Every being cries out silently to be read differently.
Unusual methods
The difference we make in an executive search, compared to other forms of recruiting, is we go out into the marketplace and actively solicit - - reach in, touch, turn around, and tempt - - the top talent from our clients most successful competitors. We are able to produce candidates who would otherwise remain unavailable. By sifting and unsettling the very best people who are working for someone else in the industry, we can often deliver gifted professionals who have the capacity to impact our clients in unexpected ways.
To tap into this lucrative passive marketplace we start by first mapping out the hiring company’s competitors and other companies who are potential sources of quality candidates. This is immediately followed by picking up the phone, discreetly cold-calling and entering into a meaningful dialogue with each of those top level prospects. Thus we can sometimes move from finding the best individual “out there” seeking a new opportunity to the best candidate in the entire marketplace. The difference can be a quantum leap, not always but sometimes.
This is a marked departure from the usual methods personnel departments use. It is the distinction between romance and bureaucracy. People really want to connect with people, not paper. They would rather be courted than be filling out application forms and jumping through bureaucratic and administrative hoops. Later on paperwork has a vital role to play but before the courting, paperwork is a genuine turn off and a nonstarter. As professional recruiters we know exactly how to start the romance and fight the roadblocks that could kill the relationship as everything progresses. One key to success in life seems to be to find and attract the right people to be around us … and then to keep them there.
Seeking Leaders
Most of us have a number of “unsolvable problems” that we’ve either put out of our mind completely, or else sit in the background of our mind kind of uneasily. Often the best solution to our management problem is acquiring the right person or persons. Sometimes the only way we can address these situations is with new and better talent.
What do we look for in the leadership talent we need? Usually not “enforcers” of the status quo and current corporate policies, which include planning, monitoring, coordinating, firefighting, hiring, firing, and so many other little things that keep the corporate machinery running. Generally the leaders we need are not the ones with great personalities, the pleasant cheery ones who might even be somewhat charismatic; these types tend to be more tap dancers than producers. Neither are they authoritarians driving people with their positional power; in the long run these title seekers demotivate people.
Rather the leaders we require understand the process of social influence (which maximizes the efforts of our staff towards the achievement of special goals). These types of leaders are characterized by honesty, focus, passion, respect and an inspiring kind of persuasiveness. We see in them confidence, clarity, self-awareness and a deep caring that goes beyond themselves. They love what they do, largely because they love who they do it with. They are both humble and empowering, collaborative and linked up, fearless and genuine. They connect their vision to action, leverage team strengths and help people transition to new roles and thinking. They are supporters instead of high achieving egomaniacs.
These leaders are visionaries who can imagine a better future and have the tenacity to work toward this end even when things don’t seem to be turning out in their favor. They build a “collective” with compassion, understanding, fairness and courage as they step into the unknown, and create conditions that don’t yet exist. Leaders envision a better future for their people that they (the people) don’t often initially recognize or understand.
Some of the traits that we as recruiters look for may vary according to the needs of the individual organization and its workforce, but at the end of the day, executive trailblazers primarily need to be able to focus on end goals and inspire the people they oversee if they are to be effective leaders.
Hiring the Best
The secret of any success is that we have to go to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. Steve Jobs once said “I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does. If we weren't still hiring great people and pushing ahead at full speed, it would be easy to fall behind and become a mediocre company…. The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.”
The smartest business decision we can make is to hire sufficiently qualified but special people. At the end of the day we bet on people, not on strategies. We can have the best strategy and the best equipment in the world, but if we don’t have the hearts and minds of the people who work with us, none of it comes to life. Bringing the right people on board saves us huge money and our business will run in ways we could not have imagined.
By contrast hiring the wrong person is the most costly mistake we can make, unless of course we count multiple wrong hires. The consensus is that it costs about 3 times an employee's annual income to correct a bad hire and greater than that the more senior the position. What is even more expensive than that is getting stuck with mediocre staff. Settling for second rate employees is the foundation for financial disaster. Nothing we do is more important than hiring right and then developing these people. Development can help great people be even better--but if we have just one dollar to spend, we would do best to spend 70 cents getting the right person in through our door. A few good hires in key positions will result in a tremendous upsurge for our businesses.
