One of the books I most admire about executive search is Topgrading by Bradford Smart. I respect it because Smart demonstrates why talent selection is a business priority rather than “only” an HR function. Smart’s emphasis on hiring A players for key positions and eliminating C players is powerful; he makes a convincing case for a company’s success being linked with its ability to find and hire A players as much (or more than) creating great products and business strategies.
This book, though, was written in 1999 and came out in 2000 when the economy was in a trough and many qualified candidates existed for every position. Back then, selection was crucial. Today, when the vast majority of top candidates are employed—and often employed by great companies—recruitment is far more important than selection. Moreover, it comes before selection.
Recruiting and extracting great candidates from great companies is as much art as science. This is the challenge entrepreneurs face today. All the advice I’ve offered—making recruiting a priority; using a tried-and-true process to identify, extract, and secure qualified candidates (rather than winging it); finding a core values fit between candidate and company—will be for naught if you don’t bring two qualities to the process: evangelical zeal and a SEAL team’s focus. Let’s start out by defining what these qualities entail.
When I’ve spoken to founders and other entrepreneurial leaders about the need for them to be involved and engaged in the recruitment process, they nod and say of course. When I describe what this involvement and engagement entails, however, some of them have second thoughts. As one owner of a small retail business said, “You mean I have to spend all that time assessing, interviewing, and selling all the serious candidates?” As much as most entrepreneurs want to meet people who are applying for important positions in their companies and have the final say about who gets hired, they are taken aback not only by the time required but the need for both intellectual and emotional engagement.
When I talk about evangelical zeal, I’m referring to an entrepreneur’s willingness to plunge deeply into the recruiting process and approach job candidates as sellers rather than buyers. More specifically, it means:
Engaging in conversations, assessment, and reflection to determine if there’s a fit between a candidate and the company
Making the effort to determine which candidate is best for the long-term mission, not just the short-term requirements of the job
Selling the candidates on the company with honesty, eloquence, and passion
Understandably, some entrepreneurs never thought of their role as involving all these tasks. They prefer their roles as moneymakers and business strategists. They claim not to have much interest or experience in recruitment and selection. Unfortunately, if they are dispassionate observers of the recruitment process or just want to make the final selection, they will end up choosing a mediocre candidate or one who may be worse than mediocre.
While some recruiting tasks can be delegated—and in larger entrepreneurial companies there needs to be recruiting competency at all levels—no one else grasps the company’s essence like you. Even more important, no one else will do as good a job as you of convincing a candidate for a top position to join your company. Most important of all, no one else has as much skin in the game: You’re the one who’s likely to think longest, hardest, and most astutely about who will help you achieve your objectives, especially if you’re hiring for a senior management position. In the words of Irv Grousbeck, “you can hire people to do anything, except hire people.”
So an entrepreneur’s ability to be all in with this process—to spend the time, make the effort, and sell the prospect—is crucial for a successful hire.
You can’t take a laissez faire approach or only have a vague idea of what you’re looking for in a candidate and expect to make a successful hire. Not only won’t you identify the right group of candidates, but even if you manage to do so through dumb luck, you won’t be able to convince the right one to join your organization.
Navy SEAL teams are so effective because they strike with great force based on great planning. They are incredibly well prepared, and this enables them to hit targets with surgical precision. Think about this analogy in terms of recruitment. You can approach your “target” without much thought and planning or even certainty that it’s the right target; or you can zoom in with a well-conceived strategy and extract him quickly and powerfully.
Entrepreneurs may be fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants people, but they can master this latter approach if they’re motivated; they need to believe that filling a given position is a critical task for the future of their company. When they’re so motivated, they put in the time and thought necessary to identify the right candidates, and they create a sales pitch that will convince the right candidates to join their company.
