I was fortunate when I worked in the Cleveland district for Xerox. We had a lot of fun and great success turning a bad operation into a pretty good one. One spring, Lina, a district sales rep who was about to get married and transfer to Pittsburgh, got together for dinner with her best friend and their two fiancés. The conversation, as is so often the case, was about work. Lina told them about her whacko general manager and some of the things he did, like dress up in drag as Vanna White to play Wheel of Fortune or swapping the skirt for a god-awful plaid suit to look like Monty Hall of Let’s Make a Deal, all in the interest of getting his troops cranked up enough to overcome their god-awful sales record.

It turned out that Lina’s buddy was engaged to a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who thought a story about this strange person would be a good idea. And so that’s how I ended up on the front page of America’s largest circulation daily newspaper.

And how I met Ross Perot. I probably seem like I’m ego-tripping and name dropping, but I am backing into an important chapter on recruiting. The “giant sucking sound” is a reference, of course, to Perot’s comment during the 1992 campaign about the possibility that NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Alliance Treaty with Mexico and Canada, would cause massive losses of U.S. jobs. A colorful choice or words from a colorful and, I believe, immensely talented business leader and good citizen.

I’ll leave debating the effects of NAFTA to others, but the sucking sound that I hear today is the talent that’s being lost because most companies do such a poor job of recruiting, retention, and training. Ross Perot taught me a valuable lesson about recruitment that I want to share with you in his chapter. First, let me provide more context.

The story in the Journal came about because Jim Hirsch, the WSJ reporter, was persistent enough to overcome my skepticism about how much interest there’d be in the saga of people selling copiers for a living. Boring. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I referred him to headquarters for permission, figuring that would end it.

A month or so later, I heard that corporate was thrilled by the idea. Free publicity. Let him in, I was told, but don’t screw up.

I dutifully set up a two-day round of customer visits, employee roundtables, and a seminar on our mission statement and quality process. After spending time with my two management partners for administration and service, Jim Hirsch interviewed me for two hours and then went away for a couple of weeks. The subject still seemed boring to me and I thought Hirsch would find something better to do with his time and talent. Late one afternoon in September, the reporter called back and said there was good news. The Journal would publish the story the next day.

“What page?” I asked. Certain it would be buried behind the ads for fast food franchises and turnkey motel opportunities along U.S. Route 1.

“The front page.” Hirsch’s tone suggested that I had offended him.

Great! But Jim had some bad news. He said, “I’m going to make you famous outside Xerox and infamous inside it.”

Oh? Why?

“You know that stuff about management partners, customers, and quality? My editors thought it was boring. They prefer a kind of rebel, bureaucracy-buster approach.”

The next morning I saw exactly what he meant. Here’s the headline:

Jim Hirsch was right. I was famous and infamous. More than four hundred phone calls were logged in that day. The first one, at 7:30 in the morning, was from my father, who had just come back from hitting every newsstand for blocks around and buying up all their Journals. He was so delighted and proud, he had trouble speaking. My 2.4 Lordy How Come! at Dayton had been permanently expunged.

He couldn’t get the words out and neither could I. We both choked up. Dad had spent the morning delivering newspapers to all the relatives and old neighbors.

The phone was madness. I was hearing from old friends and news friends, most of whom wanted to sell me something. I was suddenly the stockbroker’s pal. It was impossible to get any work done. Paul MacKinnon joined me in my office and I took the calls on the speaker phone.

“Frank Pacetta?”

“Yes, it is.”

“This is Ross Perot,” a man with a high-pitched Texas twang proclaimed.

“Sure you are.” I said, chuckling and thinking that whoever it was, he better not give up his day job expecting to replace Dana Carvey, the Saturday Night Live comedian. Ross must be used to that reaction. He gave me his private number. “Call me right back, I’d really like to talk with you.”

He hung up, leaving Paul and me to sit there in shocked silence. Finally Padre snapped out of it and blurted: “ThatwasRossPerotandyou’regoingto-meethimandgetajobandtakemewimyouandwe’regoingtoberich—and no more copiers!” We calmed each other down and I dialed the number. Perot’s assistant was waiting for the call and put me right through.

Remember, it’s a little after 7:30 in the morning in Cleveland, which means 6:30 Dallas time, where, I guess billionaires get an early start to muck out the stalls and read the Wall Street Journal Ross congratulated me for the article and said he was impressed by my leaderships skills, willingness to take risks, and the emphasis on creating a family atmosphere in the workplace. “I want to meet with you as soon as possible.”

