The Strategy & Tactics of Job Jumping

Obviously, you are happy and love your job and love your company even more. Every ambitious young executive with a smidgen of perception soon learns that dedicated loyalty to one's mother company is a supreme, if unmentioned, requirement for remaining promotable in his company. But it is also true that most of these young executives are movable, and many are movable to the point of itchiness. Being free citizens of a free country, they should feel free to try to advance in the direction of their dreams, wherever this may take them. But the tribal nature of corporate thinking should impel them, in pursuing their wholly legitimate rights, to explore possible moves artfully.

Ambitious men will be tempted to make a break for the outside if they suspect that another company might cherish them more—or make them happier—than their present employer. If they are moderately bright, they also know that up to the age of 35 it usually helps a man in his search both for success and for personal fulfillment to switch jobs a few times. A breadth of experience gives him a very definite advantage for the long haul. And at any age the smart executive likes to ponder suggestions that he might profitably make a move, if only as proof of his potency. Executive recruiter William H. Clark of New York states: "Executives will all listen to us when we call up. We ask them if they have a minute, and they always have a minute."

Switching to another company, however, can be an awkward, difficult and treacherous business, and so should not be undertaken whimsically. You should not think of moving simply because you may be temporarily teed off at a superior. Also, you shouldn't move (except under extreme provocation) if you have not been with the company at least two years, because leaving may get you pegged as a job jumper. And after the age of 35, moving too many times, even in a two-year pattern, can get you labeled a "two-year man." Before seriously considering the wisdom of moving, you should ask yourself honestly if your ambitions may outstrip your salable talents and thus leave you restless wherever you are. You should wonder, too, if the other company is interested in you primarily because you possess information classified by your own company as secret. This kind of move can give you a poor reputation in your field if you switch.

Finally, you should wonder if you are overly fascinated with the prospect of a larger salary elsewhere. A $20,000 job where you are may give a better after-tax payoff for the long term than a $30,000 job across the street if the bonus, insurance, expense-account, pension and stock-option provisions are right.

Still, there are many good and sufficient reasons why an ambitious young man should want to move if he can successfully negotiate the leap. Here are 17 good reasons:

1. More dough.

2. More apparent opportunity, or more belief in your potential on the part of the top brass in your field.

3. Your company is going downhill.

4. Your boss is moving and wants you to go with him. It commonly happens that when he moves to a new company, where knives may be flashing, he wants near him men he can trust as well as men whose abilities and working habits he knows. If he succeeds they usually have a bright future.

5. You have been stuck in the same job three or more years at your company.

6. You are with a company over-blessed with managerial talent.

7. Men your own age or younger hold most of the jobs to which you might hope to be promoted. This is particularly grounds for looking around if you were passed over when they were chosen.

8. You suspect your company is about to be merged with a larger company. In some such mergers, men from the smaller company come out better; but they are more likely to come out worse, or be eased out.

9. You are working under an insecure guy who may be jealous of you or sees you as a threat to his own position.

10. You have difficulty feeling any particular loyalty to your superiors. If so, you probably would never be allowed into the inner circle.

11. You don't like the community in which you live and see little prospect that your own company will move you to a more congenial setting.

12. You feel boxed in because you are working under a decent-enough guy who has topped out or gotten beyond his depth and wants to keep you to help him handle his operation.

13. You find that to stay in your present company you will be expected to join a leading golf club (which may cost $1800 in initiation fees that the company won't pony up) or move into an appropriate, expensive neighborhood that strikes you as stuffy.

14. You see that the good jobs at your company all seem to be going to Ivy League types (if you're not one) or non-Ivy types (if you are), or to people in another functional area such as sales, or to relatives or ex-fraternity brothers of the top leaders.

15. You have to put up with too much nonsense in the way of semiannual appraisals, periodic psychological assessments, lie-detector tests, surveillance by undercover agents or telephone monitoring.

16. You are a Jew or a Catholic or a Negro or a non-college graduate or a non-Caucasian and see that such types don't seem to get beyond a certain level in the company hierarchy.

17. Your company has structured its managerial jobs so tightly that you have little chance to make meaningful decisions or take on real responsibilities.

