During my 20+ years in recruiting, I’ve had the opportunity to work in very different recruiting environments. I’ve worked as a Senior Corporate Recruiter, where I could have 20 or more open positions at different levels of the organization at any given time, and I’ve worked as an Executive Recruiter, where a search might focus on one very important leadership position. I’ve also worked as an Embedded recruiter, becoming part of a company’s recruiting team and seeing firsthand how much the same role can change from one organization to another.

The pace and volume were different, but what really changed was the conversation.

As a corporate recruiter, I might spend the morning working on a Senior Pricing Analyst supporting a B2B sales organization and the afternoon talking to candidates for a Senior Cloud Engineer supporting an eCommerce team. The roles could be completely different, and I had to understand what each person needed to accomplish, what skills mattered and what would make someone successful in the position.

There was usually a fairly direct connection between the requirements of the job and the experience I was looking for.

Then I moved into executive recruiting, and I found myself asking a different set of questions.

The Job Description Only Tells You So Much

At the executive level, you’re not simply looking for someone who can perform a function or even manage a team. You may be hiring someone who will have Directors reporting to them, with dozens or even hundreds of employees ultimately within their organization.

That changes what you need to understand about the person sitting across from you.

I wanted to know how they set direction when there wasn’t an obvious answer. How did they develop the leaders around them? How did they make difficult decisions when there were competing priorities? Could they take a corporate strategy and turn it into something their organization could actually execute?

And then there were the questions that were harder to put into a job description.

What kind of organization does this person build around themselves? What happens to a team when they’re not in the room? How do they influence people who don’t report to them? What is their leadership philosophy, and does it make sense for the organization they’re about to join?

A resume could tell me where someone had worked and what positions they had held. It could give me a sense of their accomplishments and the size of the organizations they had led.

But it couldn’t tell me how they would lead your organization.

That required a different conversation.

The Role Changes. So Should the Search.

That’s probably one of the biggest things I’ve carried with me from recruiting across different levels of an organization.

A Senior Cloud Engineer and a VP of Technology may both need deep technical understanding, but you’re evaluating very different things.

For one, you may be trying to understand how they approach a complex technical problem and whether they have the expertise to solve it.

For the other, the question may be whether they can determine which problems the organization should be solving in the first place, build the leadership structure to address them, and make decisions that support the broader business strategy.

Neither role is more important. They’re simply different hiring challenges.

And if the hiring challenge is different, the way you apply the recruiting process should be different too.

The overall approach can remain consistent, but the decisions within it should change. The questions you ask, the people you target, the way you evaluate candidates, and even your definition of what “great” looks like should reflect the specific role and business situation.

That’s something that can be easy to overlook when companies treat every search as if the same decisions apply to every position.

A process that works well for hiring a high-volume technical role may not tell you what you need to know about a senior leader. Likewise, an executive search process can be unnecessary for a role where the primary challenge is finding someone with a very specific technical skill set.

The approach can stay consistent. The decisions within it should fit the search.

Every Search Has a Different Question to Answer

That’s one of the things recruiters tend to enjoy about the work. Even when two companies are hiring for the exact same position, the search can be completely different.

An embedded recruiting assignment makes this especially clear. A company may ask you to recruit a Senior Product Manager, for example, but the role isn’t really the same from one company to the next. The industry is different. The culture is different. The compensation is different. The business problem they’re trying to solve is different. Even what makes someone successful in the role can change.

Sometimes the challenge is finding someone with a very specific skill set. Sometimes it’s finding someone who can step into a leadership role and bring a team with them. Sometimes the resume looks perfect, but there’s a question about how the person will fit into the environment. And sometimes the biggest challenge is figuring out what the company actually needs before we start looking.

That’s why I don’t believe recruiting should be a one-size-fits-all process.

Before you can find the right person, you need to understand what the right person actually needs to accomplish.

Once you know that, you can start asking better questions, having better conversations and making better decisions about who belongs in the process.

Recruiting isn’t all the same. And that’s part of what makes the work interesting. Every search gives you a different problem to solve.