Marty was an advertising entrepreneur who created a small, independent ad agency in Chicago years ago. Marty was the quintessential instinctive businessman who said whatever was on his mind and built his ad agency without much planning, relying on his networking and sales skills to bring in small, entrepreneurial clients. After about ten years of growth, the business plateaued. Marty realized that if he wanted to realize his vision for the agency—to be the largest and best agency in the niche in which he operated—he needed to hire someone who could bring in better clients, upgrade creative efforts, and run the company more efficiently. Driven to find this individual, Marty created a list of traits he was searching for that combined competencies with softer, less easily defined abilities. He wanted someone who had experience with and contacts among Fortune 500 companies, but he also required an individual who believed in creating a family-oriented culture.
Armed with his list, Marty treated it with Bible-like reverence, refusing to deviate from it despite temptations to do so. He rejected candidates who possessed great selling ability but didn’t share his beliefs about how an ad agency should be run. Finally, he found George, a young but dynamic account supervisor at a much larger ad agency. George met all the criteria for the position, but Marty recognized it would be an uphill battle to convince him to leave a much bigger agency and accept a lower salary. Yet he was absolutely convinced that he had found the ideal person. During their meeting, Marty explained why he believed the agency could quadruple in size over the next ten years if he recruited an executive vice president who possessed certain skills and beliefs about running a business—skills and beliefs that Marty said George possessed. He asked George where he wanted to be in ten years, and George explained that he hoped to be the CEO of a highly successful ad agency that felt like family. At that point, Marty showed George the list of skills and qualities he had created, and when George saw it, he nodded and accepted the position. Ten years later, George was the CEO and they had quintupled their billings.
In many ways, Marty was a typical entrepreneur. He was an instinctive risk-taker, and he would have been the first one to admit that he didn’t spend much time on recruiting and hiring tasks. He would have also said that when he was involved in these areas, he tried to hire the most technically qualified candidate for the least money possible.
So Marty, like many entrepreneurs, didn’t bring evangelical zeal or a SEAL team’s precision and drive to recruiting naturally. It was only when he realized how high the stakes were that he approached the process with a laser-like focus and was able to make a powerful argument to sway the candidate he targeted.
To help you adopt the zeal and SEAL-like drive necessary to recruit effectively, here are some motivational tips:
•The candidate you want isn’t sitting on the couch eating chips and waiting for the phone to ring. Odds are, the best candidate has a terrific job and may be hiding in plain sight. So you have to put in the effort to find her and then make a great pitch to convince her to join your company. Otherwise, you’re going to end up hiring someone who may be competent but will fail to help you achieve significant objectives.
•Dabblers regret their dabbling. It’s like home repair. You may like fooling around with small projects, like installing a new light switch. But if it’s something major, like rewiring the entire house, then you’ll regret the outcome—burning down the place—if you’re a dabbler. In recruiting, you may be able to get away with an amateurish approach for less-significant positions, but for key ones, dabbling can burn down the business.
•True believers deliver great value. Most entrepreneurs, whether they’re running high-powered tech startups or smaller, no-tech service businesses, recognize the importance of surrounding themselves with people who share their vision; who believe in what the founder is trying to accomplish and the way he is trying to accomplish it. Cynics and skeptics and egomaniacs, on the other hand, thwart this vision, intentionally or not. Therefore, you want to bring in people who believe in your methods and objectives. There’s no way to know if they’re true believers, however, unless you enmesh yourself in the hiring process and target your candidate with precision.
Here’s an analogy that always provides me with renewed motivation. Three laborers are breaking stones in the hot sun. The first one is miserable, complaining that he’s hot and thirsty and all he’s doing is this menial job of swinging his hammer and breaking up rocks into smaller pieces. The second one isn’t complaining, since he’s glad to have a job and able to put food on the table, but he’s not going about his task with much energy or enthusiasm. The third laborer, however, is ecstatic about his task and breaks up more stones than the two other laborers combined. When asked why he is happy and productive, he responds, “Because I’m building a temple.”
