Recruiting your organization's next leader: 5 things to remember

In a global development organization, the right executive talent can attract millions of dollars to advance a nonprofit’s mission, engineer innovative ideas to break through intractable problems and unify stakeholders around a single goal.

Yet failure rates for senior executives are high and rising. In fact, CEOs appointed in the last 25 years are three times more likely to be fired than CEOs appointed earlier, according to “The Search for Executive Talent” report published by the Society for Human Resource Management in 2010.

Finding the right candidate for an executive position requires more work than filling lower-level positions, if for the sole reason that executives aren’t typically looking for jobs and organizations can’t simply post an executive-level job on a careers page.

But the payoff of finding the right candidate is exponentially larger.