Executive or professional roles at the $100,000-plus salary level are no longer rare — a Fortune 1000 company might hire hundreds annually, especially if it is in a knowledge-intensive industry. Executive hires are, by definition, strategic. But does your organization manage the hiring process for executive roles strategically?

Probably not, in my experience as an executive recruiter. The hiring of executives and senior professionals critical to the success of new initiatives is rarely managed with the same rigor as other strategic functions. Instead, it is treated as an artistic, even mysterious endeavor.

I have built a methodology, Lean Executive Hiring, for aligning the hiring process with business goals, which I use in my executive search practice and deliver as a seminar to corporate HR departments. The five stages are strategic analysis, organizational design; job design & qualifications; marketing messaging and optimizing the interviewing process.

The cost of these sub-optimized recruiting processes for senior roles is high:

1. Opportunity cost. A six-month delay in bringing a new product to market can give a competitor a critical advantage.

2. Dollars spent on hiring, such as advertising and search fees.

3. Wasted time of hiring executives, human resources and others involved in the process.

4. Frustrated candidates. The recruiting process is a candidate’s primary window into an organization. If they perceive disorganization or confusion, they might fear it is representative of the firm’s culture, and decline the job.

For example, the CEO of a financial services company wants to improve the firm’s ability to distinguish itself from competitors and reverse shrinking profit margins. Marketing was previously handled by the senior vice president of sales, and consisted primarily of trade shows and advertising. The CEO creates a new position — vice president of marketing — and sets out to find the perfect candidate.

The position is expected to be filled in four months, which seems like plenty of time. But eight months later, the position is unfilled, even though dozens of quality candidates have been interviewed, and three offers have been rejected.

Or, in a worse scenario, a star MBA consumer marketer is hired, and let go after a year of trying to build your consumer brand — even though you sell only to businesses.

What actually happened here? Because the hiring process was not managed systematically, questions that should have been answered earlier are left unresolved, hampering the ability to hire the right person. Those questions include:

1. What does marketing mean to this company? Is it brand building, product introduction, marketing channel strategy or all three?

2. Will the position report to the CEO or the senior VP of sales?

3. Will the right candidate come from a financial services competitor, a consulting firm or a consumer marketing giant like Procter & Gamble?

But executive search is different, you say. You have a broad idea of what the right person looks like, but won’t know for sure until you interview candidates and get a sense of what is available.

Or perhaps you are 85 percent sure what the position will be responsible for, and you’ll use the interviewing process to figure out the last 15 percent. And here we find the root of the problem — not answering critical decisions in the design phase. Imagine the frustration and cost of applying the same logic to building your new home:

"I’m mostly sure what I want the house to look like; let’s start building it and then decide the last details."

As with your new home, if the position is newly designed, that is all the more reason to be more decisive at the front end.

The inefficiencies in executive hiring arise from the complexity of the roles themselves, particularly in service industries.

The good news is that you can apply process optimization to the executive and professional hiring process, increase the odds of a successful hire, and substantially reduce the length of the process.

Keys to success include: defining the goals of the position clearly in the design phase; gaining agreement among decision makers on the "soft" and "hard" qualifications for the position; managing recruiting as a line function, not a staff function, and communicating the strategic "story" of the company consistently to the candidates.