Paul, meanwhile, is beaming like a man whose ship has just come in and it’s the size of the aircraft carrier Enterprise.

I was dumbfounded. Meet with me? My assistant wasn’t in yet and I went out to rummage around on her desk for my planner. “Gee, my schedule’s kind of full,” I said turning the pages. What an idiot!

“Why don’t I fly in tonight,” Perot suggested. I thought, Tonight? Not tonight, I’ve got to get my car washed. Yes, that’s what occurred to me. And yes, that was not a rational reaction. We ended up setting a date for the following week.

The day came, I was much calmer, but my wife, Julie, wasn’t. Perot was not interested in an evening of business transacted exclusively at a fancy restaurant. He wanted to go straight from the private jet terminal at Hopkins Airport to the Pacetta home in suburban Hudson. To get ready, Julie had our cleaning lady go over every inch of the house, then she cleaned it herself, and followed up with a backup cleaning lady to do everything all over again. When he arrived, Perot greeted me with a warm hug and said he needed a phone to make a call. I stood nearby and listened, impressed. “How are you,” Ross asked the person on the other end, and then said, “Did we get any business today?” Sixty years old, a billionaire, and the guy was still hitting the street.

On the ride home to Hudson, I finally worked up the courage to ask, “Ross, why are you here?” The answer to the question was day number one in my postgraduate leadership education. He said, “When I meet, hear, or read about someone with your qualities, I want to personally get to know them to see if they can impact my business organization and our customers.” Then, Ross Perot added, “Frank, it’s all about leadership and people.”

I knew that and so do you. Or we think we know that. The lesson Ross Perot delivered is one we really have trouble grasping on a level beyond its obvious common-sense appeal. On the page, the words seem obvious, even trite: “I want to personally get to know them to see if they can impact my business organization and our customers.” His presence in Cleveland, in the front seat of my car, took those flat words and pumped them full of life. Ross Perot was engaged in important business. He talked the talk, but he was there on the ground in Cleveland taking direct action to implement his vision.

“Frank, tell me this,” Perot continued on as I negotiated rush-hour traffic with my Honda Accord, “Do you recruit?” What a perfect question. Home-run time. I explained our process from A to Z, how we assemble a pool or thirty to forty candidates, test them, pare them down by about a third, run them through a battery of interviews with all eight managers who must agree on the hiring decision unanimously, and then I come in for a final face-to-face session with the top candidate. Perot listened politely until I finished. “No, I mean do you recruit, Frank? Personally? Do you know the competition’s best manager or sales rep?”

I…the best…roughly speaking…I could…There was no way around it. I had a process that my operation worked conscientiously to execute, but there was one thing lacking—real leadership involvement. Perot drove the point in deeper: “Frank, you’re in this position for a reason. It’s up to the leaders to be right up front and lead the charge to find the best people. You can’t win without them.”

But I had a damned good process. Yeah, and process isn’t enough.

Perot, the teacher, wasn’t finished. “Tell me this, if I called Xerox’s CEO with a complaint would he call me back?”

“Of course. Paul Allaire would be delighted to talk to you.”

“No, if John Doe, not Ross Perot, called, would the CEO return the call?”

“Somebody from his office would, and do it promptly. There’s a process.” That didn’t satisfy my visitor. He wanted to know what the difference was between Perot and Doe. I tried to explain that Xerox had thousands of customers and that Paul Allaire couldn’t call them all.

“Frank, that’s what happens. We get too big, add so many layers, and we think we’re too important. To this day, if a customer calls me I get right back to him. Or if a sales rep wants me to come along on a customer visit, I’ll do it. What else would I do?”

What else would I do?

I’ve borrowed that question from Ross Perot and I use it all the time. It’s really useful in this scenario: I’m doing my managing by walking around and hear someone talking about a problem with a customer. “When are you going to see them next?” I’ll ask.

“This afternoon.”

“Would you like me to come along?” The real answer may be no, but usually I’m invited. At the end of the day my colleagues thank me profusely for tearing myself away from important business—all those long-term strategy sessions and what-not. That’s when I say, “What else would I do? What else is more important? What do you suppose my job is all about if I can’t help you fix the customer’s problem?”

Do me a favor, write that Ross Perot question in your red notebook.