William Lear, a self-made multimillionaire who built Lear, Inc., offered excellent advice to talented young managers when he said: "As soon as you have learned how to (continued on page 104)Job Jumping(continued from page 99) do your job as well as it can be done, ask for more responsibility in your company—or a different job. If you don't get it, get the hell out."

If, then, for whatever reason, you do become interested in changing employers, the first requirement is that you keep this interest an extremely well-guarded secret. Proceed, as in the military, on a "need to know" basis. If your best friend doesn't need to know, don't tell him, because even best friends forget pledges of secrecy when they get loaded and are among mutual friends. Care must be taken in talking too freely about your restlessness with outside companies that might want to hire you. In some industries and regions the companies are tightly knit and swap information on who is job hunting.

Secrecy is crucial in the strategy of job jumping for at least three reasons. First, your own superiors, decent and generous as they may seem to be, are likely to resent, if only subconsciously, evidence that a presumed team player (you) is considering deserting the team. This attitude may seem like archaic nonsense, but it is, alas, a modern-day fact of life in most corporations.

A high-level executive of a billion-dollar corporation who to my astonishment sought my counsel on leads for another job, swore me to the usual secrecy and confided: "You have no idea how careful I have to be. I would be regarded as a traitor if word got out that I was even interested in leaving." Another executive, who has successfully moved from a corporation that tops its field to a top-ranking company in another field, said of his old company's leaders: "To them it was inconceivable that anyone would want to leave. I was caught in the potentially disastrous situation where the president of the company I was negotiating with decided that as a courtesy he should contact the president of the company where I was still employed, to see if he would mind. This was at a point where we still hadn't agreed on salary. It was just dumb luck that my current president said he didn't mind if I left. Maybe he was really an unusually broad-minded guy, but it left me wondering if I was valued as much as I assumed."

A second reason why secrecy is crucial is that if another company is considering you, it may be considering you for a job where the incumbent still does not know he is about to be removed.

But perhaps most important, secrecy improves your own negotiating posture. An average-bright girl knows it is better to seem to be wooed than to woo, and the same applies to job mating. This usually takes some dissimulation, but the executive on the prowl must never seem to be prowling.

You are, of course, pleased to be sought after. That is permissible and good strategy. And, as a matter of fact, you freely confide that you do occasionally have a wistful yearning for larger challenges than your job at present provides. More dough? Hell, dough simply is a reflection of responsibility and challenge, which are all that concern you. You would only be interested in leaving your present happy situation if a greater challenge seemed to present itself.

To pull off this ploy, an intermediary is always helpful, and may be essential. You certainly can't swing it by passing out mimeographed résumés to 100 potential employers.

One way you lay the groundwork for developing useful intermediaries is to obtain, while on your present job, "visibility" outside your company. You meet fellow executives from many other companies by plunging into community activities and, if you are lucky, you meet officials from investment banks and management consulting firms. You are lucky because they are in an especially good position to know of corporate changes. An acquaintance who got a $75,000 vice-presidential job tells me he was tipped off by a friend who is a management consultant. You get visibility by writing for your professional journals. You keep your dean and old professors back at your college posted on your progress, because they are often consulted by companies looking for men. And, most important, you involve yourself as far as is decently possible in trade-association work, even to the extent of taking on tiresome chores.

This visibility should, if favorably developed, yield valuable contacts when you are ready to make your move. Most good jobs are filled through personal contacts. Officers of trade associations are in an exceptionally good position to know of openings within their industry. Also, many trade associations, such as the National Federation of Sales Executives, maintain placement services, as do leading business schools, such as the one at Harvard. Leads on openings can also be gained, without your seeming dangerously eager, by politely writing inquiries in response to "Help Wanted" advertisements appearing in financial journals and in the business sections of newspapers. Elaborate casualness should be maintained in making the inquiry, however—because the company advertising might be your own!

When you actively start making your move to land another job, one way to proceed is casually to arrange meetings with a half dozen of your best contacts, one at a time. You can do this at lunch, or at a Saturday-night party, or in a country-club bar. Inevitably, the conversation at some point will turn to how things are going at your shop. Things are going fine, of course, but you do make it clear you are restless for greater challenges, there or elsewhere. If you know of a specific opening where your contact could be of help, you indicate a normal curiosity in knowing about it and ask his advice as to how such curiosity might most effectively be satisfied.

