The Difference between a Recruitment Approach and a Search Approach

Poor or nonexistent research is responsible for most failed executive search projects. It's where most search consultants stumble out of the gate, and thanks to that we've had a lot of experience parachuting in to salvage a floundering search assignment. In each such case, the common denominator has been the poor quality of research done in advance. It's important to understand why this happens so you can avoid making the same mistake.

In the old days—10 years ago—the recruiting industry suddenly split into two well-defined groups. Original research was the key differentiator between the two camps. Retained executive search firms, like every other management consulting business, operated on behalf of the client and were paid a retainer, hence their providing meaningful research was paramount. Service was the name of the game. Candidate quality, not quantity of deals closed, was the measurement metric of the day for these firms.

Contingency firms, on the other hand, are paid only if one of their candidates is hired. Because there's no upfront cost associated with hiring a contingency search firm, around a decade ago it became fashionable in HR circles to have dozens of firms simultaneously working the same assignment. When this happens, recruiters are under enormous pressure to close clients quickly—otherwise they end up working for free. Speed and assignment turnover are critical to winning in that game.

The two types of firms both use the “executive search” moniker but contingency firms often do no research, relying instead on advertising or their own database of potential candidates. Because of this and much to the dismay of HR, often companies using more than one contingency firm on an assignment are forced to suffer through a wave of duplicate résumés. That's because contingency recruiters tend to all fish from the same pond.

That said, the distinction between retained and contingency firms has blurred somewhat over the last decade. Online tools like LinkedIn, along with the proliferation of job boards for finding and recruiting actively looking people, have put downward pressure on search firm fees. To compete, many firms don't undertake any original research.

But while technology has certainly made it easier to identify executives, recruiting them has become more challenging. The best executives are zealously guarded from the outside world by an army of assistants—and technology—who are specifically instructed to thwart ESPs and their ilk. For some, the effort needed to cull the type of intelligence afforded by traditional search research is harder than ever. The benefits, I assure you, are worth the extra effort.

Today it's not uncommon for a recruiter to skip the research stage when trying to earn a fee. Over the past 10 years many ESPs—who survived the last several recessions—have succumbed to performing a quick file search, phoning around to a couple of companies in obvious turmoil, then running an ad and surfing LinkedIn with hopes of attracting your future star executive. The results are predictably poor, and not what you need to consistently win the war for talent.

The research phase of a search is another key difference between a recruiting approach and a search approach. A recruitment company will put together a list of people they already know and who are in their database, or who came through a referral channel. A search firm, alternatively, conducts new research for each and every assignment.

When to Fire Your Recruiter

If, after a few weeks on your project, your ESP brings you a list with the names and titles of your competitors' top people—fire them!

That's not research. That's just a list of names. Unfortunately as lines between retained and contingency firms continue to blur, the recruiting industry and HR have begun using the terms “executive search research” and “name generation” interchangeably. We've seen the output of both and the list of names is just that: a list of names designed to impress you. Name generation is not synonymous with search research. The class of business intelligence you need to effectively hire greatness will only be provided by full-fledged researchers.

Sadly, most candidate lists offer less insight than the white pages directory you abandoned years ago for Google. The most valuable information goes deeper than name and title. Search research is the by-product of continuous and diligent investigation of individuals and situations, and is business intelligence that provides context and depth. Online databases are plentiful and easy to access, but names alone aren't the prize—intelligence is. Search research is akin to a functional SWOT analysis of the good, the bad, and the ugly details of your competitor's executives.

Search researchers start by looking to understand:

• Which companies are winning, and why? (Industry, geography, economic climate)
• Who are the leaders driving the bus? (Who holds the reins—name, title, span of authority, direct reports, Capex and Opex budgets—the full org chart)

You need to determine the winners and losers, as well as the context and business climate. A client once assured me, “Even turkeys can fly with a good back wind.” Search research will examine the circumstances and context, not just the end result.

Texas Hold'em versus Fantasy Football

Is your recruiting philosophy holding you back? Many companies, such as AMESS Software (mentioned earlier in the book), gambled with their executive recruiting process. These companies aim too low and settle for what's offered, instead of setting their sights on the best. AMESS Software was like that. Their CEO's meager aspirations were rarely disappointed by great talent. The CEO tried to play Texas Hold'em by hiring slow and firing fast and frequently. He soon cycled through the entire deck of sales vice-presidents in his town, and had no better luck recruiting elsewhere.

