Confessions of a Corporate Head-Hunter

As an executive recruiter, I often know where exciting jobs paying upwards of $50,000 are for the taking. I know the corporations that are searching for the executives; I know the best way to impress management and I usually know if it's in a candidate's best interest to accept an offer. Superficially, these attainments make me an attractive person to know. Were it not for the fact that the profession I practice is probably the most opportunistic, cynical, defensive and manipulative of the corporate service industries, I would humbly agree with such an assessment.

In order to do my job well, however, I have to create the impression that I am working wholeheartedly on behalf of people whose interests are, in fact, often inimical. The president of a specialty chemicals company, for example, hired me and my firm to find a national sales manager to boost his corporation's flagging profits. Upon investigation of the company, including interviews with all its executives, it became obvious that what was needed was not a sales manager but a top marketing man working in conjunction with a research-and-development program that would produce a better product line. My client irrationally resisted our findings: "I can imagine who it was who gave you that kind of advice," he began. "I've got a perfectly good market-research staff. My success for 25 years in this business has been due in large measure to ignoring advice at key moments. I don't want some hot-shot coming in here and endangering our team morale."

It soon became apparent that what the man really wanted was a weak sister who would put in long hours, get along with the rest of the boys and not really accomplish a thing. And yet despite his garbled arguments against my efforts, he still thought he was going to find a sales manager who would turn the company around--and kept insisting that he could hire only the best possible man. When I'm dealing with first-rate clients who are honestly trying to hire the best--the superstars of their industries--there's a tacit understanding that we won't waste our time on anything less than the best and that we'll have to pay dearly in salary and benefits. These searches may be arduous, but at least they're above-board and fascinating. It never seems to fail, however, that when I'm dealing with self-deluders, with second-rate managers trying to solve essential problems by making superficial changes in management, I'm bombarded with reminders that only the best executives will serve their needs.

Picture the scene, therefore, as I sit staring at our chemicals executive--the sincerity of my rep tie, the firmness of my squared jaw, the responsibility implied by my blue suit and poised note pad all assuring my client that I believe every word he's saying, while behind the facade I realize that to satisfy him I shall have to deceive him and that to win the confidence of my candidate I shall have to praise him for weaknesses that will make him perfect for the job. I was able to find a man rather easily, incidentally, but it was an unhappy business--priming the client to envision the candidate as a dynamo when I knew that he was no dynamo at all and that, in fact, a dynamo was the last tiling in the world the client wanted.

When my client is a knowledgeable, hard-nosed business executive with a corporate problem that demands outstanding, experienced personnel, my task can be technically difficult: I may have to interview many candidates; I may have to write hundreds of letters, ask for leads from all my contacts, run complicated and expensive computer programs, coordinate my findings with the impression my men make on my client, travel throughout the world. These superstar searches test our mettle, but they never involve us in deceiving the candidate.

If a candidate is the right man for the job, he's usually not in the job market. Let me stress that, because one of the biggest mistakes a man can make in an interview with me is to show that he actively wants the job I'm describing. If I seem to be saying something as obvious as "Play hard to get, so the recruiter will think your present employer loves you," that's only a small part of my advice. Candidates almost always forget that a head-hunter's first responsibility is to his corporate client and that it may be in the client's best interest not to hire them. The man whose strongest pitch is mat he "really" wants the job is showing an inadequate sense of the priorities of our meeting. The cagey candidate will spend most of his time trying to find out what the client's problem is, giving the impression that understanding the corporate problem is his first concern. Only after this professional and cool-seeming examination of the objective reasons for the interview should a candidate even hint that he might be interested. And if he has shown an astute understanding of the client's needs, his silence will usually draw the head-hunter into becoming the suitor. In the executive-search business, it's a lot better to be pitched to than to be pitching.

Too few executives realize that the head-hunter may have sought them out for reasons quite apart from trying to find them a job. For example, I may be looking for an unattractive character to parade before my client to make another man appear more attractive by contrast. I may be adding yet another name to my list because some of my clients think I'm performing well only when I march hordes of candidates, good and bad, before them. And, most subtly of all, I may want to produce for my client just the man he has specified, so that when it comes to making the expensive decision to hire him, the client will be forced at last to see that he had misinterpreted his corporate problem in the first place.

