How to Hire a COO
Looking for someone to ensure business operations are efficient and effective? Experts explain how to structure your search.
If being the public face of your company as well as managing day-to-day operations is becoming unfeasible, or if your board of directors has been hinting that you need another member of the management team to drive growth and performance, it might be time to hire a chief operating officer.
While the actual duties of a COO can vary greatly company to company, the classic description includes responsibility for managing the activities of the company, including daily operations. As one of the highest-ranking executives, the COO reports to the CEO and the company's board of directors.
Hiring a COO can free up a CEO to focus on major external initiatives and foster new opportunities rather than being occupied with keeping multiple departments productive. Also, an experienced COO can bring new leadership tools to an office – which is especially true for start-ups whose CEO has been the single executive running the show from day one, according to Tom Berray, a managing partner at Cabot Consultants, an executive search firm based in Virginia.
"In the CEO-COO model, the CEO is trying to figure out the strategic aspects and the COO owns the execution model. The COO figures out how to keep things running efficiently, and on time," he says.
How do you know it's time to bring another executive on board? Berray says he usually sees companies that haven't had a COO from the start decide to add one when growth is well underway and the company needs to ramp up its execution scale in a short period of time. If that's the case, then it's time to bring in a COO with a proven record of builiding up sales and scaling the departments that are key to your company's success.
Dig Deeper: The Leadership Makeover
Hiring a COO: Define Your Needs
While it's true that any new employee needs to be part of the long-term corporate strategy, that couldn't be more important than when hiring an executive teammate. Visualizing where you want to be in five years, one year, and even next quarter, will be significantly more natural to see how a new COO fits into that matrix.
The cleanest way to plot out that role is through a well crafted, future-oriented job description, which can be the single step that begins the hiring process – and makes it simpler, from start to finish.
The basics of a solid job description include title, to whom the position reports (here, it's the CEO and board of directors) and a summary of the position and bullet-pointed specific job duties. For a more thorough document, add names and positions of colleagues that position will work with closely and minimum qualifications.
Even if you do not include them in a description, executive search experts advise thinking specifically about what accomplishments your ideal candidate should have – say, successfully overseeing a variety of departments spread across multiple business locations. Remember, for any executive-level position, you need not only be searching for someone with education, qualifications and who's a good match personally, but also someone with a proven track record of growth success.
Because the role of a COO can vary from company to company, you'll want to assess which departments of your organization the COO should oversee – be it all or just a few. Also, ask yourself whether you want to allow some flexibility in hiring based on the strengths of your best candidates.
"A lot of times the CEO recognizes and focuses on their few core strengths, for instance a former lawyer could have the legal department report to him," Berray says. "Sometimes the CEO and COO will split up department-reporting by skill set."
Dig Deeper: Improving Your Hiring Practices
Hiring a COO: Recruit Wisely
If your company is in the position to hire a COO, chances are you have a significant budget for doing so. If that's the case, have you also budgeted for the time and energy it will take to find an ideal hire?
Because most top candidates from related fields are likely entrenched in great jobs already, they're unlikely to be trolling job-posting sites. To reach out to a qualified group of candidates you'll need to prepare to spend significant time on calling and networking with peer CEOs and COOs, or to fork over what can be a large fee to enlist the help of an executive search firm.
"You could use a search company, but a lot of start-ups don't have that 20 percent to spend on a head-hunter," says Dan Teree, who founded Ticketfly two years ago with Andrew Dreskin.
Berray, an experienced executive recruiter, says his firm rarely turns online for finding executive-level candidates, due to the daunting task of weeding through "hundreds if not thousands of responses – and getting a lot of irrelevant stuff."
There are exceptions, though. He recommends posting a COO position if it's located in a remote geographic area or is in a field different from the one you'd like to hire from. "If you're looking for some cross-industry pollination – if you're open to some people you wouldn't normally think of, it could work," he says.
If you do decide to post a job listing online, let the job description you've already crafted be your guide. Include minimal qualifications, educational background, relevant fields of previous work, and what sort of a track record you're looking for.
You must also consider how to convey what kind of candidate will be a strong cultural fit. Performance-management expert Jamie Resker, president of Employee Performance Solutions, suggests looking for characteristics that already exist in your office. "It's not an exact science, but you want to find out whether this person is going to be a good fit culturally in the office is important," she says. "For that, you just need to tap into the best qualities your existing employees share."
If you fear getting a flood of applicants, listing a salary could narrow the pool. Otherwise, experts suggest it is not necessary, and is highly variable at the executive level. With the listing complete, post to your company website, and supplement that with listings in targeted trade publications and specialized media and postings on online job sites.
Dig Deeper: Tapping the Talent Pool
Hiring a COO: Be Competitive
In order to attract top candidates, you'll need to offer a competitive salary. Searching competitors' job listings can be a useful means of finding that industry information if you aren't in the position to purchase salary study information or work with a firm that conducts compensation research. Other simple sources of information can be PayScale.com and Salary.com – and they adjust for geographical inequalities in pay.