Instead of playing Texas Hold'em and accepting the talent you're dealt, I invite you to think differently. Change the rules. Stack the deck. Draw an inside straight—every time.

Tell me honestly, how well could your company perform if you could consistently recruit your industry's top people? What if you always had the inside track to recruiting the best executive talent: Would you chose to build a different team? If you could always recruit whom you wanted, would you accomplish your goals quicker? What if we told you how to flip that Texas Hold'em deck of cards to see the face value of each card in the deck, legally and without getting shot? I suppose you could draw a royal flush with every hand. You could win all the time.

Actually, forget the card analogy. There are only 52 of them, after all. We're going to show you how to play even bigger and assure your company's destiny.

Supersize Your Thinking

Successful search research really has more in common with Fantasy Football than Texas Hold'em. Instead of limiting yourself to a deck of 52 meager cards, Fantasy Football provides an abundance of highly talented players to choose from. There are 32 NFL teams, as well as hundreds of college teams to recruit from: the best in the world and the up-and-comers! You can quickly find player-specific statistics on every quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end, kicker, left tackle you name it. Every player's performance information is available for analysis. Whether it's offense or defense or bench strength you're looking for, you can see it all online: completions, attempts, yards, touchdowns, and interceptions. Statistics on football players are available on dozens of Internet websites.

While many consider Fantasy Football just a game, supporters spend real money as well as their own time hunting painstakingly for an edge gathering their own intelligence on players in addition to information freely available to everyone. In the same vein, search research can help you create detailed performance profiles on every executive you'd possibly consider—before you even meet him or her. This additional layer of business intelligence facilitates comparing the performance of an identified group against another, as well as against a host of variables including company size, geography, market positioning, brand maturity, and even company culture.

A robust search research function can create an environment in which you can continuously recruit high performance teams by design. How valuable is that?

Search Research: Reimagined

Exceptional researchers adopt an abundance mindset. Think Fantasy Football, not Texas Hold'em. They consider every executive as available, all the time. They don't limit themselves, except for any hands-off restrictions, to examining only executives already in their database. Just recruiting the low-hanging fruit limits your company's growth potential. Instead, identify which executives are the best. Set your sights on them. Then go get them!

The case study we've kept coming back to in this book— that of Fred's chief operating officer/successor search—is a good example. In the book's first chapter, when I first met Fred, I asked him questions regarding the hands-off client restrictions (Figure 4.2) of the first two search firms. His responses led me to immediately take the assignment. We realized that the search had not been executed correctly, with the failed consultants being tripped up by their firms' hands-off obligations.

Just like Fred, you deserve to select from the best of the best. Yes, leaders are rare. Yes, executive talent is scarce. But when you approach the recruiting process with an assumption of abundance—that all talent is available all the time—you won't limit yourself to the traditional pool of talent in your industry.

How to Do Search Research Correctly

In our case, Michael and I looked at all the companies, organizations, and businesses in Tulip's ecosystem, including suppliers and customers. We talked to executives within the local manufacturing association as well.

Geographically, we specifically targeted direct and indirect competitors within a 90-minute drive of the manufacturing plant in Milwaukee. Wherever practical, start a search physically close to where the executive will work and expand outward in concentric circles (like a bull's-eye target in archery). While this isn't always possible, a tightly targeted search focused around local geography can reduce the time and expense associated with relocating an executive.

Preparing for a Deep Dive

Whether you do the research yourself or farm it out, you'll need to dive into the details and examine the minutiae to create meaningful intelligence. So where to begin? You could hire a search firm to do it since research is a first step for them, but I encourage you to do some research yourself first. If you begin the research in advance of hiring the search consultant, you'll understand where the search firm should focus its efforts along with having a good idea on what intelligence gathering you really need from them. You'll also know if your ESP is doing everything possible for your project.

The quickest way to build a preliminary list is to gather your Search Committee, and have your head of human resources lead you through a facilitated exercise to determine:

• What companies are the best sources of executive talent that suit your needs?
• Where does this talent profile reside now?
  • Industries
  • Competitors
    • Direct
    • Indirect
  • Suppliers
  • Vendors
• What functional position[s] do they hold?
• What specific titles are associated with this role?
• What trends or events might magnetize them to your company?
• What issues may push them away from their current company or industry? (Typical examples include takeovers and mergers, and industry consolidations.)

