Jim Collins famously wrote in his renowned book, ‘Good to Great’ about the need to make sure that a leader has the right people in the right seats. Collins points out that without the right people in the right seats a strategy will stall and a leader will find frustration as the vision fails to materialize. Over the course of my credit union and Army careers, I’ve realized just how true this is. Without having the right ‘who’, a leader cannot effectively consider ‘what’. This is true whether it is the Board hiring their next CEO, or the CEO hiring her executive leaders.
As I mature as a leader, I reflect a lot on Collins’ book and just how canny it is. Over the past few years alone, I served as my credit union’s interim CEO and battalion commander as an Army Reserve officer. These two roles gave me insights on just how important it is to have the right team to animate a strategy and how, yet again Collins was right. This new-found insight made me pause to think about how much of an art hiring is and how, especially at the executive level, as an industry, we rely on search firms to help us find the “right” people.
Finding qualified candidates in the credit union industry is difficult. It is a smaller pool of candidates, and because of it, increasingly candidates outside the industry need to be considered. Often borrowing professionals from adjacent industries or other industries that are also highly regulated. I find that health care and insurance make for fertile recruiting grounds. And to sift through, qualify and present a slate of candidates is no small task that our search firm partners seemingly do so well.
Over my career in the credit union industry, I had the opportunity to listen to a lot of credit union professionals talk about their experiences with search firms. Some great. Some good. Some legendarily bad. As a Board chair of the Search Committee, you may ask what makes the difference. I know I certainly did when filling executive roles as interim CEO.
It really seems to boil down to communication. The best in class search firms seem to take the time to understand the role and what the credit union needs. This up-front interest pays off with high-quality candidates. This is because the search firm understands the needs and can match not as much as strictly off a resume, but understanding what the candidate can offer.
The flip side of this is, of course, the bad search firms. I remember when I first moved from FinTech to the credit union industry, my then co-worker expressed frustration that the search firm never even acknowledged his resume, let alone let him know what was going on in the process. Fittingly, that same firm did the same to me years later when I was searching. I could still hear my former co-worker’s voice echoing in my head as I too could not get a response from this search firm.
Communication is hard. Communicating with the credit union, communicating with the candidates takes effort. And there are search firms that are very good at doing it and as explored above, some that do not even try. However, this communication is what makes the difference between a successful placement and an unsuccessful placement. We hire these search firms to do the hard work for us, to cut through the fluff and offer the best candidates for each position.
Complicating matters, AI entered into this space increasingly in the last year. For every position legions of AI bots are now responding to those positions, especially at the executive level. Search firms are seeing hundreds of submissions for positions now, when in the past it was a fraction of that. While ‘bot’ suggests that these are not actual applications, most are actually tied to a human. Of course that human may not be qualified in the least, but it represents a dramatic shift in strategies.
How does a credit union CEO know if her search firm placing her CLO position is prepared for this new reality? It comes from understanding the search firm’s process. Having that interactive process is important to understand the needs of the credit union. Ensuring they manage for the candidate experience is vital, otherwise candidates will know. If there is one thing we do very well in the credit union industry, it is sharing of information.
Squaring these considerations against the legions of bots is difficult. However, this is where AI is the answer to AI. A search firm that employs AI to screen hundreds of resumes is not the only way, but it is the most sustainable way. In my own recent recruiting experience, there simply was no way I could read the over 800 applications I received for a position. But for a search firm with good notes on the credit union needs as part of the prompt, this task becomes not only achievable, but a strategic one.
A strategic vision is essentially a promise made to the credit union's members, but it is the staff who must actually deliver on that promise daily. The connection between a hire and a strategy is most evident when examining member experience. For instance, attempting to dramatically improve a Net Promoter Score cannot be achieved merely through executive mandate or revised policies. It requires intentionally staffing up critical touchpoints, like the call center, and investing heavily in the training of those individuals.
When you hire professionals who inherently align with a service-first culture and empower them with the right resources, a metric like NPS can swing from deep in the negative to overwhelmingly positive. The right hire transforms a theoretical strategic objective such as "enhancing member satisfaction" into a tangible, operational reality. It proves that strategy is not just about what a credit union intends to do, but fundamentally about who is actively executing it on the ground.
As a credit union leader, having the right people “on the bus,” is the critical consideration to achieve the strategic vision. Hiring and matching people, skills, and needs is not easy and our industry frequently employs search firm partners to help us fill these roles. Hiring the right search firm is arguably just as important as hiring the right person because selecting a poor one dissuades good candidates and shifts the work back to the credit union. Do not be afraid to ask if your credit union has the right people to propel your vision. This question is a necessary and strategic question.