When we drove up to the house, Julie came out and Ross lost all interest in me. My wife is petite and about four-foot-eleven. She’s always got a strong wind blowing at her back, and Ross’s personality isn’t bland, either. The two of them really hit it off immediately, and were perfectly matched in height, walking arm-in-arm up the driveway, like a couple of tiny figures off the top of a wedding cake.

My children were perfectly behaved, of course, though Frankie, then seven years old, was still a little sullen about being forced to bathe. Ross scooped up Alle, who was only one, and held her on his lap through the entire visit. I had stocked my liquor cabinet with standard brands for a Southern gentleman—Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and so on—Ross had bottled water. I put away about four scotches before we headed out to dinner.

As we walked through the restaurant to the table, I could hear whispers, “That’s Ross Perot. What’s he doing with Pacetta?” It was probably four hours before we got out of there. Ross seemed to ask hundreds of questions, mostly about our family, and told us all about his family and the early history of his company. At times, it was very emotional. His eyes would fill with tears as he recounted special moments of sharing and sacrifice.

For me the whole evening was special, as you can probably tell. There was no way to know at the time, but Ross Perot was on the verge of redefining himself, for better or worse, by plunging into politics. In the eyes of some critics who judge him solely on the basis of his eccentric performance in the 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, he’s a flake. But what we saw was an authentic visionary and leader. Tough, uncompromising, principled, and devoted to his family—Ross Perot is the man he says he is.

In the winter of 1999, while writing this book, I was pleased to see that he hadn’t changed. The IPO for Perot Systems was a huge success, billions of dollars were added to his net worth, and there was Ross telling the press that he’d return any customer or shareholder telephone call.

“What else would I do?”

Snare Jordans

Did he offer me a job? Not directly. But in due course, I was contacted and asked to consider joining Perot Systems, but I decided against moving my young family to Texas. Also, the company’s culture required new managers to start over in some respects. I wanted more leadership and management responsibility, not less. It’s one of those judgment calls that a person has to make and then wonder about. But second-guessing is a waste of time.

Thanks to Ross Perot, though, I am a reformed underachiever when it comes to recruiting and talent hunting. I never stop looking for talent, and it’s one job I never delegate. I want you to test yourself, using Perot as a benchmark.

Consider that last question. Until Ross Perot called it to my attention, I would have answered, “Everybody we hired in the last two years.” And that wouldn’t have been accurate. I met with the finalist who had been screened by my managers, but I didn’t initiate the process or drive it through to completion.

Why not? I was too busy.

There we go again! Too busy.

And besides, I had a process to take care of mat. Those are two lame excuses. It’s like saying, “I was too busy to make sure my team showed up for work in the morning.” Or “I was too busy to bother lining up new customers.” Indifference to recruiting is the same as being indifferent about the future. If you don’t adequately fill up the gas tank today, you’re guaranteed to run dry tomorrow.

That is a big responsibility. If no one is in charge, that’s frightening. I’ve run across operations that handle it with a filing cabinet and an administrative assistant. Need somebody? Check the latest resumes, make a few calls, do an interview or two. A slight improvement is to look in the yellow pages under “executive placement services.” Maybe they’ll have some candidates. The next notch up is to let human resources do the job, which will at least have a process. But without line or field responsibilities, HR ends up hiring by the book and the “book” can tend to be overengineered.

These aren’t smart ways to go. The best way to start hiring franchise players like Michael Jordan is to hire one to run recruiting. And to work closely with that person. My personal choice would be Gary Hudepohl of Gary Hudepohl & Associates, a specialty executive search firm. I’d back up the Wells Fargo truck and let Gary help himself. He’s definitely on my recruiting wish list. The problem is that Gary’s happy right where he is, and his clients are even happier. GHA specializes in finding chief financial officers and chief information officers for a select group of major corporations.

What’s the secret? Gary Hudepohl has a one-word answer—“retention.” And you thought this chapter is about recruiting. It is, but we’ll focus on the other R-word first.¹

High retention is evidence of high people-ology. Companies that create an environment around strong leaders, who encourage high performance and work to develop their employees’ full potential, are going to attract the best people.

This seems to fly in the face of the prevailing wisdom that the hottest talent is prepared to add lines to a resume the way gunfighters notched the handles of their revolvers. I believe young up-and-coming stars move frequently because they aren’t getting the opportunities, the action, the excitement, the responsibilities, and the development that they need. Most surveys support me on that. To retain them, it’s not enough to scout and sign the very best. You have to be a first-class talent-building organization.