In our Texas Hold'em versus Fantasy Football analogy, it's the difference between choosing among 52 known entities and hundreds, perhaps thousands of the best executives in the world. Your initial list may be huge, but a researcher with an abundance mentality can easily winnow down an impressive yet unwieldy list to a manageable number of all-stars.

Once you have your preliminary target list, here's how to further calibrate your thinking to quickly hone in on the best qualified executives to approach. Search research permits you to ask, and answer, the following (see Figure 4.3):

• Who are your competitors' top executives?
• Which executives have already demonstrated they can do what your position requires?
  • Which among them can figuratively blow the doors off the place?
• What can you find out about him or her?
  • Responsibilities
  • Accomplishments
  • Strengths/weaknesses
  • Track record
  • Career aspirations
• Why might they be interested in your opportunity?

To do this correctly, you must understand their span of authority and that of the team they manage. That's the only way to relate them to your needs. After building the list of ideal executives to recruit, you need to ask a new set of questions:

• Who knows them, has worked for them, and can tell you how they might fit in your organization? Can they offer you insight? An introduction maybe?
• How do I get in front of them? What's the best way to connect?
• What message do I need to deliver to get their attention and start a dialogue?

Where do you turn to start collecting this information? There are online databases aplenty, but we also use other tools to help cut weeks off the research process and do deep dives to collect information normally unavailable to a recruiter.

The best tool we've ever used to identify senior executives, managers, and high-end individual contributors, and has been a staple in our tool kit since the turn of this century, is ZoomInfo (see Figure 4.4). The site has been a pioneer and perennial leader in the B2B marketing data business since it was founded by CEO Jonathan Stern in 2000 as Eliyon Technologies. We serendipitously became a beta tester for ZoomInfo in its formative years.

ZoomInfo's power, breadth of information, and simplicity of use cannot be overstated. But it's not just the raw processing power. ZoomInfo's technology uses automatic summarization to reduce information from hundreds of thousands of news and information sources to create summaries, which retain the most important points of the original document.¹

In our practice, we use ZoomInfo to search, sort, monitor, and continuously update key information that's pertinent to each of our projects. It's more refined than Google Alerts and faster. In less than a second, you can retrieve the same type of detailed research that used to take a researcher two to three weeks to compile. You can stay current on 136 million people and 8.5 million companies. There are also handy features that allow you to set alerts, gather more intelligence from social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as numerous ways to share profiles between coworkers.

Groundbreaking Changes in Technology Make It Easier to Find People…

… But More Difficult to Reach Executives

Technology has been the great equalizer for the executive search industry, allowing boutique firms to compete with giants without the need to be heavily staffed with researchers. Prior to the proliferation of online databases and social networking sites, a search firm's Rolodex was its currency. An ESP's major value was his or her quick access to the résumés, profiles, and business contacts their firm had amassed for decades. And then suddenly technology put millions of people at the fingertips of recruiters, human resource departments, and hiring managers. Unfortunately, being able to find more people faster did not equate to attracting more talent, and if you've ever watched the NBC television show America's Got Talent you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The introduction of job boards like Monster and social networking sites like LinkedIn in the late 1990s and early 2000s made it relatively easy for job hunters to find open positions and employers to find people. This initially diminished the value of a recruiter's résumé database. But then, a funny thing happened: It became too easy for job hunters to apply for jobs. Chaos ensued, along with a rapid transformation in hiring practices that went unnoticed by both those looking for work and employers.

Allow me to explain.

For each of the past five years, 50-plus million jobs have been filled in the United States—almost all without a job posting— because of the proliferation of job boards and social media sites like LinkedIn. While creating job postings can keep an HR staff ultra-busy in countless organizations, many other employers are reticent to post jobs because they can't deal with the avalanche of résumés they get—much less deal with the subsequent (increased) government regulations for maintaining records on those job applicants. Today, savvy employers rely on a brand-new digital suite of tools and tactics to find the handful of most qualified recruits to interview.

The recruiting paradigm has shifted, and this revolution in recruiting has taken place at the same time the job market feels itself under huge strain. The current state of the global job market is more challenging than it has been in more than 25 years. The magnitude of job force reductions has been unprecedented. When you think about the quantity of people vying for the few known job openings that might exist, employers need to be clever and think outside the box to separate the wheat from the chaff.