Four Categories of Candidates
The candidate pool for a new hire can be broken down into about four categories. There is the (1) active type who is aggressively looking for a new position. Passive candidates are either (2) “discerning” or (3) “dormant”. Discerners are carefully and consciously open to the right opportunity. Dormants are subconsciously open to the right opportunity but they have to be woken up to it. The fourth category are the (4) “Impenetrables, non-candidates who are not open to any opportunity for a variety of reasons; overcoming the impenetrable’s obstacles is nearly always a futile waste of energy and time.
In a covert search we do not exclude active jobseekers but we do deemphasize them. For the “actives” to be found to be the top talent in the potential candidate pool can occur only by serendipity good luck. It happens but not too often. Looking into our database, placing a local/internet ad and making a couple of quick networking calls is the easy part, but really only the beginning of a candidate search. The Discerners are a little easier to find because most often they are letting their friends and professional colleagues know they’re open to other alternatives to their current position. This is where we find many of our nominees when we first get out and start talking to people in the industry. Some are gems with legitimate frustrations; others are disgruntled types with attitude problems.
What are the chief frustrations that cause a Discerner to look around?
- They don’t like their boss or what he is asking of them; people more often quit their boss than quit their company.
- They are not getting technological development opportunities to upgrade their skills on; when a technology is fast changing, they are keen to work in a company which offers an opportunity to work with the latest tools; they seek the opportunities to grow in terms of types of projects, role in the project and forthcoming associated monetary rewards.
- Similarly they may not be getting professional development opportunities to advance; they feel stifled and operating below potential.
- They do not feel informed: top performers are logically career-oriented people and crave to know in detail how they are doing, how their work will be measured, what they need to do to be deemed successful, and what their career path could be.
- They do not feel recognized: they want to spend more time interacting with key people in the company and perhaps to find a mentor. Teambuilding events and formal recognition ceremonies for top performers build a needed sense of excitement. Status symbols are more important than we can know. This seems to apply equally throughout an organization for all people from janitor to executive director.
- They do not feel rewarded: there is an inequity between contribution and nonfinancial reward. Psychological rewards tied to a clear and understandable measure of results is either a driving force or a demotivator.
- Compensation may be too low. There may be wage inequities in the company or the industry. Further low pay or small salary increases may be a sign of disrespect. Appearances of unfairness may weigh on self-perception.
- The younger generation in particular may have itchy feet: they find job security in frequently changing companies. They seek new outside experience by moving into areas beyond their current proven abilities.
- Similarly, high-performing employees may become restless and uneasy unless they are continuously challenging themselves and expanding their experience and knowledge. When operations slow down these key people need to be sent on training and educational programs but instead have to face “cut-backs”..
- They may feel they’re being set up to fail. They might have been asked to be a square peg in a round hole or perhaps work in an area not well suited for their aptitudes, proclivities and instinctive work style. They may be given responsibility to oversee certain tasks but not the authority, tools or training to accomplish them. Where support systems are not properly in place turnover rates tend to be very high.
A reasonably high percentage of Discerners will turn out to be at the top of the candidate pool. However the Dormants make up the biggest percentage of the top candidates. They are very successful now and they’re busy carrying on with their role and responsibilities. They may or may not feel any undue frustration (for we all live with some frustration) yet they may have a sense that they’re not living up to their full potential. They are willing to talk to recruiters like us when they suspect there may be something more (delightfully) out there for them.
Very few recruiters have the phone skills and social wherewithal to come close to finding and engaging Discerners. An even smaller percentage have the knowledge and focus to recruit Dormants - - those top-perfomers who no one would suspect would ever change jobs. These are the candidates who must be approached, recruited, and presented with a compelling opportunity. Most recruiters just don't have the stuff required to recruit Dormants.