The third laborer knows something instinctively that most of us have to learn. Simon Sinek, marketing expert and author of Start with Why, gave a TED talk that addresses this point. Sinek tells us that great leaders communicate not by talking about what or how but start with the why.
Great communicators focus on the why of their audience. Why do they get up every day and do what they do? What is their overarching purpose? This is why selling a candidate on the position by focusing on the money bottom line is like trying to sell a product by talking about . . . the product. “We make great cars.” Or “We make great computers.” Working for a paycheck is a what. It’s a result, an endgame.
The rational part of the brain might like these messages well enough. But they aren’t messages that get people in the gut. But start with the why—the source of their drive, their passion, their motivation—and you reach people where it really matters.
Ever try to get a confirmed “Mac person” to switch brands? If you have, you’ll know it’s a losing proposition . . . and you’ll get a glimpse of the power of starting with the why.
The why is also the right place to start when you pitch your company to the right candidate. Explain why you get up in the morning. Why you built this business. Why you think it makes a difference in the world to be doing what you do.
As Sinek puts it: “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”
To clarify the difference between the approach I’m advocating versus the less zealous and unfocused method used by some entrepreneurs, here’s a chart listing the contrasting traits of each:
ZEAL-AND-SEAL
Creates a plan/strategy to find the right candidates for a key job
Identifies both the tangible (skills) and intangible (values) qualities essential for the job
Is involved continuously and directly in the process; knows exactly how it’s progressing, offers input, communicates with candidates and helps assess each one
Cares more about the quality of the search than about getting it done as quickly as possible
Acts as the closer when a candidate is chosen; makes the pitch to the candidate to join the company, painting a picture that helps the candidate see the values fit
Conducts a post-recruitment debrief regularly, assessing what went right and wrong in the search, thereby building a database to learn from and improve the process
Pursues candidates in an ad hoc and at times random and disorganized manner
Relies exclusively on the job specs to guide the search
Is involved sporadically in the search, asking others who are more directly involved how it’s going and becoming more involved when the schedule permits (or others tell him he needs to be more involved)
Is obsessed about finding a qualified candidate immediately
Acts as a buyer rather than a seller; expects candidates to recognize the opportunity rather than describing the opportunity in compelling detail
The passive and unfocused approach is easier and often quicker, which makes it appealing to stressed-out entrepreneurs. In the sturm und drang of daily business life, filling a key position as fast as possible feels like an imperative—problems seem to pile up every day the position is still open. I know that an unfilled job can hang like a Damoclean Sword above entrepreneurs’ heads, tempting them to forget about their recruitment strategy or to use compensation as the primary tool to convince someone to take the job.
But think of all the times you’ve regretted acting impulsively or without a plan, or how you’ve beaten yourself up because your lack of involvement resulted in a missed opportunity. Whether these actions involved recruiting or some other aspect of the business, it probably produced an unfavorable outcome.
Let’s take a look at some specific situations that will illustrate the value of evangelical zeal and a SEAL team’s focus.
Carrie runs a profitable catering company that specializes in high-end dinners for small, intimate gatherings. She’s been in business for three years and though it was a struggle initially, she has a good network of loyal customers and has built her company through referrals. Carrie is a good promoter and is perceptive about people—she found a terrific chef who she was able to hire at a reasonable salary because he didn’t have a lot of experience, and she also has been astute in her other hires. But to help her company continue to grow, she has decided she must expand into a new market sector. Carrie does some research and sees an opportunity to cater business functions, but she has few contacts in this sector. She decides to hire a salesperson with this experience and expertise, bringing in a local search firm to help her find the right person. But before she can do so, she has lunch with a friend who tells Carrie that her sister, Laura, has been working in sales for a huge Fortune 100 company in another city. Now Laura is interested in moving back to where she grew up and doing something more entrepreneurial and would be willing to work on commission.