At the same time, executives have become loath to being treated like online commodities. They've also become increasingly distrustful of unsolicited calls from recruiters. For this reason alone, many senior executives now covet a low profile and purposefully avoid social media whenever and wherever possible. Social networking profiles are only as reliable as the user who has entered the information, and that information can be biased toward a specific end result—like being recruited. (Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 3.0 goes into great depth on how to leverage LinkedIn for that purpose.)

Social networking sites frequently lack details around span of authority and rarely provide detailed org charts. In many cases the information is also out of date. This means there are large holes in the intelligence required to recruit that individual. A recent study showed that “a full 68 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs still have no presence on social media. However, that finding is an improvement by two percentage points over last year's results.”² Anecdotal evidence from more than 500 executive search projects over the past 10 years supports these findings.

There's also still a sizable chunk of people who don't use social media due to concerns about privacy, data security, potential identity theft, and/or because they don't want to appear as though they're looking for a job.

Be Vigilant

Titles and responsibilities are rarely equivalent across companies or industries. The secret is to isolate the desired skills and experience from the designated responsibilities. When creating your candidate pipeline you need to amass the org charts of all executives among your company's competitors, regardless of title or current functional role, who have the experience and skills matching your requirements. You should also include executives who currently reside within other areas of your company's ecosystem. For example, many years ago, when assigned to recruit an executive vice-president of logistics for a multibillion-dollar telecommunications firm, we identified and recruited a vice-president of operations from a PC manufacturer because he was formerly the Navy flag officer responsible for a $20-billion supply chain.

Better questions bring better insight. The more effort you put into the front end of an executive search, especially when it comes to calibrating research, the less time you'll spend kissing frogs because each meeting/interview will be on point and your time well spent. This greatly enhances the experience and will make closing on your ideal candidate easier, but a side benefit is the stealth nature of this approach. In today's hypercompetitive market, the less your competitors know about your operation and future plans the better, and when your outreach campaign is this highly focused you alert fewer people to your plans.

As your research is being completed, you can clarify more precisely what your prospective candidates should look like by benchmarking (see Figure 4.5) from a known executive who's deemed a fit.

Calibrating the Search Chair and Search Consultant

Anyone who has ever hired a search firm, and then months later realized the firm didn't fully understand the requirements or that a major component of the spec was forgotten or downplayed, understands just how easy it is to waste time looking for the wrong person. But this simply doesn't happen if you benchmark at the front end. Granted, it adds slightly more up-front work for the search consultant and Search Chair. But it can also reduce the amount of time spent finding the perfect individual by 50 percent or more. When you know exactly what you're looking for from the fit side, the never-going-to-work-out candidates become obvious. Lost opportunity costs may never be recovered, so dropping a lit match on the haystack to quickly reveal the golden needle within is never a bad idea.

In executive search, benchmarking is the practice of choosing a candidate to interview to gauge both the search consultant and the Search Chair's alignment on the skills, experience, and fit needed for that role. Every time you do a search, you need to benchmark.

Think of it as a dry run to calibrate both sides and validate the requirements before the search consultant goes to the marketplace. This an opportunity to tighten/alter the position profile and confidential candidate brief, as well as potentially the thinking of the Search Committee (and its chair) to ensure everyone's on the same page. It's also an opportunity for the search consultant to understand how the Search Chair processes information and draws conclusions, which is a good time for the search consultant to offer support if there are any obvious gaps in the Search Chair's interview and assessment knowledge.

Heidrick & Struggles is one of the largest search firms in the world, and its CEO Kevin Kelly revealed in a Financial Times article that a recent internal study of 20,000 Heidrick searches found that “40 percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail, or quit within 18 months. It's expensive in terms of lost revenue. It's expensive in terms of the individual's hiring. It's damaging to morale…”

Because of the above it's imperative for companies to adopt a comprehensive approach to executive hiring and retention practices. The odds are good that these companies will be engaged in an executive search in the near future, and the likelihood of failure is astronomical: Recent studies by the Corporate Executive Board show that “50 to 70 percent of executives fail within the first 18 months of promotion into an executive role, either from within or coming from outside the organization; of those, about 3 percent ‘fail spectacularly,’ while nearly 50 percent ‘quietly struggle.’”⁴

Lack of preparation for C-level roles is a significant factor in this shocking failure rate. An extensive, 10-year study of executive performance by Navalent, a leadership consulting firm, concluded—after over 2,600 Fortune 1000 executive interviews—that:

