As a search specialist I am often asked this question. Clients are incresingly demanding a range of diverse skills in recruiting top talent for leading consultancy roles. The success and failure of leading demanding and complex projects such as the IT Modernisation of the NHS has highlighted the difficulty in managing relationships between people at the highest level. The success of any delivery is dependent on people that manage the implementation from inception to roll-out, it requires people to lead, motivate, interpret, understand and manage an array of different, often conflicting requirements. Candidates that possess most if not all of these qualities will be in a much stonger position to attract the attention of the best recruiters. It is incumbent on the part of the hiring company and any search compnay that works with a client to ensure that every conceiveable aspect of a role is clearly defined, prioritised and discussed before an agreement is made on conducting an informed search.The extra time and effort at the start of any search will reduce the risk and cost of making the wrong hiring decision when offer time is reached

ermmm - thats not a question - that's an advert

I agree. The type of consulting that really gets things done (not just PowerPoint decks) need "real life" experience. However, I am very skeptical about the standardized screening process.

The contribution by a "search specialist" dramatically highlights the problem in my opinion. This is the reason that so many large programmes and projects go wrong! These elements of failure are built in right from the start, initially by so called "search specialists" who do not even understand in reality what they are supposed to be searching for. They then therefore end up selecting the wrong person, who does not have the requisite skills or knowledge to ensure that a complex programme or project, with all of its demands, is managed in an optimal fashion. The truth is that these sorts of scenarios are the most demanding of real mangement abilities, far more in fact than senior line management or director-level roles. The salient difficulty is that these so-called "search specialists" do not even really understand what the word "best" means! There the mega-problem begins, and so the macro-failures continue. About the only thing these people are any good at at all is "searching" blindly, and since they do not know what they are looking for, and would not even be able to see it if they found it, they end up believing that their search has been accomplished when they find someone who bamboozles them into believing that they have found what they would have been looking for if only they had understood what it was. Hans Christian Anderson wrote a children's tale many years ago entitled "The Emperor's New Clothes"; this explained then exactly the problem, that those who are pompous and do not understand can be easily fooled!