This approach is preferable to asking him specifically to go to bat for you; because it gives him a chance to evade the role of middleman if such would make him feel uncomfortable, and assures you that if he does accept the role of middleman he will do it much more enthusiastically.

Another and increasingly popular way to establish an intermediary is to turn your problem forthrightly over to an executive recruiting firm. The good ones are fully alert to the need of secrecy and to the need of the job seeker to appear to be happily employed where he is.

Ostensibly, executive recruiting firms work only on behalf of client companies, who do in fact pay the search firms' fees. The client company needs a man and quietly commissions the search firm to undertake the task of finding just the right man. The fee paid to the search firm averages 20 percent to 25 percent of the total compensation that goes with the job in question for the first year. Thus, on a job that offers a $30,000 "package" in compensation, the search firm will be paid at least $6000.

Ostensibly, too, these search firms earn their stiff fees by making an enormous search of the national landscape of business to find just the two or three perfect fits for the opening in question, and go to elaborate pains to persuade the individuals they have discovered to permit their names to be presented. The search firms' clients are most likely to be fascinated with someone who seems exceptionally hard to find and get.

Some of the searches are quite taxing. But, increasingly, the search firms need to "search" no farther than their own files. They feed a description of the man who is needed into their computer, and then telephone the individuals whose cards drop out of the stack of cards fed into the machine. Your card may drop out for the very good reason that you have visited or written to the search firm and have given it a good summary of your qualifications.

One leading search firm, Hergenrather Associates, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, acknowledges that it regularly receives about 1000 résumés a month from executives. It reduces the information about the promising executives to computer file cards. Ward Howell Associates, one of the most respected search firms in the nation, estimates that about 50 executives or would-be executives come to its office in New York every day either to leave résumés or to (continued on page 162)Job Jumping(continued from page 104) visit. And an official of another of the biggest search firms in the nation acknowledged to me the other day that, more and more, men are "taking the initiative" in making search firms aware of their availability in the event a really challenging job comes along.

The bright men who are restless are not content simply with supplying search firms with information that can be fed into their computers or massive index files. They call their contact at the search firm every few months to report progress, seek advice, etc. The purpose, of course, is to make sure that they remain in the back of the recruiter's mind and are not just names on cards filed in the firm's computer system.

Many of these search firms—and there are now several hundred of them across the nation of widely varying quality—are now nationwide or international in their operations, or have exchange arrangements with firms in other cities. Boyden Associates, Inc., which maintains a sumptuous suite of offices on Madison Avenue in New York, has branches in such cities as Fort Worth, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Geneva, Switzerland. Most of the leading search firms have their headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Among the better known of these (in addition to Howell and Boyden) are Handy Associates, Inc.; Executive Manpower Corporation; Ashton Dunn Associates, Inc.; Canny Bowen Howard Peck & Associates, Inc.; Thorndike Deland Associates; William H. Clark Associates. Another leading search firm, Clark-Channell, Inc., is in Stamford, Connecticut. Chicago serves as headquarters for a number of major search firms, such as Heidrick & Struggles, Inc. Perhaps the most famous in Chicago is George Fry & Associates, Inc., which also does management consulting work. Another major management consulting firm deep in the search business is Booz, Allen and Hamilton, Inc. It has offices in many cities.

A curious executive outside New York seeking information on reputable recruiting firms that may have offices or contacts in his area might address an inquiry to the Association of Executive Recruiting Consultants, Post Office Box 490, New York, New York.

If you happen to be seen by your superiors or colleagues at the office of a recruiting firm or chatting somewhere with a recruiter, this need not be disastrous. Fortunately, there is an easy—and flattering—explanation available. The recruiter simply is seeking your counsel on possible candidates for a job which must be filled. This happens frequently enough to make the explanation plausible.

Ordinarily, when a recruiter contacts you he will try to reach you at home. Certainly he will not talk with you by phone at your office in any incriminating way. Too many companies these days have machines monitoring calls. If he talks with your secretary he will pretend to be a stranger and simply leave his name (or an agreed code name) and his number.

If you move through the various stages from being a "suspect" for a specific opening to a "prospect" to a "candidate" to a "finalist," you will only at the last stage be told the name of the client company. And only if you become a finalist will your name be revealed to the company. A meeting for a mutual inspection will then be arranged, perhaps as a casual encounter at a bar or in a hotel lobby in some neutral city where you are unlikely to be known. Perhaps it will be arranged that you share a room in a railroad car, or that you meet while admiring antiques in a window on Second Avenue in New York. (The prospective employer, as indicated, may have his reasons for being secretive, too.)