• 76 percent of respondents indicated the formal development processes of their organization were not, or at best minimally, helpful in preparing them for their executive role.
• 55 percent indicated that they had minimal, if any, ongoing coaching and feedback to help them refine their ability to perform in an executive role.
• 45 percent indicated they had minimal understanding of the challenges they would face in an executive role.⁵

Today's young executives are assuming senior and C-Suite roles at an accelerated pace. Yet since they lack the experience, knowledge, relational, and emotional maturity necessary to sustain success, the failure rates we mentioned earlier are astounding but predictable. They're also consistent with this writer's extensive experience in successfully conducting over 1,000 executive search assignments over the past 30 years.

But you can avoid hiring the wrong person from the start by conducting a benchmark interview. Calibrate your needs before you take the search to market: the search becomes laser-focused when you clearly understand the complete executive profile from both a business and a fit perspective. Think about how much energy and effort goes into evaluating a candidate's technical skills, business acumen, emotional intelligence, management skills, predominant leadership style, short- and long-term goals, motivators, creativity, strengths, personality, and other factors. We're talking hours and hours of intense focused interview and assessment time, which could be better spent on viable prospects.

Who Do You Benchmark?

The benchmark candidate could be someone you both know, or an individual selected by either the search consultant or Search Chair. If it's someone from the search consultant's files, they should fit 80 percent of the technical parameters and 95 percent of the soft skills related to the fit you're looking for (not a hard and fast rule, but good to keep in mind). Considering how great of a fit they typically are, it's not unusual for the benchmark candidate to be asked back as a finalist in the search. The benchmark candidate doesn't even need to know they're the benchmark for a host of reasons, all of them in the best interest of the company. Instead recognize that the benchmark got a head start and may be in the pole position.

How to Benchmark

Approach the benchmark candidate as you would any other. After interesting them in the role, sending them the position profile (PP), as well as receiving and assessing their confidential candidate brief (CCB), simply interview the benchmark candidate in the same manner you would the others.

The opportunity for the Search Chair and search consultant (ESP) to interview and evaluate the candidate together builds a strong bond as partners in the project, each working toward a common goal. It permits the search partners to calibrate a common understanding of what's needed to find the ideal candidate. It encourages open dialogue and discussion and can lead to refining the original job description, position profile, and CCB as required.

Following the benchmark interview a good ESP can objectively deconstruct the interview (because they lead it, with active participation from the Search Chair) to reconstruct the role and find any gaps in thinking that went into constructing the PP and/or requirements.

What To Do

The Search Chair and ESP conduct the interview together in the same room, at the same time, with the same guidelines as a regular first one-on-one interview (which is explained in-depth in section IV). The benchmark interview, however, has one major component added: following the candidate's interview, the Search Chair and ESP actively dissect the candidate's fit and experience against the PP. That discussion should assess the consultant's depth of understanding of the role from a fit standpoint, and identify where calibration is potentially needed. Experience isn't the most important item here—fit to the requirements is the goal.

And that goes beyond culture. Because you actually may not be looking for someone who fits in. Indeed, the position may necessitate the exact opposite. Be careful how you judge the fit against the need, as defined by the role spec'd out by the board; understand that in a turnaround, a reboot, or a whole shift of an organization, fitting in may be exactly what you don't want.

Let me explain.…

The Benchmark Candidate in Practice

In reality, a benchmarking interview is more than just a trial run to gauge how the ESP, CCB, and Search Chair best work together. And a benchmark candidate sure isn't some stranger chosen from the firm's files at random.

When executed correctly the benchmark candidate is often the individual hired at the conclusion of a search, and is certainly a top contender for the role. So it's important to approach the interview with the same reverence you would your best customer. You want to impress them as much as they want to amaze you. Precisely because he or she is the benchmark candidate, you must treat them exactly the same as all the other candidates being interviewed. And you absolutely, positively have to ensure they're unaware others are being benchmarked against them.

By the time a client meets the benchmark candidate a number of milestones will have already occurred in rapid succession:

• The search consultant has recruited, interviewed, and screened the candidate.
• The candidate has received and reviewed the Position Profile.
• The candidate has agreed to proceed in the search and has completed the CCB, and forwarded it to the search consultant.
• The search consultant has reviewed the CCB against the position profile and often against the candidate's bio or résumé (if the candidate has a LinkedIn profile, this could be used as well).
• The search consultant has interviewed the candidate face-to-face or by phone.

