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How do you find the right people, and how do you know you have the right candidates to present" ? Almost right after closing the door of his office behind me, I was asked the question by Hani Harik, CEO of Emirates Computers, the largest ITC System Integration firm in the Middle East, the first minute I was in his office. It is a question that goes to the heart of the Search business, and in the case of Hani, made him discover in the shortest period of time out of what wood the consultant in front of him was cut.
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In order to know if we have the right people to present, we need first to know where to find them, based on an understanding of what the clients real need is, and most important, what his business is about. Sounds simple ?
Understanding what the business is about goes beyond reading the write-up on the website of the client company. On a sidenote, some with no knowledge of a sector or exposure to a geography do not even bother doing that effort, and are surprised why they can't land search assignments.
In the case of a listed company, a significant amount of information will be found in the public domain. finance sites such as Google Finance or MSN Moneycentral are a good start. As for private companies, anyone skilled with a search engine, could uncover a reasonable amount of information related to client-wins, supplier relationships, management changes, and so on... More importantly, secondary sources, like industry insiders one might know, can shed further light, and bring valueable tidbits of information to the surface. Any consultant going to a client meeting without doing proper due-dilligence on the company he is visiting puts himself on a slippery slope even before he or she starts talking. A few months ago I travelled to London for a meeting with the Talent Sourcing Manager of a major US IT Multinational; a company designing, manufacturing and selling IT Network Infrastructure, and for who expansion into Africa and Central Asia was of prime strategic importance. One of the first questions I got was not to present my Company, but if I could tell her about the product line her company and how it differentiated from their main competitors ? This was probably her form of triage, separating the wheat from the chaff, but I can tell she was delighted I just could talk sense about her companies product lines and services (meeting a senior sales manager for a coffee the week before helped significantly). A hot air, "talk-talk" answer on a question not asked, would not have been conducive to a positive development of a presentation of my service proposition. Therefore, do your home work, and make the prospective client understand you made efforts to understand his business, products, environment and operating context even before meeting them. Know the business of the client before the meeting, as it will give an indication to any savvy HR or Talent Sourcing Manager on how you will handle execution of an assignment.
What is the real need of the client's business? The MEA HRD of a client asked me last year to find him the best Consumer Sales Director, most preferably someone working for their direct, and very successful competitor. I told him straight away I would not do that, and he was, to put it mildly, quite surprised. The reason made for a lot of business sense. This successful competitor had over 35% marketshare, and the Sales Executives in this firm did not do one essential thing our client desperately required: rolling up the sleeves and pro-actively knock on the doors of potential customers, in this case distributors and category retailers. The successful competitor had his channel in place, channel partners would approach them to have their products in their line-up and shelves, as their brand was so recognized it had to be in the store. My clients product line was, well, somewhere around 5% marketshare. Moreover, they just went through a major restructuring and laid-off a significant amount of people. (1) Successful people at the competitor would never be interested in a move to, in their eyes, a tarnished contender and (2) their profile is of an executive spending significant time to internal reporting and politics, and client relationship management, not prospecting and building business from scratch, but maintaining existing business. I placed a succesful Consumer Sales Director, with the exact profile the client required, but did not initially requested.
Another example is the one whereby an existing client (a very large family owned business in Romania) had a plot of land he bought 10 years ago and forgot about, but discovered through visiting Real Estate Developers it was worth over 20 Mio Euro. He asked me if I could find him a General Manager, for a Real Estate Development business he wanted to start-up himself, as he had done in the past in other sectors: financial services, IT, media and advertising. The issue was, he did not know what profile of GM he was looking for: someone with a commercial, design or construction background? An expatriate or a local manager? How would he need to compensate the right candidate, salary, upside, equity share? Could I help him on structuring the contract proposal? The story on this mandate, which took almost a year to I will cover in a future article, but is makes clear how important the role of consultancy becomes in successful Executive Search.
Therefore, before trying to imagine where to find a particular executive, start with (1) your personal due diligence on the business of the client, and when meeting, (2) discover his real need - which is often only partly expressed - or the need he states will not bring the desired solution. Step 1 is an absolute requirement to create the rapport and the basis for the Socratic approach making up step 2.
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