Talent attracts talent, and talent retains talent.

A high attrition rate is a bad sign, particularly if it persists over a long period of time, or shows regular spiking. Making personnel changes or downsizing can happen, but it shouldn’t be happening continually or in an off-and-on fashion. It can help to find out what is really causing attrition. How? Ask.

A system of exit interviews or follow-up contacts six to months to a year after an employee voluntarily leaves can yield valuable information. Do a Pacetta Poll. Ask them:

• Why did you leave?

And since you may be told, “I got a better offer,” ask for more specifics:

• Were you dissatisfied by our management process?
• Were you dissatisfied by our product or service?
• Were you dissatisfied with our company culture?
• Would you have remained with us for more money?
• Would you have remained with us for more responsibility?
• Did you feel welcome, valued, and appreciated?
• Was your personal life and situatión given due consideration?
• Were you mentored, coached, and trained adequately?
• Did you have a sense the company cared about your success and was willing to invest in it?
• Did anyone ask you to stay?
• Was a substantial effort made to meet and exceed the offer from you new employer?

These questions can provide a distinct profile of your retention strengths and weaknesses. The first—“Why did you leave?”—is an all-purpose clarification tool. Why isn’t it asked? Few companies have a clear understanding of why people leave. They guess about it: Money, personality issues, family, and better opportunities elsewhere are the standard assumptions. Most of the time those assumptions are either flat-out wrong or only partially correct. To this day, Xerox has no idea why I decided to leave. They assume it was because I didn’t want to make a lateral move to Minneapolis for yet another turnaround assignment. And since that was a precipitating factor, it was a good enough assumption, as far as my bosses were concerned. It allowed them say, “He’s got his priorities, and we’ve got ours.”

Fine. My point is that if you genuinely believe that the only way to produce and sell quality products is through quality people, you need to know what motivates a person to leave after spending twenty-four years with the operation leading teams that brought in hundreds of millions dollars in revenue. This curiosity doesn’t mean that Xerox needs to beg Frank Pacetta to stay or to change any policy or procedure. The simple information value to be gained justifies the simple question—“Would you mind sitting down with us and explaining why you’re leaving?” If the answer is no, okay. At least the attempt was made.

By not asking, the message is sent loud and clear that we really don’t care why an employee left and that individual effort and contribution is of little importance. We’ll just hire somebody else. More where that came from. This attitude devalues and demotivates the people who remain. I don’t care what the experts say about the new job-hopping career and economic paradigms. When most people decide to leave a job that they’ve held for more than a year or two, it is a major decision. Not caring about what went into that decision says to everyone in the organization, “We don’t care about you.” And the response that will come back from your people is, “And we don’t care about you either.”

That’s poison, and your best people are the most susceptible to it. Don’t believe the myth that the stars know they’re so good they can and will go anywhere. Free agency in sports seems to confirm that. But in business we are all free agents, yet company loyalty is still the norm as long as it is deserved and reciprocated. Abby Joseph Cohen, to pull one name out of the hat, could work anywhere on Wall Street and name her price, yet the star financial analyst chooses to stay at Goldman Sachs.

I suspect the real reason that the question isn’t asked more often is that we don’t want to know. “You can’t handle the truth”—a line from the movie A Few Good Men is right on the mark. It’s tough to hear the truth because we then have to live with it or do something about it. And now we are squarely in the heart of the heart of people-ology. If my organization doesn’t care about people, I want to know about it and fix it. So should you.

The other questions on the list are more specific and process oriented. Again, they provide useful snapshots of reality as seen by the ex-employee. Wouldn’t you like to know if there are holes in the management process or deficiencies in the product? Consultants earn millions of dollars providing that sort of information. You can get it for free.

Were you dissatisfied with the culture? Picking up a bunch of yeses on that one should set off alarm bells—if you really care about the kind of culture that you’ve created. The money question is also revealing. Managers understand when the competition comes along and entices an employee away by offering more money. Over the years, I’ve surveyed friends and colleagues on the issue and found that the majority did see money as a major reason for making the change, but the amount of money tends to be ridiculously small. People change jobs, careers, cities, and disrupt their families for as little as $7,000 or $8,000 extra a year. Two things occur to me on this situation. One, there are other reasons for the decision beyond money. Two, if such pathetically small amounts of money are crucial, why didn’t somebody say, “If we match the other guy’s offer, will you stay?”

But we didn’t want to get into a bidding war.