The search consultant confirms through the interview process that the candidate meets the base technical qualifications and has the right experience as detailed on the CCB, and the ESP explains to the Search Chair why they consider the candidate to be fully qualified. The ESP also points out any discrepancies or weaknesses discovered ahead of time (for example, having seven years of experience if 10 years was the ideal, and why an exception is being made).

The benchmark candidate is a viable candidate at this point and will likely be asked back for further interviews, but there are certainly no guarantees. No formal referencing will have been done by this time, although informal referencing has commenced.

After the benchmark candidate's interview is over, the ESP and Search Chair discuss the candidate in detail while everything is still fresh in their minds. Both must confirm the technical skills, experience, and fit are correct. If the benchmark candidate is on target, the ESP is good to go.

If the ESP was way off in his or her assessment of fit, both ESP and Search Chair must discuss the job description, PP, and CCB in detail until it's clear where the error was made. When fit isn't assessed correctly the first time, I suggest you bring in a second benchmark candidate. Getting the fit right is critical to the long-term success of the candidate, even if it adds a week or so to the project. Accuracy must trump speed. Ensure the search parameters are correctly calibrated now, otherwise you risk wasting your time or—even worse—making a bad hire.

Communication errors happen in all lines of work. But if the fit is wrong the second time the CEO should replace the ESP, the Search Chair, or both. It's very rare that fit issues are misjudged more than once by an experienced ESP.

In the benchmark interview you'll receive feedback from the candidate about the role, which may include market intelligence that necessitates changes to the position profile. You may find you need to modify questions in the CCB to draw out overlooked aspects or more deeply assessed other areas before you meet other candidates.

The changes we usually see needing addressing are rigid educational requirements and years of experience, industry-specific competencies, and compensation. These are the issues benchmark candidates typically bring to the forefront, and that help refine your targeted pursuit. The objective is to confirm the ESP and Search Chair agree on what constitutes your ideal candidate, especially around the issue of fit. Remember: Skills and experience are really checkboxes on the candidate's CCB—fit is the wild card.

Once the ESP and Search Chair agree, it's go time!

Bottom Line

When every qualified person is considered a potential candidate, then 90 percent of the time there will be a half dozen or so excellent people to select. But there's usually one candidate who best fits the role. Many ESPs don't recognize this and only focus their strategies around the skills match. Understanding a candidate's fit is a byproduct of how you approach the recruiting and interview stage to get at the candidate's core values. To get to that point quickly you need a benchmark interview before your recruiting and interview process starts in full.

Why Most Projects Fail at Recruiting the Best People

Unfortunately, many ESPs handle their first engagement with executive prospects poorly and are rejected out of hand. Too many recruiters confuse effectiveness with efficiency, using email and other forms of technology to quickly engage and qualify people—bypassing the personal touch that's really required at all levels, but especially at the executive level. This will quickly bring your carefully researched and constructed long list of several hundred prospects down to a handful. Now, it could be the right handful … but you'll never know for sure: When you use an impersonal approach, you run the very real risk of rejecting the right candidate without even knowing it. Every person on your list deserves a phone call.

A-Courting We Shall Go

I'm a big believer in being direct. I started headhunting back in the early 1980s, when the term was still novel. Now most people understand what the term means, but back in the day the term was very descriptive of what we did. Long before email and LinkedIn, the number one way of introducing yourself to a prospect was via telephone. Before voicemail (oh, am I dating myself now), it could take many attempts to successfully connect with a prospective candidate. Often more than one message needed to be left with his or her executive assistants. Technology has made the job more efficient, but not necessarily as effective.

So, armed with your long list of prospects and a need for discretion, you need to personally call and talk to every one of them. When you get voicemail (which is all the time), leave them an intriguing message and private number with which to call you back. There are many ways to pitch an opportunity. If you're really interested in understanding what gets the attention of senior executives, we suggest you read Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal by Oren Klaff. Oren's methodology for grabbing a senior executive's attention is unique, not the least bit smarmy, and can be learned by anyone. While the book's main focus is on getting an investor's time and attention during a formal presentation, the logic is transferable to a phone call. We are, after all, trying to grab the attention of a busy, fully-employed executive who is generating wealth at another company. They may be quite happy at the moment, and convincing them to speak with a total stranger about leaving their current employer can take some persuasion.

