Thursday, June 15, 2021 — Severin Sorensen
Program Description
Consistently attracting and capturing top game-changing talent – aka, the “difference makers” — for your business is a critical life skill for business owners and senior executives to master for sustainable company growth and business success. Difference makers are game-changing impact players and include key executive talent and much needed technical employee utility players that great businesses and teams are built upon. Unfortunately, knowing that you need and want employee “difference makers” does not make them magically appear, nor help you retain them.
Severin Sorensen, a successful serial entrepreneur, executive headhunter, and former Vistage Chair (2010-2018), has long focused on “high growth” companies and the “difference makers” that lead them. Informed by over 85 years of scholarly research on selecting talent, Severin has developed a consistent and reliable behavioral characteristics Talent Capture Management system that focuses on the business processes of identifying, recruiting, screening, hiring, onboarding and retaining top game-changing talent. The presentation begins by exploring typical and member “hiring fumbles” and misjudgments that occur in the hiring process; a session called “Hiring Bad.” These oversights frequently cripple organizations, waste resources, delay progress and cause mindshare distraction for firms. Severin argues that the root causes of many of these hiring fumbles are detectable flaws and frequently overlooked during the traditional hiring process. He also argues that candidate selection is not just about asking questions: It is knowing what to ask and what to observe.
Having identified the typical hiring problems, Severin next turns to the creation of a systemic process for greatly increasing the probability and success of hiring great hires every time. He explores the use of Ten (10) Talent Capture Management Tools that he uses regularly to consistently identify, attract, recruit, screen, hiring, and onboard for performance difference-maker success. Severin’s Top 10 Tools of Talent Capture Management shared in the presentation include Behavioral Job Analysis; Behavioral Job Description; Candidate Sourcing, Attraction, and Recruiting Plans; Employment Application Intake Process and the ATS; Applicant Funnel creation and first screening process; Phone Interviews of Top Candidates; Psychometric testing of top candidates in preparation for Panel Interviews; Candidate work samples and homework; cognitive tests; panel interviews; structured interviews and candidate ranking; job try-outs, integrity tests, and other pre-employment tests. Severin also reviews the stages of candidate warming, from candidate attracting, website career pages, outreach, and contact during the screening and selection process. Examples of questions for various stages of the review process are explored, along with setups strategies for phone screening interviews, panel interviews, and final interviews. Additional insights include tips for background checks and screenings, reference checks, and compensation negotiation. This session provides a watershed of concepts, theory, tips, and tools to enlarge the CEO and executive toolbox of Vistage members and their companies.
Biography:
Severin Sorensen is CEO of ePraxis LLC, a premier level executive headhunting, talent selection, and executive coaching company. As an executive coach, Severin has provided over 7,000 hours of paid executive coaching sessions to business executives from companies large and small, such as fast growing INC 5000 companies, and large publicly traded multinational corporations. As an executive headhunter, Severin is frequently called on to help companies identify, screen, test, and select top talent for businesses looking to place ‘difference makers’ in the CEO, President, and key executive positions. Severin leverages over 85 years of scholarly talent selection research to consistently find, screen, test, and select difference making top talent for his clients.
Severin earned a graduate degree (M.Phil.) in economics from King’s College, Cambridge, University, England, and two undergraduate degrees in economics and political science from the University of Utah.
