Roles in your leadership team can become vacant, created or combined for a variety of reasons. A few of these are stated in the picture below.
Depending on the size & capabilities of your Human Resources & Talent Acquisition department, these situations will stimulate a chain of reactions that you may or may not have previously planned for.
Now before jumping in to finding someone for the role, you need to think long and hard about your strategy.
Simplistically put, your options are:
1) Fill this position utilizing your company's in-house resources, or
2) Go external and engage an executive search firm who specializes in these specific searches.
Warning!!! Do not rush this decision.
Do not implement a strategy because "this is how we have always done it". Do not pick your preferred supplier if they don't specialize in this area of search. Each search is drastically different. A CIO search in San Francisco is completely different to a CFO search in NYC. Different function, geography, the list goes on.
The world is changing faster than ever and this is a decision that will impact your business's success, or failure indefinitely.
One size does not fit all
The process you need to go through for assessing your in-house capabilities are as follows:
You need to be honest with yourself and your company. If you can do this in-house, great! If you can't, go external.
One piece of advice that I must emphasize, don't let the dollars and cents impact your decision. Yes, going external and engaging a retained search firm does come with a price tag. But do a quick google search on how much a bad hire can cost and it will quickly put things into perspective.
