Digital leadership qualities to look for when recruiting for senior roles

Finding the right hire for your senior digital roles isn’t a simple check-box exercise, so we’ve put together a quick-fire guide to five essential digital leadership qualities you should look for during the recruitment process.

While assessing experience and knowledge are obviously important elements to consider when searching for the most appropriate candidate, you also need to think about behavioural traits too. Managing a digital team takes much more than having a finger on the digital pulse and excellent interpersonal skills. For the best business results, you need to look for someone who can demonstrate the following key leadership qualities that will help to drive your digital strategy forward.

Five critical digital leadership qualities

Here are five core leadership qualities that our digital recruitment experts recommend keeping in mind
throughout the hiring process:

Destination not digitisation – this may sound counter-intuitive, but good digital leaders understand that strategy is about the end-game, not the tools that take you there. The purpose of implementing digital solutions must always be to deliver a specific outcome – whether that’s to improve customer experience, maximise margins, improve security or anything else. The digital tools are merely a pathway to the required destination.
Customer-centric not industry-focused – digital has opened up the world and broken down barriers, so you need a digital leader with a broader, more customer-centric view to take the helm. To take your business to new heights, you need leaders who look to close the gap on consumer barriers by focusing on what’s missing for them – and if you abide by traditional industry boundaries, you’ll be forever bound by the existing expectations within them, rather than breaking through and meeting needs that have previously been unseen or ignored.
Innovation isn’t everything – while an eye for innovation is an essential digital leadership quality, it’s also crucial that your senior digital hires are able to shun sophisticated solutions in favour of more suitable (or cost-effective) existing ones. While your digital teams need to be working to advance your business, a true leader will consider rate-of-change to avoid jumping on (and investing in) short-lived trends and strategies that could quickly become obsolete. Sometimes, it’s better to reproduce tried-and-tested digital approaches, tailoring them to get the best-fit solutions that will still push you ahead of your competitors, without taking unnecessary risks or innovating just for the sake of it. Successful digital leaders move forwards, not sideways.
Collaborate and challenge – digital touches pretty much every part of your business, so a good leader won’t just look through a digital lens, but will take a business-wide view. Collaboration is the key, and not just at upper-management levels either. A good digital leader delves right in, taking notes from every department and challenging outdated or inefficient practices. They ask pertinent questions of the people at ‘ground level’ to ensure that any digital strategy satisfies the needs of the entire organisation, and the needs of the people it serves.
Resilience as much as intelligence – digital can be disruptive, throwing out complete systems and changing established rules that resonate throughout the business. It can also throw up myriad problems to deal with, from technology issues to rapid strategy shifts that need to be responded to quickly and calmly. Digital leaders therefore need to hire for digital roles according to candidates’ resilience and ability to adapt to changes, while staying focused, positive and able to manage the impacts felt by colleagues in other departments. Digital is always shifting, so your entire digital team needs to be able to roll with the punches.

There are many other digital leadership qualities to consider when hiring for senior digital roles – so if you’d like some further insight or advice, please get in touch with our recruitment experts.