Come on!

Many companies do a cost-benefit analysis on whether to switch to a new brand of paper clips. Do one on your employees. Add up what you invested in training and development, add up salaries, fringe benefits, and bonuses, factor in a value to cover knowledge and experience, and compare the total to what the person brings in. I think you’ll discover that the bidding war won’t bankrupt you.

I’m not a statistician. The PA/PE ratio took all often minutes to dream up. You’re welcome to it, or develop your own way to measure a persons real worth. Just measure it!

You’ll discover that we are letting people walk out the door with your money. I hate that. I have an image of a guy with a wheelbarrow full of cash going down the elevator, moving through the lobby, out the front door to the parking lot, where he shovels my money into his trunk and drives off. All because I didn’t say, “Can I match the offer?”

If he or she says, “Sure,” and names their price, then I’ll know whether to help with the wheelbarrow and wave good-bye or get out my checkbook.

A Communications and Retention Tool

Many times it’s not even money. More responsibility and opportunities may cost nothing. Kick me if I have let someone leave who wanted more responsibility. Kick me again if I’m not offering enough opportunities. Both of these are issues that should be addressed in the individual performance contracts that were discussed in chapter 7. There is a communications breakdown involved if the first we know about this is after an employee leaves.

If a manager is conducting monthly one-on-one reviews of the contracts that he or she has with the team, the communications flow should have revealed the problem. If I want more responsibility, I can tell my boss and between the two of us we’ll write contract provisions that realize the goal to meet the needs of both sides. The genius of the contract process is that it combines two sets of expectations into one action plan. The reviews allow the leader and the team member to collaborate on how best to achieve the desired results and to monitor the progress on a regular basis.

The contract is probably the best retention tool of them all. The questions that need to be asked after an employee leaves can be raised during the monthly reviews. If I have six or eight team leaders reporting to me, the contracts that we have—leader to leader—will stipulate that basic employee satisfaction issues are to be raised with the team members during monthly reviews. I go ballistic when a team leader says to me, “Frank, I think Jill is getting ready to quit.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, she’s been pretty standoffish and uncooperative lately.”

“Maybe she’s having family problems.”

“I hear she’s talking to Jeff Collier’s operation.”

“Why don’t you ask her if she’s going to quit?”

“Ask?”

That’s right.

It’s called c-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n. Surveys show again and again that one of the principal reasons for attrition is that people don’t feel they are appreciated. It could be that Jill has been working very hard lately, but her manager hasn’t noticed. It may just be a one-time-only oversight, or it may indicate a pattern of poor management and leadership. By asking the question in a review, “Do you feel your work is appreciated?” the problem—if it exists—can be tackled.

Finally, “Did anybody ask you to stay?” What a question! What a question not to ask of a valued employee. I’ve had top performers tell me that they had no intention of leaving until they were approached by another company or head hunter. The money was a little better or other aspects of the deal slightly sweeter, but what tipped them to accept the offer was that their current employer didn’t try hard enough to keep them. Simply asking them to stay is the minimum. At least it opens a dialogue with the signal that the employee is valued. And that may be enough.

Proactive Rerecruiting

The purpose of the postmortem questions is to bring your recruiting and rerecruiting process to life. By collecting answers from ex-employees about the reason they left, you can immediately set about establishing a rerecruiting process that will buttress your retention program. The goals should be to:

• Eliminate all barriers to retention that were highlighted by the surveys of ex-employees.
• Develop a list of high-risk likely defectors.
• Identify essential “can’t operate without” employees.
• Thank each one.
• Upgrade their personal performance contracts, paying special attention to problem areas identified by the surveys of ex-employees.
• Provide extra compensation and other rewards from a specially established recruiting and retaining fund.
• Send letters home to their spouses describing the employee’s contribution to the success of the company and expressing appreciation for the spouse’s support.
• Tell each essential employee to come to you immediately if they are ever approached by another firm
• If and when an essential employee attempts to leave, make a personal commitment to keep that employee—announce it publicly—and go all out.

Ho-hum rerecruitment leads to ho-hum retention. The vicious circle keeps spinning until it’s wiped out recruitment, employee satisfaction, and high performance. A few comments about the last three bullets above before I double back to Gary Hudepohl. Sending a letter home to a spouse to praise their partner seems a little odd, doesn’t it? Think about it, though. He or she carries a great deal of influence. I discuss everything with Julie, and she has final veto power. It’s like that in many households. If you can encourage that spouse to say, “What a great place to work,” the decision to leave may not be so cut and dried.