It's a tall order on a first phone call. This call often ends in a quick “No, thank you, I'm not looking,” followed by a dial tone. I know, because I grew up in the recruiting business making calls like this in what was affectionately known as the “boiler room” with a half-dozen other guys. You really needed a thick skin to keep going. It took me about three weeks of constant rejection, despite memorizing dozens of snappy rebuttals, before I stopped to examine the process I'd been taught and came up with a more egalitarian approach. Within a short period of time I stopped cold calling entirely, and instead started warm calling. My career took off.

Let me explain, so you don't waste your time with methods most recruiters are taught but that haven't worked in decades.

Your sole objective in making initial contact with a prospect on your long list is to introduce yourself and get them to agree for you to send them the PP you so carefully crafted, to a confidential mail address of their choosing. Frequently, even if they have a few minutes to talk, I say, “I really don't want to speak with you now. I'd prefer to send you this information and then take a follow-up call from you after you've had 10 minutes of quiet uninterrupted time to review the material.”

Thirty years later, my first contact with a prospect is always over the phone. Sometimes it takes a half-dozen calls or more but it's a small price to pay to reach a great candidate. (My personal record was 51 calls leaving 51 different voicemail messages before connecting with the CEO I was hunting at the time—well documented by the Wall Street Journal in an article nicknaming me “The Rogue Recruiter”). Your first contact with a prospect on your long list is always when you're the most vulnerable, because you're a complete stranger who's barged in to the executive's day unwanted. You need to create a peer relationship to have a fruitful discussion.

I've grown accustomed to being asked how I got their name—it's a fair question—and I always tell them they were identified by our research team as someone of high interest because… (I fill in the “because” with the appropriate, honest answer). That's the way I start to gain their trust. Ninety-nine times out of 100 they'll give me a private email address and I politely request they stay on the line until I've sent the PP, to ensure it doesn't bounce back because of a typo.

Before I leave the call I tell them my name again, telephone number, and email address and invite them to look me up online at Perry-Martel's website. Then I tell them what happens next: that I know they're busy and appreciate they're not looking and don't have a current résumé, and emphasize that I don't want one—at least not now. If and when we speak in a few days (setting expectations here), it usually turns out they're interested in learning more. Many times I'm asked to send the CCB too, but at this point it's premature and contains too much privileged information.

Lastly, I ask them when they'll have time to review the PP and when would be a good time for me to circle back, answer their questions, and gauge their interest. At no time do I engage them in further conversation, even if they want to. There's no point. If the research has been done correctly, I already know they can do the job. They have the skills and experience my client needs. The position profile will either pique their interest or not, and we need to understand why. The next time we speak it will be a conversation about them. The first phone call simply opens the door for a second call, which then becomes a discussion about them, their goals, and their career trajectory.

Positioning the Confidential Candidate Brief

My second call is much different. They've now accepted the PP, and it's up to me to turn them into a candidate or allow them to disengage. This is a critical inflection point in the process. Again, my call is designed to be low-key and unobtrusive. I'm not in sales mode. Rather, I'm still seeking to understand who they are as a person and leader, and what's important to them.

I start by asking them if they've had an opportunity to review the PP and if they have any immediate questions I can answer, or they'd prefer I call them back at another time. If they have questions, eventually they'll run out and begin to ask me what I'd like to know about them. I like intelligent questions, because then I know they're looking at the opportunity with a certain degree of real interest.

When it's my turn to ask questions I say, “I don't have any specific questions at the moment, but if you wouldn't mind: could you roll me back to when you were first getting out of college or university, and take me through your career up to now—if you have the time.” Most do take the time, and I listen. Sometimes they talk almost continuously for as long as an hour, and I don't interrupt. At this juncture I'm not trying to qualify them but, rather, disqualify them. The question in my mind at this point is always: “Given what I know today about the client company and this role, is this candidate a good fit for them, and is my client's opportunity the next logical progression in this person's career?”

I listen very carefully because I'm interested. I listen because I need to understand what makes them tick, the types of challenges they rally for, the type of people they work best with—all the while relating everything back to the client's opportunity, and what we already know about the company's culture following the benchmark interview.

What I'm Looking to Learn on the Qualifying Call

Because actions speak louder than words, the most important information you need to glean from this screening call and mini-interview has to do with their character, not their skill set. You already know from researching them that they're qualified technically.

