[rpd] Recruitment of AfriNIC CEO

[Owen DeLong]

> On Nov 21, 2014, at 1:13 AM, Douglas Onyango <ondouglas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> All,
> While internal  knowledge of the community is key, I think it may confines our search team to only the community, which may or may not deliver the very best candidate. 
> 

Depending on how you are intending to define the community, I would argue that recruiting outside of the community would be very unlikely to yield an ideal result.

Permit me to elaborate…

If you define the community broadly (all internet users within the AfriNIC region), then surely the best candidate must be within the community as I do not believe that someone coming from outside of the community would have the necessary understanding of the unique challenges within the region.

If you define the community more narrowly as only those who participate in this mailing list or some other limited subset of the internet-using community within the region, then you may be right that such a definition could well exclude an ideal candidate.
> Couple this with admin & and logistical requirements needed to look for executive candidates in a short period of time and think involving an agency would be more efficient.
> 
For all the reasons that Woody mentioned, and based on my experience, I don’t think it would. I think it would be a great way to waste time and resources looking at a number of candidates that fit some generic profile, but are not necessarily well suited to the task at hand.
> My suggestion is to engage a competent agency which can take care of the logistics  and initial vetting of candidates, they can then forward the cream to an internal team for a final round of interviews.
> 
In my experience, down this path lies madness as I have yet to encounter a “competent agency” which does an initial vetting which proves useful. YMMV.
> This path gives us the best of both worlds  with the shortest  turn around time.
> 
This is one of those examples where we see a clear demonstration of the difference between theory and practice.

(The difference being that “In theory, there is no difference.”)

In theory, you are absolutely correct and this looks like a great idea on paper. However, experience has shown that this is not necessarily the case because it turns out that there are a number of more subtle difficulties that come into play:

	1.	Finding a competent agency is hard.
	2.	Getting the competent agency to truly understand the job requirements is even harder.
	3.	Finding qualified candidates for such a unique role is quite hard.
	4.	There is no downside to an agency to shotgun the position and send you the N candidates they think are closest.
		The worst that can happen is that you don’t hire one of their candidates. They have no skin in the game and they
		will do whatever they do within the confines of the deadline you give them rather than really searching for the
		truly right candidate. If you don’t give them a deadline, they will send you every remotely qualified candidate
		as soon as they can to minimize risk of not getting the contract.

As such, I think that using a recruiter is likely to be a waste. I think you might have better success using a community survey where you ask people to nominate a candidate they think would do the job well and then solicit resumes from the names that get entered most often. (write-in only and one-name per respondent only.) This may not work, either, but I think it’s likely to be at least as effective as using a recruiter.

Owen

> Regards,
> On 20 Nov 2014 11:46, "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka at seacom.mu <mailto:mark.tinka at seacom.mu>> wrote:
> >
> > On Thursday, November 20, 2014 09:44:57 AM Bill Woodcock
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Speaking from my own experience on the ARIN board when we
> > > had a similar transition to make, I’d say that
> > > “recruitment professionals” are an unmitigated disaster.
> > >  They’ll find you a set of generic and mediocre
> > > candidates, none particularly prepared for the task.
> > > After two false starts using “recruitment professionals”
> > > we gave up on them and hired someone we knew was capable
> > > of handling the job, and who wouldn’t flake out.  And
> > > that’s worked out really well for us.
> >
> > I'd tend to agree, in this case.
> >
> > We know the community, and that's an advantage worth
> > exploiting.
> >
> > Mark.
> >
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