Recruit Industry Icons – The Game-Changing Hires That Can Literally Change Everything

Apple recently lost its iconic iPhone designer to OpenAI and another iconic designer to Meta. The loss of two of Apple’s icons should be considered a warning sign of things to come. Apple has been known for years for its exceptional retention rate among its senior executives.

Smart recruiting leaders everywhere need to be aware of the growing practice of “Industry Icon Recruiting” (Or IIR). This recruiting strategy can produce a single well-known and admired icon hire and this hire may literally be capable of changing the future of most companies (and even industries).

This high-impact business strategy also provides a strategic opportunity to recruit leaders who are literally viewed as heroes by their own top executives. With this single hire, recruiting has dramatically increased the company’s capabilities. And with those added capabilities, the company may now be able to change its future direction.

The Key Elements Of The Industry Icon Recruiting Strategy (or IIR)

The recruiting of industry icons is a strategic hiring process. It is designed to hire at least one exceptionally well-known and highly admired industry thought leader/icon each year, directly away from your top competitors.

Fortunately, this recruiting effort only requires the recruiting function to put together a small team of influential managers and employees. Their role is to identify a handful of the most desirable industry icons to target. And then the team spends up to a year building a trust relationship and trying to convince each target that your company can offer them their “dream job.” As an added benefit, this recruiting strategy provides the team with much more time to accurately assess each of your recruiting targets.

The industry icon recruiting strategy has four primary goals: to increase your company’s capabilities, to attract new recruits, to excite your current employees, and to gain insights into your competitors’ current and future plans. Its only major drawback is that it can take up to a year to produce the desired outcome.

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The Many Benefits of Industry Icon Recruiting

Outside of recruiting a famous replacement CEO for your own company, there is no single hire that will ever produce the broad business and recruiting impacts you will receive after you hire a renowned industry icon. This is why I call this single-icon hiring “The hire that can literally change everything.” The top benefits of this IIR strategy are listed below. They are ranked from top to bottom based on their business impacts.

• Expect an increase in your company’s strategic capabilities, while you reduce those of your competitor – obviously, by hiring a highly successful industry icon. Your company will instantly increase its strategic knowledge and capabilities in a mission-critical area. But recruiting leaders should also realize that your CEO and your executive team will be pleased when they learn that, in addition to increasing your own company’s capabilities. That you are simultaneously hurting your competitor by decreasing their strategic capabilities, which may take years and many resources to replace.

• Realize that this icon hire will make it easier to change your company’s direction – even though a shift in corporate direction may be sorely needed. In reality, it is quite difficult to change the direction of a large corporation. However, the addition of this icon and the capabilities it brings may create enough momentum to convince everyone that this is the opportune time to make the necessary directional shift, which might be enough to clear the path for your company to become the #1 in your industry. 

• Expect to gain deep insights into your competitors – when you hire an icon from a top industry competitor. You will instantly gain their knowledge of the practices and plans of their current company. However, at industry conferences, many industry innovators get a chance to run their ideas by these industry icons. When you hire an icon, you will also gain their knowledge of the innovations occurring throughout your industry. As an added bonus, even if you don’t end up hiring them, your relationship-building conversations with your icon targets over many months will still provide you with many of their industry insights.

• Plan on dramatically improving your ability to recruit – because you are hiring a renowned industry icon. Almost everyone will talk about their hiring. And many will assume that “something’s happening here.” The possibility of something happening will be enough to significantly increase the number of applicants who will consider applying at your company. Hiring an icon will also improve your brand image as an employer of choice for future hires.

• Expect an improved retention rate among your current employees – many of your employees who are currently considering leaving will change their minds in the short term. To learn whether the upcoming changes will positively impact them. 

• Realize that the hired icon will bring other top talent along with them – because the newly hired icon will be well known and admired. After they join your company, they will convince some and inspire extremely talented individuals to join them at your company.

• Expect the status of your recruiting function to skyrocket – after you successfully hire even one renowned industry icon. Your CEO will literally be bombarded with congratulations from numerous executives and others outside your industry. And that notoriety, coupled with the business impact the icon-hire will create, will dramatically raise your recruiting function’s internal status. In addition, your function will also become a benchmarking target. As external executives and recruiting leaders attempt to learn more details about how you accomplished it.

• Consider the possibility that this single hire will actually increase your stock’s value – if your company’s stock price has been declining. Both your current and potential shareholders will certainly note the fact that you pulled off such a major recruiting accomplishment as a sign of things to come. And that positive thought might even increase the value of your stock.

• Expect this IIR approach to require few resources – because this industry icon recruiting approach doesn’t require any significant budget allocation or new technology. In addition, the program’s goal will only be a single icon hire per year. Your function won’t have to worry about a resource drain when you implement it. All that the strategy requires is a small team of your most impressive employees/managers to spend the equivalent of one day a month on building relationships with your targeted icons. 

Final Thoughts

Most of the recruiting leaders that I know are constantly on the lookout for high-impact strategic recruiting approaches that will, because of their significant business impacts, garner the attention and praise of the executive team. But to qualify for consideration, each proposed recruiting strategy can’t require a significant budget allocation or any new technologies.

In my view, the only recruiting strategy that even comes close to qualifying is the Industry Icon Recruiting (IIR) strategy. Incidentally, the team lift-out strategy comes in a distant second place in terms of business impact while the “most wanted list” recruiting approach comes in third.

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Notes for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.

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