The last two Business901 podcast featured Adam Zak, founder and CEO of Adam Zak Executive Search. Adam is an accomplished senior executive with more 
than 25 years of experience spanning the areas of management, consulting, financial and operations management and talent acquisition. He co-authored the book, Simple Excellence: Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean Transformation
detailing the role of senior management in achieving a successful transformation to organizational excellence.
You can find the entire transcript with Podcast Links, Learning about People with Adam Zak. An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: In Lean, we talk about culture. You have to evaluate both sides of the fence. You have to evaluate the company culture that is seeking someone, and then you have to find a fit for that culture. How do you do that?
Adam: There is a way to do that and so let me just take a couple of minutes to explain what I’ve done. I’ve been doing executive search for well over 20 years. I’ve completed just under 600 executive searches, and if those averaged even five or six interviews a piece and I know many of them involved more people than that. That’s a lot of interviews, so I’ve developed a strategy and a methodology and actually I’ve built a fair bit of Lean thinking into that. It just works. There is a lot of structure, but it’s also agile or flexible enough, so that I can tailor it to the requirements, the circumstances for every company, every position, and every candidate.
The interview approach that I use that I’ve built, it just helps to understand the candidate’s story. It’s about the candidate’s story: the skills, the experiences and the accomplishments. I ask questions about what the candidate achieved, why did it matter, questions about the kinds of decisions that they made. How they went about making them, questions about the mistakes that they made, how they recovered, what they learned from them, questions about why they were basically even drawn to the company where they worked and the position they held. Then, how they considered changes and went about making those. I really get to understand both for myself as well as on behalf of my client what was going on in the process.
I think it will lead into answering your question more specifically. My process actually consists of three components or phases and interviewing is actually only one of them, the one in the middle. It’s about preparation; it’s about execution and then it’s about evaluation and if you’d like to ask questions or if you’d like me to talk about each of those phases, I’m happy to do that.
Entire transcript with Podcast Links, Learning about People with Adam Zak.
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