Recruitment and Selection : The way of finding future talented leaders

Sammanfattning: Hiring the wrong leader can have disastrous effects on the productivity, moral, time and budget of an organization. In fact, a gap of leaders will arise in the next years, which makes it necessary to know and use the right strategies for attracting and selecting the appropriate future leaders who have the ability to successfully lead a company. Therefore, recruiting and selecting the right leaders is an important challenge for all organizations worldwide. How can they find, attract and choose people to become leaders? To answer this question, this Thesis looks at the whole process of hiring future leaders for organizations. First, we want to determine what is necessary to be successful in a leadership position in an organization. Second, we figured out what kind of recruitment strategies can be used in order to attract and find leaders, and third, we aim at showing which methods companies can employ to select the best fitting candidate for their vacant leadership position. In order to find answers to these questions, we have conducted interviews with seven leaders from different industry sectors, who shared their experience about leadership and the way of finding, attracting and selecting talented people who can become future leaders. Moreover, we conducted a questionnaire that has been handed out to students who might be potential leaders of the future. To ensure the meaningfulness of the study, we asked students from different faculties in 21 countries. The reason of the mixture of different sources is to acquire a broader insight into how the recruitment and selection of leaders takes place, with the aim of creating a representative picture.