The Real Work
Once we have a grasp of what the hiring manager is truly looking for and we have laid out a job map of the industry where the best candidates may be uncovered, we have to get on the phone to set up a series of “a-cup-of-coffee” meetings. We will have a list of half a dozen fairly senior managers that we’ve talked to in the past, or that we’ve just generated through mediums such as LinkedIn, networking referrals, trade and professional associations, corporate reports as well as published directories. It’s usually very worthwhile for these executives to have a chat with us about what’s “going on in the industry”. Ultimately, they know it’s about jobs and opportunities. Such leaders may not be suitable or interested in a specific role today but they will certainly be so in the future. As well, senior candidates always know other senior candidates and certainly understand the game of hiring since they do it themselves. They can be great sources of information and contacts as we take the time to build relationships with these kingpins.
Gaining a candidate’s attention is a delicate matter. We are asking for “advice” and we truly are. At the same time the person we are calling may see us as a valuable career mentor who they might want on their team of life-time contacts. Any business leader who is somebody, will usually stop to talk (or else schedule another time to do so). This cup of coffee with a recruiter can become a two-way conversation between industry professionals with benefits to both.
Professionals like senior managers are busy people and calls to them are interruptions to their work day. Recruiters must provide a benefit by offering information that adds to their base of knowledge and motivates their curiosity. We simply explain the reason for the call in a clear but not too specific manner (we have our client’s confidentiality to protect). At the same time we cannot overwhelm the individual with too much information that may induce an automatic negative response. We do show both an immediate purpose for the call (an open job) and a long-term purpose (future jobs and a mutually beneficial relationship). We ask “do you know anybody who would be interested in a particularly attractive position?” The conversation carries on from there. Professionals who are going anywhere immediately recognize the value of relationships with executive recruiters in their careers and businesses.
As interesting and entertaining these conversations can be, it is grind-it-out-work and anything but easy, the constant evaluation process going on that requires rapid insight from rather meagre data. Most seniors are interesting conversationalists and charming but this is not a time for in-depth questioning that might alienate our guest. At the same time as recruiters we become rather good at sorting out the tap dancers from the high achievers in rather short order.
The Gems
Eventually we do come up with a small list of candidates worthy of a second meeting to get into some real details. The second meet is not a time for an in-depth appraisal process and in fact that will only come later on in negotiations when both the candidate and the hiring manager have begun to agree in principle about the possibility of working together. Referring new-found candidates to the hiring manager calls for discrete diplomacy, delicacy and tact. What is going to get discussed is some considerable detail about what the hiring manager really needs and wants.
Only then will we see if the opportunity has any “psychic enticement” for the potential candidate. Any candidate of impeccable caliber (who can step into in the described job role and command the immediate respect of both staff and customers alike) is going to need something deep inside calling to him. Certainly the opportunity to show what he can really do must appear large. More importantly there must be an appeal to the candidate’s suppressed (or sometimes subconscious) desires. In making this move the candidate, and perhaps his family, will have to feel “he has made it” - - he has reached what he is really yearning for. There will be status symbols, markers of what he views as success. Money will only matter for its symbolic meaning. During negotiations salary usually ranks amongst the lowest factors in the bargaining process. There is ego involvement and that is a good thing for the best candidates have predictably strong egos.
These strong egos need to be courted. As recruiters we take on the role of both advocate and negotiator but we have a rather straightforward agenda. In the second meeting and follow-ups the focus shifts to the work-to-be-none. The candidate needs to understand the job, want to do it and believe he can do it very well. This is the one main qualifier, the separator between the right and wrong kind of motivation for the position. The commitment to go forward will be there, or not.
Stepping Forward
Commitment is found in the willingness to do preparatory work in seeking out non-confidential information about the prospective company’s:
- products and technologies
- relevant but not-so-obvious web pages that might be useful
- the problems and challenges the whole company is facing
- industry issues that impact the business
- the tools the department uses
- methods employed in project management
- competitors and vendors to deal with
- articles about the company that illuminate how they run their business
- historical information about the company's products and growth
- organizational information about how various departments might work together
- financial and profitability data
- the names and telephone numbers of key staff members and coworkers
- most importantly, the local challenges to be faced immediately and long term
Much of this information will come from the hiring manager. The candidate will be able to talk to the manager on the phone and possibly with some of his team members. He can generate questions in advance in preparation for the face-to-face meeting. He can find out about the things that really matter and what it will take to make his department more profitable. It's in a hiring manager's best interest to help the candidate prepare for the interview -- at least to the extent the candidate is interested in doing so. A candidate who makes good use of whatever resources are bestowed prior to the interview, will likely make similar use of these tools once he's on the job. How determinedly he seeks out the facts is a very telling test of real interest.
