By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Recruiters, Can’t live with them. Shouldn’t live without them.
Retained search recruiters are often perceived of as the creme de la creme of the search world. What is the job of the retained search professional when their target is all so well rehearsed and generally extremely capable?
On this show, Jeff speaks with Mark Jaffe, a veteran executive recruiter as he speaks about how he evaluates and assesses particular contenders and helps his clients hire exceptional talent.
The Self Assessment Profile for The Executive Search Firm
Hi. This is Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, and you’re going to be listening to the first part of a two part series I’m doing on recruiters. And my thought was, most people who are hunting for work, shall we say, don’t really understand their adversary when they’re contacted by a recruiter. Now, whether a retained recruiter like my guest on this show, Mark Jaffe, or primarily a contingency recruiter as my next guest will be on the next show, I want to open you up to the idea of understanding who’s on the other side of the phone call, who they’re what they’re really looking for, what they’re really like. So on this show, we have Mark Jaffe, who represents the retained search market. And I think you’re going to find it very interesting. So here we go.
Are you looking for a new job, or interested in leveling up job search? Radio is your go to resource for insider tips on job hunting and growing your career. Here’s your host, Jeff Altman.
My guest on this show is Mark Jaffe, who is a veteran executive recruiter and owner of Wyatt and Jaffe, an executive search firm. And he’s also the author of a terrific book called Let me give it to you straight, an outspoken guide to working with head hunters advancing your career and reaching enlightenment without the sugar coating. Hey, Mark, welcome to Job Search radio. Great to have you. Thank you, Jeff, for inviting me. It’s good to be here.
Thank you. So could you tell my listeners a little bit about your firm and what it does? Sure we’re a traditional, retained executive search firm. We’re a boutique we work primarily in four areas, technology,
financial services, consumer and retail.
Gotcha. And how did you get into executive recruiting?
Well, you know, almost nobody as a seven or eight year old says, I want to be either a fireman or an executive recruiter. Mommy, mommy, I want to be a head hunter.
I didn’t even know the position existed until I was well into my 20s, and I was working for my dad, who was a CPA, and he was trying to encourage me to go back to college and get an accounting degree and take over his business. But as luck would have it, there was a search firm down the hall, and I got to know these guys, and they
spun their magical web and pulled me right in.
That’s fabulous.
No disrespect is intended. Your background isn’t the poster trial for what people in the executive search business
present themselves as being, is it?
Well, it’s not the traditional New York aristocracy of lunch at the Four Seasons golf at the Larchmont golf club, boating at the Wingfoot Yacht Club. No, it’s not
absolutely I saw that in your background, and I loved it.
No disrespect to those folks, but you’re someone who came in under the radar and has built a great career. So I want to give my listeners a glimpse into what how an executive recruiter thinks, and how they operate so they’re under no illusions. So first of all, let’s work with something I read in your
book, The cardinal rules of recruiting. So when you’re when you’re talking about hiring, what are the basic rules? What is the basic rule, the cardinal rule of recruiting?
Well, the cardinal rule, or I should say, the first rule that I learned when I started in this business was that a players hire a players, but B players hire C players,
people who have chinks in their armor, people who are insecure, people who are not performing at The top of their game always make sure that they hire people who are less talented than they are, whereas people who are really they have all their lights out and they are shining brightly. They’re not threatened by executives who are smarter than them, even.
If they’re even if they’re on their own team.
Stories about certain American presidents who are a players, and certainly some who conducted themselves like B’s and C’s
without naming names. Without naming name, could mean you could you could argue that Nixon surrounded himself with a group of people who were less than stellar performers, as evidenced by the, you know, the comedy of the Watergate burglary and everything that happened afterwards and and I think he’s a classic case of somebody who was very bright, very capable, but ruled by his insecurity,
very true. So let’s start diving into what a recruiter looks for, what an executive recruiter looks for when they’re trying to find someone for a search.
Well,
first, let me preface my comments by saying that at the level that we recruit, which is generally people who are making
400 $500,000
and more.
Everybody looks good, everybody sounds good. Everybody has crisp, compelling, credible answers to all the toughest interview questions. In other words, they’re all well rehearsed.
So the first thing I want to do they’re scribble off their script. I want to blow past their rehearsed material
and their standard presentation and all their performance art, and I want to find out who’s that little person inside,
like the Wizard of Oz, who’s operating all the machinery. So the short answer is separating the projection from the reality. So when you talk about getting them off the script, give me an example of the script.
Well, the script is, everybody comes to an interview prepared to talk about
what you had in mind for your career when you went to college, why you made this change, why you made that choice, how you achieve this result, whether it’s a skill based interview or a traditional evaluation interview,
where the interviewer is looking for your motivations.