The only candidates who need fear these devices are those who want a job either for which they are not qualified or in which they would not be happy. And such men are usually not the most skilled nor personable. Although I do remember one candidate who wanted a job he knew he would despise and for which he admitted he was overqualified; and not only did he make these admissions but I recommended him for the $55,000-a-year post he subsequently got.

In this particular case, the job required writing talent along with managerial know-how, and while the salary was high, the job involved tedious minutiae, was a tawdry promotional campaign for a tawdry line of products and was surrounded by managers with whom my candidate would not get along. Were a man to have the right qualifications for the job, he would not, in all likelihood, have the stomach for it. I quickly figured out that I would be filling a job likely to become vacant in a relatively short time--either because the candidate became dissatisfied and looked elsewhere or because my client became dissatisfied with the halfhearted, grudgingly bestowed efforts of the new man.

The reason it worked out perfectly for all concerned was that both client and candidate were out to screw each other. My client wanted top talent to iron out the problems in his organization, so that he could hire less expensive help to do the job made possible by his short-lived superstar. I'm convinced he intended to fire his new man the moment things had been put back in working order. On the other side, my candidate wanted a quick bank roll and a prestigious step up the corporate ladder. He intended to start looking for another job the day he was hired. I had found the right fink for the right rat. I also collected my fee.

Let me return to my observation that it's the wise candidate who appears not to be in the job market. An intelligent man doing an excellent job should be content with both the kind of work he's asked to do and the amount he's paid for doing it. You and I know, however, that in an imperfect world virtue often goes unrewarded and a genuinely splendid employee may be getting short shrift from management. (A candidate should never admit this, however, because in the Calvinistic world of the corporation the disparity between virtue and reward is less likely to be read as injustice than as just deserts.)

An executive must remember that a recruiter is more likely to be impressed by his curiosity about the job and the company than by whatever the man has to say about himself. If the recruiter asks why the candidate is interested in the job under discussion, the candidate should parry by asking why the recruiter is interested in him. The candidate should give the impression that the recruiter's first task is to convince him, the man for whom he is buying an overly expensive, mediocre lunch, that there is something worth the candidate's time to listen to and that only when the candidate is convinced that he has been brought into the confidence of the recruiter will he speak candidly about himself.

The candidate must not be reluctant to ask blunt and seemingly indelicate questions. After all, it's his career that's at stake and he's the one who has to (concluded on page 174)Corporate Head-Hunter(continued from page 168) protect it. The recruiter can find another candidate more easily than he can find another client. In a head-hunter interview, valor is the better part of discretion. Here is a list of some of the boorish thrusts with which you ought to challenge head-hunters like me:

1. If this job is so hot, how come your client had to hire an expensive executive-recruitment firm to fill it?

2. Describe the character of your client. What kind of man does it take to get along with him?

3. Why did the last guy leave?

4. Does your client want excellence or something less?

5. How much is he offering? And, since it's not enough, how much will he raise his offer and spice it with benefits?

6. How did you get my name? If you got it from someone who knows me and whom I respect, I'm impressed. If you got it out of a computer run or through some corporate gossip, you'll obviously have to spend a lot of my valuable time verifying my qualifications. If I were as badly prepared as you are, you wouldn't even interview me.

7. How much do you know about the kind of work I do? If not a lot, how can you judge me?

8. How much does your opinion of me count with your client? If not a lot, when do I meet him?

9. Are you aware that if this conversation isn't kept confidential, I'll kill you?

The client would like the candidate to believe that job opportunities are in a sellers' market; the candidate wants the client to believe his services are in a buyers' market. Smart people on both sides will mantain this ritual fiction; my job is to mediate, satisfying all parties and, happily, by doing so, myself.

Though a large portion of the education of a recruiter involves learning about the way human beings behave under stress, there is a more substantive area of knowledge in which all successful recruiters become expert. It is so obvious that it's easy to leave unnoticed, and that is the knowledge of the intimate workings of major American corporations.