Warning! Don’t try this if you don’t mean it. Don’t overdo it. Don’t make it formulaic. Don’t assign it to your administrative assistant. Insincerity will cost you major grief.

The next bullet, “Tell each essential employee to come to you if they are ever approached by another firm,” leaves you open to blackmail, doesn’t it? Pay it, and the top performer will earn it back.

Finally, “Make a personal commitment to keep an essential employee who is about to leave” raises the stakes for both of you and puts the recruiting company at a disadvantage. The employee now must make a personal decision, not a strictly business one, to look you in the eye and say, “I’m moving on even though you have demonstrated this commitment to me.” Furthermore, you are counterpunching the recruiting firm in a way that it can’t match because the prospect does not have the preexisting relationships and this extraordinary personal commitment.

One final point about rerecruiting. If you lose a great one, don’t rest until you get him or her back in the fold. Tell them that when they leave, tell the rest of the organization, and follow through.

Hurry Up and Wait

The leader must first own the retention and rerecruiting processes before there is a meaningful recruiting program. This involvement at the top is the first thing that Gary Hudepohl looks for when he establishes a relationship with clients. He wants to know who owns recruiting because it tells him about the firm he will be selling to his other client—the candidate. He needs to find the right fit for both. The wrong candidate for the right job is as bad as the right candidate for the wrong job. He’s got to get it all right or else it’s all wrong.

As far as I’m concerned, using an executive recruitment firm is the way to go if the client company and the consultant are committed to relentlessly pursuing a perfect fit, and if both sides expect nothing less. Gary’s experience with working for a major midwestern bank is a good example. The bank hired him to fill a senior level vacancy that had been open for more than a year. Gary’s associates had developed a list of twenty-five to thirty names, but he wasn’t satisfied. The list had to be whittled down to the top five.

The bank—and this is an instructive detail—was willing to wait. A year had gone by and that was okay if they got the right person. Too often, there is such time pressure on the recruiting process that the whole thing falls apart. Gary’s people took their time and eventually identified the five best people for the position. At that point, Gary personally took over, using his network of contacts, and worked the phones until he knew who was head and shoulders above the others. Not the one who was most interested or in the market for a new job. The best.

And that was the problem. When he called the guy, there was no interest. Zip. He was happy where he was. In fact, it took two months of telephone calls to get to that point. He wouldn’t talk at all until Gary’s sheer persistence wore him down.

Once there was telephone contact, Gary worked on establishing a face-to-face relationship. He made two trips to the candidate’s home city and convinced to him to at least think about it. Gary finally decided to take a chance of irritating the candidate by bringing along the bank’s recruiting manager. As far as the candidate knew, he would be meeting Gary solo.

It was love at first sight. The hiring manager said, “We have to find a way to get this guy.” They totally revamped the bank’s offer, broke through the dollar ceiling that had been opposed, and redid the rest of the package of benefits. When they went back to the candidate, they were afraid his company would make a counteroffer and that would be that. But the candidate liked the hiring manager as much as the hiring manager liked him. It was locked.

Know Thyself

Gary Hudepohl uses an eight-point checklist to guide the recruiting process. It belongs in your red notebook. Notice that the focus is on the company and the culture rather than on the individual’s resume.

• What does the client need?
• What are the key behaviors?
• What’s the management style?
• How do they treat their employees?
• What’s the balance between home and work?
• What’s the succession plan?
• What are the promotion and mobility possibilities?
• Compensation—can it be creative and flexible?

By answering these questions first, a recruiting manager or consultant has a basis for carefully screening candidates instead of madly scrambling for warm bodies with impressive resumes. If your company is not family-friendly, it’s a good idea to recognize it, acknowledge it to all concerned, and avoid dangling jobs in front of candidates who take their parental responsibilities seriously. Why be turned down, or worse, end up undermining the recruit’s family if they don’t realize what they’re getting into and try to tough it out after they’re hired? Go for single men and women or those with children gone from the nest, who can handle the culture and its demands (better yet, become family-friendly). And if you are the one who is being recruited, don’t you want to know the answers to these questions before you get way the down the road and discover that there’s a slow promotion track or that you’re not about to be included in the succession plan? Or that there’s a glass ceiling for moms?

I’ll add a ninth point to Gary’s guidelines—a variation on the golden rule:

Simple, isn’t it?