Recruiting executives can feel a daunting task. After all, these leaders will effectively make or break your company, and competition for top executive talent is fierce, but a well-defined recruitment strategy and well executed will result in the onboarding of excellent additions to the leadership team.

Competition for best-in-class talent between companies has never been fiercer in my memory, and as a consequence many organisations are turning to recruitment agencies for help in searching and engaging with candidates for critical and urgent positions.

But finding the right recruitment partner is not obvious so I’ve shared recommendations on how a company should prepare for agency selection, what criteria will be important and what information you should ask of them before deciding on the agency. Remember, your external recruitment partner will be representing your company and brand, so you must ensure they are the right choice.

Hiring a marketing exec with global responsibility versus one that has a regional or country role requires different skill and mindsets.

Peter Wharton shares his viewpoint from experience both as a marketing exec for tech companies and as a specialised recruiter for pioneering software vendors.

Peter Wharton is seeing more companies recruit executives to run both sales operations and marketing operations rather than maintain them as separate departments and explains why. Peter is managing partner at Antal International Geneva and recruits c-level, sales, marketing and operations management talent for pioneering tech companies.

As small and mid-sized tech companies start scaling up their business the need to assemble a top-class executive team is crucial to its success. A company’s quality of leadership just simply cannot be overstated and is more important than ever.

From my experience, these are the typical key sequential steps in building the team at the start of the scale-up journey.