Of Headhunters and their Cattle Calls
Raju Narisetti -
Tuesday, November 04, 2008 10:07 PM
Lost in the 21-month battle that Barack Obama waged to try and become president of the United States is perhaps the fact that, come 20 January 2009, when the 44th President is sworn in, it will be one of the most challenging assignments anyone can voluntarily and willingly take on. The chances that a new US President will fail to meet all the enormous expectations are probably 100%, no matter how you look at it.
The good news, I suppose is that unlike American CEOs, American Presidents by and large get to finish at least one term, irrespective of how the country fares under their stewardship. Indeed, a March 2008 study by Weber Shandwick of CEO tenures shows that "among CEOs of the world’s largest companies that left against their will in 2007, North American CEOs departed at the highest rate compared to their regional counterparts" some 37% in North America versus 32% in Europe and only 24% in Asia Pacific. (Read the detailed report here for some interesting global trends on CEO departures.)
This makes me wonder about how, while we can often say every country deserves the government it gets (I mean US voters did comfortably and happily reelect George Bush for his second term even if there are those who still think he stole the first term from Al Gore), why is it that the blame for ineffective CEOs doesn't get apportioned to head hunters? Especially if the failed CEO is an outside hire and is departing in short order.
It is now commonplace in Western business press--and starting to appear in some Indian CEO Appointment newspaper stories as well--to find the name of the relevant headhunting firm mentioned when reporting about a new CEO hire. But when it comes to stories about that same CEO being ousted or leaving a lot sooner to "pursue other opportunities," the usual euphemism for "we decided to give the ouster a good public relations cover," the head hunters have long fled the scene.
In a recent chat in Tianjin, China, with the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders, Kevin Kelly, the CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, a venerable top management head hunting firm, did concede that head hunters have some responsibility for bad hires but also put much of the blame for failed CEOs on the organization itself. He is probably right. But, over in India, I know some head hunters are increasingly agreeing to do a "free" replacement search if a senior management candidate bails within, say, 18 months. But this practice isn't something that head hunters are really willing to talk about openly. And I am not entirely sure if such "free" replacement searches automatically apply to cases where a candidate turns out to be a bad fit and is ousted than jump ship.But that the interests of headhunters and organizations don't necessarily align was brought home very vividly to me recently.
Consider this email exchange for what was essentially a cold-call email. Coincidentally, it came just days after I sat next to a senior editor of Harvard Business Review, a former journalism colleague, and we discussed at length how magazines such as HBR are trying to figure out the right model in a digital era, a subject that often leaves me with a lot of questions and few answers for now.
Karen’s First Email: “Hello Raju: Your name has been raised in relation to our search for an Editor in Chief for the Harvard Business Review. Is this something you might like to discuss? Thank you!!”
I reply saying that it must be a pretty wide search if my name popped up and I will be curious to know more about the search contours, partly because I have often wondered about the fate (future?) of publications such as HBR in an internet era as well as in terms of geographic expansion, especially in terms of monetizing good content.
Karen’s Reply: “Here’s the deal. We are in final stages of the search, assuring that we have rounded up everyone that we should have. If you were going to pursue, I would need a resume soon and we would need to move very quickly. Thanks! Is that possible?”
I write back saying “hope you don't mind me being blunt but this sounds like a cattle call” and note that my profile is publicly available and I haven’t really done a CV in years. And, “while I may be interested, I wouldn't want to waste your or HBR's time--and mine--unless I have a much better idea of what the job needs and contours are, beyond the obvious.”
I didn’t expect to hear back from Karen and I didn't. I don’t blame her, given my not particularly friendly response. I also realize I am setting myself up for some rather tangential conversations by blogging about this. But, at least for me, even though it is the iconic management magazine that she was hiring for, if this isn’t early material for a case study on how not to go about selling a job, I don’t know what is. And I am a little better informed perhaps about how this is played out, having been at the receiving end of skimpy funnel-shaped head hunter pipeline of prospective candidates for jobs in pre-Mint roles. I do realize how the search industry does what it does in a business where the revenue model is based in filling jobs and moving on. (Incidentally, for whatever it is worth, the print newsroom of Mint hasn't and doesn't need to use headhunters to find its journalists.)
The head hunter-hiring organization relationship can perhaps evolve into more of a partnership with search firms having a lot more of their skin in the game. And I suspect several of you who are part of the industry will write, telling me just how that is what is increasingly happening. Until then, maybe, every organization also deserves the job candidates it ends up with. Though, unlike Obama or John McCain, we can also dump the bad ones pretty early on.