Executive Search: Art or Science ?

Executive Search is people business. Search consultants who stress the use of "scientific methods" give the activity and its practitioner the appearance to be objective, factual and reliable, while de facto they reduce overall the overall reliability of the enterprise.

I know an Executive Search consultant who pitches her  competitive differentiator to be a batch of sophisticated psychological tests, leading to the depiction of a "profile" that matches the particular need of the client. All is presented in fancy PowerPoint slides and brochures.

After hearing her pitch you almost believe assesment is the most important element in the process, as this is where she can apply her tests, which is what she obviously knows most about.

Now how do you test in order to distinguish a CFO with fund raising experience from a CFO with operational experience, or how to determine if an Sales Director will be successful in enterprise or consumer business? Right, one need to understand the role, position and personality profile indepth, and then search to find the right individuals all before a test can be administered.

My experience with that consultant was that a placement done on such extensive profile testing turned out to be a complete dud. In another case where this consultant argued strongly against a hire, due to a bad performance on the applied "tests", the particular individual is today successfuly managing a large pan-European business unit for a US multinational. Before testing, one must know what to test for, and no test can figure that out.

The following analogy makes the relevance of "science" and "testing" clear. The scientific analysis of a book can only cover its physical and chemical properties, like the composition of the pages, or of the ink  the text was written in; probably the furthest it can go is a statistical analysis of the signs or letters on the pages.  Science cannot capture symbolic and institutional meaning. Therefore science cannot distinguish if Hamlet is about a brawl in a strip tease club in Bangkok, or a thematic exploration of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption in medieval Denmark. In order to find out what Hamlet is about, one needs to read and properly interpret the story. One cannot test a discourse for its meaning.

The same applies to executive search. As it is a business about and for people, science will be of little help throughout most of the process. Psychological tests will help only confirming or broadening previous assessments of candidates, and can shine a light on personality issues that might have been overlooked. Still, their usefullness is questionable, as they cannot predict performance of a candidate in future employment.

Therefore much of executive search is pure art: practice and hard work undoubtedly makes better. The proof of the art succesfully applied consists off the stuff tests can't figure out, either predict: satisfied clients and candidates.