Evaluating
Once the candidate is scheduled for a face-to-face with the hiring manager, the process is very similar to the comprehensive search described above. The questions of in-depth analysis of the candidate will get sorted out as he describes how he would do the job in question. Towards the end of this interview the candidate is asked to prepare a “project” or presentation that would demonstrate how he would actually do just one of the tasks of the job. Typically it takes about two weeks to get the presentation ready. Most attack the project with enthusiasm wanting to put their best stuff on display. Certainly this presentation can be very revealing. In terms of the nature of his work skills but also how well he fits into the team chemistry and corporate culture; the interaction between the candidate, the hiring manager and those staff he chooses to have on hand for the presentation will be enlightening. Compatibility between all parties will become apparent as staff inquiries are made about what’s put forth in the presentation. Whether to go forward together will become obvious rather quickly.
Covert Search Benefits
Summarily, recruitment through covert search usually takes less time than approaches made by common recruitment techniques. Candidates will be discovered that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The candidates recruited by such search are usually better quality than those found through ordinary methods, reducing the risk of recruitment enormously.
Outside recruiters are often better at pinpointing a successful executive match than in-house professionals – a finding that may come as a surprise considering that in-house recruiters are presumably more familiar with their own companies’ requirements than outsiders. External search means drawing upon a wealth of expertise and connections to zero in on candidates with optimal backgrounds and skill sets while assessing cultural and interpersonal fit. Further advantage is gained by hiring through an executive search firm in the form of discretion. Sometimes, recruiters are brought on board because the company wants perspective on a potential hire from a third party that can objectively comment on various candidates.
Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, we must look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if we don't have the first, the other two will kill us. If we hire somebody without integrity, we are actually saying we really want them to be dumb and lazy, pawns in our game. We have to find people with good judgment and taste; that’s not easy. Neither can we run a generic campaign to find such leaders in one place - - each search is unique. "Leaders don't flock. You have to find them one at a time."
Guaranteeing Success
Covert searches can be fee-based or run on contingency. That is an individual corporate decision. The industry often attaches a guarantee to a contingency based placement. We find the guarantee counterproductive. First of all, “fall-offs” are rare if the search is done diligently. Motivation is tested early and integrity is demonstrated in the skills presentation. Interactions with the hiring manager and his staff will reveal whether there is chemistry and a fit. Psychological attractiveness is addressed early; candidates only interested in a money grab or an “escape from Hell” are not hard to detect. A thorough reference check on the final candidate also ensures success and makes changing jobs much easier.
Second, good recruiters are hard to find. The squabble that can follow a guarantee can cause hard feelings and ruin a relationship that is highly profitable for both parties. If a new Hire leaves shortly after starting, nine times out of ten it is because of a lack of forthcoming on the part of the hiring company - - something crucial has been left unsaid or undone. It is either a lack of integrity on the part of the hiring manager or the hiring company has some type of serious structural problem that needs to be addressed or at least revealed. The other 10% of the time a falloff occurs is a result of something extremely unusual or even bizarre: an unanticipated family event, death, fraud by a sociopath, or a huge and belated counter offer by a desperate former employer applied with great psychological pressure. Truly exceptional. No recruiter can ever remove all the risk from a hire. Sound process and diligence removes as much is possible.
So instead of a guarantee in the form of offering a replacement candidate, what we do offer is a highly discounted comprehensive search to fix the problem, if there was one. Extremely remote improbabilities do occur. More often the rare occurrence of a falloff is a sign of a lack of a critical ingredient in the hiring process. We just fix it all up and in the process remove the cause of any future reoccurrence. Meanwhile a high quality replacement is brought aboard.
Character
Management guru and researcher Jim Collins has said:
The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake. The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led--yes. But not tightly managed….If I were running a company today, I would have one priority above all others: to acquire as many of the best people as I could [because] the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people. In determining the right people, the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience…. First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.
Hire character. Train skill.
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