Carrie meets Laura for coffee and is tremendously impressed. Though Laura doesn’t have contacts in the local business community and her sales experience is limited to the software industry, she is an attractive, dynamic presence and loves food—they talk about their favorite recipes for much of the time they’re together. The next day, Carrie calls Laura and offers her the job, convinced that she’s found the ideal person to help her expand the business.
In fact, Laura turns out to be a disaster. Her lack of contacts in the local business community present problems, but even worse, Laura and Carrie aren’t on the same wavelength when it comes to the business. For Laura, this is just a “fun” diversion until she finds something more meaningful; she isn’t willing to put in the long hours building a base of contacts or learn the business. She tends to talk down to prospective customers, viewing them as not as significant professionally as the people she dealt with when she was working for the Fortune 100 company. After less than a year, she quits before Carrie can fire her, taking a job with a large corporation.
If Carrie had possessed more SEAL-like focus and a well-conceived plan for finding a salesperson, she would not have been seduced by Laura’s charm and Fortune 100 sales experience. She would not have fallen in love at first sight.
Too often, entrepreneurs “confabulate” the greatness of candidates who make good first impressions. Because many small business owners like acting quickly, decisively, and instinctively, they often meet a job candidate who appears perfect for the position. They are impatient and don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, so rather than going through the process and relying on a dynamic strategy and their own intense involvement to produce the right person for the job, they convince themselves that they’re extraordinarily lucky and fate has given them the ideal candidate.
In these situations, entrepreneurs must remind themselves to trust their process rather than their instinctive first reactions. When they hire the first person who they interview, they often hire the wrong person. SEAL teams have tremendous discipline: Entrepreneurs need to exhibit the same steel will and resist grabbing the first person who makes a good impression.
“Hire slow. Fire fast.” That’s how Stanford University business professor and entrepreneurial expert Irving Grousbeck puts it. It’s the same advice relationship experts give: Don’t get married after the first date. You may feel pressure to hire someone to fill a critical position, but try to take it as slowly as is feasible. Once you determine that a candidate is a good fit from a values and mission standpoint, then hire her. It may take you a little more time than normal to make this determination, but you’ll be much less likely to fire the person you hire within the year. And, having alternative candidates is likely to produce a better result.
If you do make this mistake and hire the wrong person, don’t allow your hubris or rationalizations to get in the way of recognizing your mistake and firing this individual. Liza Landsman, former chief marketing officer of E*Trade Financial and current president of Jet.com, said that one key lesson in hiring she learned early on was that “often the greatest hiring mistakes one makes are not firing the wrong people soon enough.” Landsman recalled a member of a team she led early in her career who was really talented on paper, but who didn’t have the chemistry, culture, or mindset to flourish on the team. Landsman kept trying to fix the situation.
“I just kept thinking, it’s a failure of leadership,” she said. “She needs coaching, she needs support, she needs feedback. The whole team needs to support her. And what I really failed to realize is that her negativity was incredibly infectious, and it was harming the productivity, not just of her as an individual, but of the entire team.”
Eventually another member of the team confronted Landsman about the situation.
“It was a real wake-up call to me that the right decision too late has very little value,” Landsman said. “And, so that’s something I really think of, both in hiring—looking at that cultural fit, and not just skill set fit—but . . . recognizing when people are either on the wrong team or in the wrong job, and moving much more swiftly [to remedy the situation], because it breeds less negativity that way.”
Daniel launched his Silicon Valley startup, and one of his first actions was to hire a staff of ten. Of the ten positions he planned to fill, Daniel was focused on one in particular—chief financial officer. Daniel was a tech guy, and he was brilliant at programming and highly creative, but when it came to finances, he was uninterested at best, incompetent at worst. To his credit, he knew this was a weakness, and he also recognized that to realize his long-term goals, he had to have someone who was astute about everything from budgeting with the limited funds available to scaling the company in a financially feasible manner to going public (his ultimate goal).