No other group of people is as likely to know as much about the nitty-gritty of American corporate life as are excellent executive recruiters. Corporate recruiters are in business because corporations have problems, and the best way to understand an intricate mechanism is to watch it malfunction. Just as all our knowledge of the human organism is a result of studies done to identify pathologies, the business expertise of the corporate recruiter comes from his constant acquaintance with the failures and disappointments of partially or wholly diseased organizations. If it weren't for our ailments, there would be no science of medicine; and where better to find out about the married state than in a divorce court?

As I have already mentioned, our clients often are too timid or too stupid to want an accurate assessment of their problems, but when they are honest and intelligent, their candid description of what's wrong with their operation makes us privy to the most intimate details of American corporate life. And from this intimate association with the essential problems of the corporation, I can offer these renderings of some of America's major industries:

Automotive: Crude; oriented to an ultimate market and distribution system that is crude--car hawkers, new and used, and abysmal servicemen.

Hotel and restaurant: With few exceptions, little professional management--hacks.

Entertainment: Worse than the hotel and restaurant industry.

Forest products: Highly oriented to property holdings in Northwest and Southeast; low paying; talented people find it easy to be noticed and appreciated. Depreciation from their vast real-estate holdings helps their earnings picture and leads one to believe they are better managed than they are. "Back to the land" characterizes their management style.

Electronics: Fast-paced, technical and highly competitive (as in the semiconductor business), these people have to be good--and are.

Machine-tool and related capital equipment: Inarticulate and unfriendly; an industry of grunters, very dull.

Management consulting: Very staff oriented, lacking decision makers--companies poorly organized, with high turnover. They tell clients what they already know in words they can't understand.

Computers: Many marginal but highly overpaid people in this industry; because computers are the new panacea and because practitioners speak their own language and don't believe in interpreters, we assume they're geniuses; someday soon we'll find them out.

Chemical: Technical types, obviously; introverted; more concerned with production processes than with marketing. A friend in the chemical business says the prevailing attitude is: "Look at our beautiful, huge new plant; we don't know how we'll sell its output, but we sure do make it cheap."

Banking: A surprisingly swinging group, especially the commercial-loan officers in major cities; still frumpy here and there, but coming on strong.

Construction equipment: Also somewhat crude, but exciting people--used to big dollars in investment, inventory, product development and attendant risk in selling to a fragmented, up-and-down industry--construction; also technical--a mechanical product requiring great engineering sophistication and solid research.

Publishing: Particularly book publishing, unbelievably sluggish, insular, outmoded, provincial (too tied to new York), overpopulated with polite, mediocre people and companies.

Advertising: Though deserving of some of its criticism and populated with its share of out-and-out phonies, it is, on the whole, unjustly maligned; many fascinating people; a more creative, open, imaginative group than in publishing--the stereotypes in plays, novels and movies are boring and ludicrous. They are good, positive cynics; remember, their clients aren't always prizes.

Consumer durables: Such as TV, hi-fi, electric organs, white goods and various appliances; good merchandisers or they couldn't survive, but crude in a manner similar to those in the automotive industry.

Retailing (including supermarkets): Expects its managers to work 70 hours a week for coolie wages--what caliber of people do you think that attracts?

Railroads: Though astronaut Wally Schirra reminds us that we all need them, the Penn Central debacle reminds us: How unfortunate.

Airlines: Railroads in the sky.

Consumer packaged goods: All-round most talented, most articulate, most intelligent, most extroverted and best-paid managements.

The executive head-hunter is some sort of hybrid between a fiduciary and a cardsharp. In his most responsible role, he's authorized to analyze the crucial ills of American business life and find the men most capable of remedying them. This trust is bestowed on him by highly paid corporate executives who recognize that problems have gone beyond their capacity to handle them and have the good sense to delegate authority to trust-worthy management experts. In his most Machiavellian role, he's a mediator between executives who don't understand their problems and job candidates who don't care what the job is as long as there's a quick buck to be made.

Without a strong streak of irony, the head-hunter is a dullard unprepared to distinguish between those who deserve to be handled like the fools or mediocrities they are and those who deserve his most expert judgment and most candid emotions. In dealing with me and my colleagues, whether you're a corporate manager or a man looking for a job, your best assurance of good treatment is to know your own mind. You can be sure that the man sitting across the table from you knows his.