Recruiting Strategy Talent

We are in an unprecedented time of transition in the job market, with talent at all levels of organizations reflecting on their passions, ambitions, and career trajectory, and exploring new employment opportunities. Strategy is typically a small function staffed by people with a relatively unique skillset. Most companies do not have longstanding DNA around identifying and nurturing the right talent for Strategy, the way they do say for salespeople, accountants or product developers.Mine is one of those companies – I am building a strategy organization fresh in a 40-year-old company that has never had one. In addition, our company has a stated goal, and it is a mission that I take personally, to increase the diversity of our talent pool (with diversity defined based on the statistics of talent in the tech sector). I have set an expectation that I will not make a decision on a set of key roles until there is a panel of candidates that includes several viable diverse candidates.I have invested a significant amount of time in bringing along both our recruiters and an external agency on the kind of talent that I am looking for, but there is a relatively low hit rate on identifying qualified talent, and an extremely rate of identifying qualified diverse candidates – extremely and embarrassingly low. As we so often tell the people in other functions who we counsel on business issues, we should not expect a different outcome from doing more of the same. I would like to leverage the power of our group to unlock new approaches to identify the right talent for a growing strategy organization.