Daniel, who had a healthy ego, targeted a number of top financial executives who worked for major Silicon Valley companies. Five of them came in for interviews, and Daniel decided to offer the job to one of the candidates—but he turned down the offer. Daniel moved on to the second candidate he liked, but he too said no. Both of them admired Daniel’s startup concept and his track record, but they didn’t want to go from one of the top companies in the Valley to one that had just launched and whose future was still uncertain.
Anticipating that some of the candidates would be reluctant to leave big companies for a startup, Daniel had sought to impress them by emphasizing his accomplishments working for other companies as well as a previous successful startup; he also talked about how the CFO would receive a salary that was even more than Daniel’s compensation and that he would have equity in the company. But what he failed to discuss was how he believed in a participatory, inclusive culture; how he wanted to create a company that was a hybrid of a family business and a typical tech company; how he believed the company could not only shake up the industry but provide a product that might change people’s lives.
With the third candidate, Daniel spoke from the heart. He was authentic and engaged as he shared his vision, and he was up-front about the obstacles and how he hoped to overcome them. He was clear about his desire to create a different type of company, one that didn’t just make a lot of money but could really make a difference.
This candidate accepted, admitting he was taking a chance by doing so but saying he was willing to risk failure for the dream that Daniel described.
Learn Daniel’s lesson. If you play the dispassionate professional—or, even worse, remove yourself from the interviewing process—you probably have no chance of convincing top candidates to switch jobs. You have to be involved, genuine, and articulate about your company and its future if you hope to pry a great candidate out of a great job. Evangelical zeal doesn’t mean you have to shout from the mountaintops or emote like a character in a soap opera, but it does require you to deliver a compelling pitch. You can preach quietly, but you must do a good job of conveying why making the company successful matters to you and what that success will look like.
SITUATION #3
A mid-sized company was searching for a chief technology officer at a tumultuous time in its history. The founder and CEO was in the process of restructuring the company, to make it more profitable as well as to bring more innovation to its product development. The CEO contacted me to help with the recruitment process, and after a long search, we narrowed the candidate list down to two. The CEO scheduled one candidate for a Monday interview, the other for Wednesday. The CEO allotted the same amount of time for each interview, created a list of topics that he wanted to cover with the candidates, and had two other members of his executive team in the interviews.
The Monday meeting with the first candidate went great; she seemed to be highly qualified from a skills standpoint and also possessed the attitude and beliefs that would make her a good fit for the company. The Wednesday meeting, however, was not as good. The candidate had the same sterling credentials, but the CEO and the two members of the executive team didn’t get the same positive feeling from this second candidate that they received from the first one.
In reviewing these two interviews with the CEO, I asked if there was anything “external” to the interview itself that might have prejudiced them in favor of the Monday candidate. After some discussion, the CEO said that the Wednesday interview was harder for him and his two colleagues because they had a board meeting scheduled for the next day and they were all scrambling to prepare data for the board about the restructuring. The CEO admitted they were a bit distracted and harried during the second interview. As we discussed this situation, the CEO realized that their response to the second candidate was based much more on their attitude that day rather than the candidate herself. They ended up re-interviewing both candidates and hiring the Wednesday candidate, who so far has worked out great.
The lesson here is to maintain iron discipline from start to finish while going through the recruiting protocols. It’s so easy for outside events or personal bias to skew the results of the process without being aware of how they’re affecting the process. Therefore, adhere to a recruitment plan assiduously. Remind yourself every step of the way that no matter how chaotic things are, you can’t let it affect your recruiting process. If you have a recruiting strategy in place and resolve to stick to it with military discipline, this will help avoid situations like the one just described.
As critical as it is for you to be involved in the recruitment process, it may not be possible or appropriate for you to be the point person for every new hire, especially if you’re a relatively large or growing company. I’ve worked with a number of entrepreneurs who when they started out were able to make good hiring choices based on their circles of friends and colleagues. As I noted earlier, sometimes hiring a college friend or someone with whom you worked closely early in your career ensures that you’re bringing in someone who shares your values. You may not have done a formal analysis of what those values are, but you have learned through experience that they share your sense of mission and workstyle. The problem is that as your business grows, your circle isn’t large enough to provide a pool of candidate who possess both the values and skills you require.