We've found that character can be distilled from the patterns that reappear throughout their life. For our purposes, we're looking to discover if he or she has a strong internal locus of control or a strong external locus of control. You'll be able to assess this if you ask them to step you though their career story from the beginning to the present day.

I'm interested in the themes that appear throughout their career and:

• How they addressed controversy?
• How they took on new challenges?
• How their contribution positively impacted the organizations (or not!)?

The following explains how to do this unobtrusively. Actively listen to what the candidate says and how they're saying it. This goes beyond merely reflecting on the main points and summarizing what's been said. You need to listen beyond what's being said and get at the hidden meaning. You need to read (listen) between the lines. You must be genuinely attentive to the meaning and significance of what the person is saying. Show empathy. Use your emotional intelligence to pick up on the unspoken clues that hint at a larger story behind their words.

• Focus on the candidate's accomplishments. Did they grow as a result?
• Are they adaptable?
• Do they display natural resiliency?
• Listen to why each career move was made. In your head, ask yourself: Did it make sense?
  • Has there been steady career progression?
  • How clearly did they see the situation?
  • Are they focused on execution?
  • Progress: Are they making good decisions or are they making the same mistakes?
  • Was the candidate's decision reasonable?
• What are the driving forces in this person's career and life?
  • Are they ambitious?
  • Are they willing to take risks?
  • Look for personal situations that could influence performance.
• Determine areas of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
• Do the same things that were negatives in earlier situations exist in your company?
• What does the length of tenure at each company tell you?
  • Are there holes in their story? Note this for later referencing if they move forward in the process.
• Did they respond to situations in ways that will work in this specific situation and organization?

No Pain, No Gain?

Before I disengage I need to understand if their interest is more than casual and, if so, where it's coming from. A good salesperson knows that to make the sale you need to understand what motivates your prospect to buy. The process used for defining these motivational factors is what's referred to as “qualifying the buyer.” As a recruiter, or ESP, I need to know what might motivate the candidate to leave his or her current position and join my client's organization. Strategically, these motivational factors normally fall into two categories: pain factors and gain factors.

Pain factors are any issues in the candidate's current job or work environment with which he or she is not totally satisfied. These issues push the candidate away from their employer and might cause them to look elsewhere. Gain factors, on the other hand—as you may have already gathered—are any attractive elements they read about in the PP or discovered while talking with you.

Understand as best you can both the pain and gain factors early in the interview by asking one or more of the following questions.

To Establish Pain Factors

Here are two quick questions I ask to understand what may motivate someone to move:

1. The satisfaction question goes like this: “(Name of the person), obviously if you were totally satisfied at the ABC Company, we wouldn't be talking here today. What are some of the factors in your current work situation with which you're not completely satisfied? Why are these important to you?”
2. The grass is greener question is asked this way: “(Name of the person), what are some of the factors you'd hope to find in a new employment situation that aren't present in your current work situation, and why are these important to you?”

To Establish Gain Factors

And these are two innocuous questions I ask to understand what may attract them to your opportunity:

1. The authority question: “(Name of the person), what are some of the factors that motivated you to come and talk with us today? What do you find attractive in the opportunity?”
2. The futures question: “What was there about the description of the mandate at (name of the client) that most interested you?” (Followed by asking for anything else that was interesting to him or her.)

When you get the CCB back, you can see if those factors are reflected in their answers. If they factor in heavily then you're finally beginning to understand what it may take to keep them interested and engaged as you go through your interview process. It may also give you insight as to how to craft an offer and a deal. When you now know what's driving their engagement, you can advise others who may interview the candidate later what needs to be emphasized. This will substantially improve your ability to land the candidate you choose.

These motivational factors also will come in handy later, when you make an employment offer. Any good offer strategy will include discussion reinforcing the idea that these important needs can be met in your work environment. This adds a certain amount of additional value that the candidate should find quite appealing if he or she elects to join your organization.

Behind the Scenes

As soon as the individual indicates they'll complete the CCB they become a candidate, and we open a file on them. As the search progresses and they're invited to continue in the process, their file will grow. We not only file our notes and impressions following every interaction, but also link to articles and other sources of information relevant to their candidacy. Technology-wise we accomplish this using a software program called Invenias. Invenias was designed by Executive Search Professionals for use by Executive Search Professionals. One of its best features is its ability to let me produce very detailed reports for our clients.