Search firms ordinarily like to handle "suspects" who can command at least $20,000 a year, for the perfectly greedy reason that their fee is geared to the compensation you can command. In some instances they will take on a man merely looking for a $10,000 job if he is young and seems full of promise. Such a comer can later be shifted into higher-paying jobs yielding more respectable fees to the search firm.

If a search firm seems reluctant to take you on, it may not be because you are unworthy of its effort but because, unknown to you, it has rendered man-searching assignments for your present company. As a matter of "ethics" it usually will not seek to lure away an employee of a client company. This courtesy of not raiding client companies has produced some intriguing results. A good many of the larger companies, rich in executive talent, consider it ordinary business prudence to take out insurance against being raided. They do this by occasionally throwing assignments to the major search firms, and thus putting themselves off limits to these major raiders. But that is not the end of the interesting ramifications. Some of the big search firms will not take certain big executive-rich corporations as clients because they can make more money raiding these companies!

Another hazard that the restless young executive must beware is the possibility that he is working in an industry where all the major companies have an unwritten antiraiding pact. Usually this can be surmised by keeping an ear to interoffice gossip. Corporate chieftains who observe these antiraiding pacts usually explain them on the ground that raiding isn't a fraternal kind of thing to do. Brotherhood aside, the pacts have an economic appeal. By making it less likely that a valued manager will jump the reservation and go to a competitor, they need worry less about demands for higher pay from the managers, and about the possible loss of company know-how.

The executive-recruiting firms usually know about, or suspect, the existence of such pacts and will certainly assume they may be a factor, for example, when commissioned to find a man for a company in the oil, chemical, soap, steel, tobacco, aircraft or tire industries. Usually the pacts only involve the major producers in such industries; the majors continue to regard the smaller firms in their industry as fair game for raiding. Ward Howell commented that when he is asked to find a man by a company, he asks right away whether "we may look in the logical places for the man who is needed."

A restless young man who concludes that he is in an industry that has an antiraiding pact must think in terms of getting into another spot within his own company or moving to a company in another industry (or going to a smaller company in his industry). Fortunately, a well-trained professional manager has knowledge (say, cost control) and leadership abilities that will usually make him attractive to companies outside his own industry. The trend in companies to diversify their products, furthermore, helps make their managers more competent to handle jobs in industries where the principal product may be different from their own. As diversification spreads, some pros are coming to feel that a company is a company is a company.

Once a specific company begins showing interest in you as a manager, you should, of course, be as hard-boiled in assessing it as it is in assessing you:

Get a Dun & Bradstreet report on it. And ask your broker about it as an investment.

Check people in the industry to find what the company's main challenges are and from which functional areas it has been drawing most of its top men.

Try to check with people in the company or town to assess its working climate: Is it static and highly orderly, or is it fast-changing and freewheeling; is it stuffy or shirt-sleeve; is it relaxed or suspicion-ridden?

Is it so big and does it have so many layers of authority that you might feel lost in it?

Is it highly paternal, or will it let you lead your own life?

Is it a company where individual integrity will be cherished, or will you find yourself in an environment where kickbacks, price fixing, private nest feathering, record juggling, the making of phony claims for its products or comparable plaguing ethical questions are likely to arise with uncomfortable frequency?

And whom will you be working under, if it is not a top job? Is he a decent type or a potential s. o. b.? Is he constricted or flexible? Will you be hitching your wagon to a star in the company, or has he plateaued out? Is he a confident guy who will respect your ability to handle the job that is open; or is he an insecure guy who may harass you with constant, detailed supervision?

In short, would you feel comfortable and work your best in this company's environment, and would it give you a feeling that you are making a creative contribution?

Meanwhile, if you are a finalist, the prospective employer will of course be checking you out, or he will have had his search firm handle most of it. You should make sure you are solid on the more common knockout factors that employing companies watch for.