Similarly, you may recognize that you need outside help to find the person who would make a big difference. As the head of an executive recruitment firm, I obviously have a certain bias about this topic, but I can tell you objectively that any good firm can increase your ability to find the right candidates and join your company. Entrepreneurs need to be aware, however, that not all recruitment firms are created equal—I’ll suggest some guidelines to assist you in finding one that will be effective. First, though, let’s address how to make sure you find the right candidate when your company is large or growing and you can’t do everything yourself.
The simple solution is making your company a values-driven recruiting organization from the top down. This means training your key people in the principles I’ve espoused in these pages: understanding the values and mission of the company, targeting candidates who possess both compatible values and skills, recruiting with discipline, strategy, and zeal, selling the company’s larger and deeper raison d’être rather than just the job itself. You want your customer service head (as well as all your functional department executives) to be able to hire customer-facing representatives who grasp the long-term goals and cultural norms of the company.
Here’s an easy technique to implement this suggestion: Every leader conveys these principles one level down. This is a job requirement for every person in a leadership position. Entrepreneurs should train their leaders in how to do so using the process detailed in chapters 5 through 8. In this way, the philosophy is imbued in managers at different levels and in different functions, spreading this recruiting mindset quickly and effectively.
As founder and TriNet’s CEO for the company’s first 20 years, Martin Babinec is one of the key entrepreneurs who helped build the industry of professional employer organizations (PEOs). He is a fierce evangelist for establishing and propagating core values. TriNet runs on five core values: Personal Growth, Orientation to the Future, Integrity, Service, and Entrepreneurialism (POISE). Not content to let these core ideals remain static slogans posted on the walls or trotted out in speeches, Babinec integrated them into the company’s operational processes. Every significant decision the company makes is reviewed for fit with the five core values and colleagues hold each other accountable to these same values.
Now let’s turn to the question of an executive recruiting firm. While many such firms exist, some are bad and some are inappropriate for entrepreneurs. The bad ones will give you a list of candidates who only possess the skills required (with little attention given to the fit between candidate values and work norms and those of the organization). The inappropriate ones are large and aren’t able to customize their recruitment process to the needs of small and growing entrepreneurial companies.
With those caveats in mind, here are four tips that will help you choose the right firm to assist you in your recruitment efforts:
•Determine if the firm has a process in place to understand your culture and core values. It’s not enough to understand the list of competencies you seek in a new executive. Each candidate a headhunter brings you should be vetted for the targeted core value set.
•Ask who will be leading the search. Remember the adage: Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. Make sure your search will be led directly by someone whose name is on the door. That way the success or failure of your search will reflect directly on the firm you’ve brought on board. It’s the quickest and best way to ensure accountability—and to avoid having a crucial search languish for months on the desk of an overwhelmed associate.
•Make sure that the person you work with at a search firm has prior experience as an entrepreneur building a company. A search executive who has been on the inside, rapidly scaling up both an executive team and the functional teams that support them, will understand your needs and growing pains intuitively.
•Find a partner who demonstrates the energy, enthusiasm, and engagement critical to selling candidates. It’s one thing to find great candidates who are ideally suited for a job and a company; it’s something else entirely to convince them to join the company. Obviously, you can help a search firm sell candidates on your company, but you want a partner who also is adept at convincing people to take a leap of faith. You don’t want someone who seems to search by the numbers, who displays little eloquence or verve when describing your company to candidates. You do want someone who is gifted in selling the underlying value and mission of your company, who can describe it in a way that is not only accurate but motivating.
Now you know the overarching philosophy of highly effective entrepreneurial recruiting. This means it’s time to move to the next step: Learning the process to implement this philosophy.