the talent's performance...).

This stage is like a penalty kick in a World Cup final, where a hit can win you an important title and a miss can cost you dearly (in money, time and indirect internal consequences for the business). Make sure you have "good penalty takers" supporting you in this decision.

We strongly believe that for this type of challenge, the winning combination involves technology, method and excellent people involved from end to end.