Most important, you should not have a harem problem that could be bothersome in the community where you are going to be. You should not be so overextended financially that this will show up in your credit rating (which certainly will be checked). You should be able to handle booze and, if you are married, you should not have a wife who gets publicly plastered or is sexually restless in public. And you should not be vague or seriously inaccurate about dates in describing the sequence of your job and school histories.

When the time comes for the confrontation—or crucial interview—with the company official who must decide whether or not to hire you, be relaxed, confident, crisp, serious and reasonably candid. You should make it plain you are assessing his company as much as he is assessing you. Talk easily and articulately but not compulsively. (Engineers and accountants are especially prone to freeze up in such interviews, whereas salesmen are prone to talk too much.)

Within the bounds of decency, look the part. Unfortunately, many hiring officials, in their conceit, believe they can spot the best prospect within one minute after he steps across the threshold. If it is an important job, such officials are likely to be impressed by a "commanding appearance" and "executive bearing." One reason that appearances have become so important lately is that more and more companies are assessing strangers from other areas and have little chance to know them personally (because they don't bother to take the time). The growing use of executive recruiting firms has tended to produce a greater emphasis upon "the executive look." As middlemen, they must find a candidate and sell him to the management. They tend to fall into the habit of looking for a man who is a "successful package"; and a part of a successful package is the look of an executive, in many cases. The recruiters find it easier to sell such a man to their client. This, incidentally, has brought charges that some of these search firms tend too much to be typecasting bureaus.

In any case, it is safer in the crucial interview if you leave behind in your closet your bright ties, pink shirts, sports jackets, loafers, multicolored socks or alligator shoes. Wear a suit, the duller and neater the better. In general, it will help your cause—regardless of specific garb—if you visually project an image of sobriety, responsibility, restraint.

Don't be disconcerted if after you have filled out a 12-page questionnaire, submitted to a battery of psychological tests and have been thoroughly sleuthed as to background by ex–FBI men, the official who is interviewing you leans back and says: "Tell me about yourself." Three different executives have told me they had this maddening experience. Perhaps the official has been too lazy, before the interview, to read all the reports available on you. Or perhaps he trusts his own intuition more than reports. He knows that many of the traits most crucial to executive success cannot be measured. Thus, while you are talking he may not be listening at all to the tale of your career, but may be trying to surmise from the way you talk how you stack up on such crucial abilities as:

Will you be able to maintain a high level of thrust?

Do you appear to be the sort who is deft in handling people?

Do you have a reasonably good mind that can get to the heart of things and bring order out of confusion?

As you talk, are you demonstrating that you are a good communicator of ideas and facts?

Do you appear to be tough enough to stand up under a good deal of harassment, infighting and tension?

Would you really be the kind who would enjoy taking over responsibility for an important project?

Would you be likely to be able to generate trust and confidence in the people working under you?

On top of all this, the man—whether fair or not—is reacting to you on the basis of body chemistry. Do you hit it off together or don't you? If you don't, then you can lose out for the job even though you are perfectly fitted for it. But then again, maybe the guy will take a liking to you, or at least consider that you are OK. If so, you will get an offer, and perhaps a good one that you cannot resist.

You may be tempted to want to talk over the offer with your present employer before giving the prospective employer a final answer. Unless you are genuinely torn—or have been soliciting offers simply to use as leverage in trying to improve your position in the home company—this is probably a bad idea. Your present employer is a poor person to give you objective advice in this situation; and if he seems relatively undistressed that you are leaving (by not offering to improve your present arrangement), it may give you a down feeling.

On the other hand, your present boss should be the very first to hear of your decision to leave. The skill with which you make your break with the old company can be highly important for the future. Resist all temptation to spill your pent-up grievances and dislikes at this point. Just tell him you have an offer that is too hard to resist and let it go at that.

If you are still relatively young, bear in mind that you will quite likely be changing companies again in a few years, maybe less if the new job proves disappointing. And at such a future time when prospective employers turn loose their investigators on your background, they will most assuredly talk with at least your last two employers. Therefore, if for no other reason, it is prudent to try to leave behind you as many bosses and associates as possible who will recall you as being a basically good guy.

The process of pulling off a good move smoothly may seem to take a lot out of you emotionally. There are, indeed, hazards, anxiety and suspense. But the total feeling, if you are a natural executive type, will be one of exhilaration, because it is a major period of testing for you. The incidents in this testing will in later years stand out among the more vivid memories of your career.