Senior executives are all good at interviewing, and you know what? At that level, mostly they’re all good in general, but my job is to find out who the real person is inside. So there’s a constant process of separating substance from form, and the way I do it is I say hey, tell me about your family of origin. Tell me what your father did, tell me what your mother did. Your siblings, what we like in high school? Did you? Did you prefer one on one social activities? Or did you prefer groups?
And I’m not looking for anything Jeff in particular. It doesn’t matter whether somebody was the president of National Honor Society or, you know, was selling pot in the parking lot after school.
What I care about is getting them off their script, talking about stuff that’s close to their heart,
and
that gives me a glimpse of, you know, who the person really is,
and how do you kind of mesh that up with what the client is looking for? I know that’s the secret sauce, but how do you kind of put that together to figure out whether this could be a good referral or not? Well, typically, clients have a very two dimensional sense of what they’re looking for. They know what their business goals are in most cases, and they sometimes think they have an idea of what type of experience is going to lend itself ideally
to satisfying those goals. But I also have some impressions talking to the clients, you know, Jeff, when we’re talking about retained executive search. It’s really a form of management consulting with a sub specialty in executive recruitment,
not unlike what they do at McKinsey or Bain or somewhere else. So I really need to understand not just what my clients are telling me to go shop for. I have to understand what they really need, and that advises what I’m looking for when I interview.
I know that’s true of me, too on the contingency side, because folks, unlike mark, most of my work is contingency recruiting. I hear a lot of words from my clients, and they say they need a lot of stuff.
But I really dissect it, not just simply in terms of the skill base, but to really understand the personality of the individual who’s hiring. Because ultimately, it’s not just flipping one skill against the other and say, hey, this person has such and such. They say they want that. It’s perfect. Firms hire human beings and the human beings have to mesh too, and that’s what I’m kind of taking away from what you’re saying. You’re trying to understand your client beyond simply the two dimensions, and try to match them up with the human being that could be the potential referral, if I interpret that correctly. Jeff, you got it right. You know, there’s an old saying in the business that clients will always send you on the wrong search.
It’s not because they’re diabolical or because they want to make it more difficult for you. It’s it’s because the patient generally can’t do the best job SELF diagnosing, and so clients are always thinking in terms of, well, how many years of experience doing what, and coming from watching which environment, those kinds of things, rather than the stuff that I’m focused on, which is, you know, who’s going to work in this environment, who’s going to Raise the talent bar for this organization. But still be integrated. So that, you know, it’s almost like doing transplant surgery. You want to make sure that the host body can handle it, but you want to also make sure that it’s a healthier organ than the one that you’re replacing
that’s so well put. And I’m going to pause here for a moment mark and say we’re going to be back with more from Mark in just a moment. But first my job search insider tip for this show. I hate doing the pause there, but it just seems like a good bright spot.
You know, folks, there is a story I want to tell you about a guy who used to own a gas station in the south and as a side business at the gas station, he used to make food for people,
and one day, he decided he was tired of selling gas and people had told him his food was really good, so he decided to try marketing the food he was selling, particularly the chicken product. So he started knocking on doors to try and find someone who might be interested in his product, and he knocked on over 1000 doors, each time getting turned down. But he had an undying faith in what he was originally told. It wasn’t anyone said his product was bad. He was just being told they didn’t want to buy it from him, but eventually he got the one person who believed that they could sell what he had,
and out of that, we have that legendary American business leader, the colonel, Colonel Sanders, and a lesson in perseverance and persistence that comes From absolute faith that what you’re doing is right. For many of you, you give up way too early. This man knocked on more than 1000 doors in order to eventually find that one believer in what he had to say that made all the difference in his life and the life of so many others.
My encouragement, be persistent. Don’t give up so easily. If you face a crossroads, you just got to keep trying and not give up before you cross the goal line. So that’s my tip for this show. Let’s come back to Mark and pick up where we left off. So we were talking about a whole bunch of stuff related to getting underneath the Vernier
and trying to mesh properly. And the last thing you were talking about I just love, which is, it’s not that clients try to give Xinjiang a wild goose chase, but they don’t really know what they’re looking for or what’s good for them.
The lawyer who’s representing themselves, as you will. So how do you fix them in all of this? Well, you know, when I started the business in 1984
Cindy Crawford was the most famous supermodel. So clients would always say, I want, I want you to bring me this Cindy Crawford of marketing, or, I want you to bring me this Cindy Crawford of digital servo design. Or I want you to bring you know, it was always the Cindy Crawford of something or another. And you look at the client and he’s saying Cindy Crawford, but you think maybe March setter match, better match for him, right?
So I always figured it was a, it was like, it was like
a triangle diagram. You got Sidney Crawford at one point, you’ve got Marge Simpson in the other that’s, that’s who he deserves. But then I’m going to form the third point. And the third point is, what
does he really need? And can I find it in.
A form
that he will at least marginally recognize as close enough to his original description. Can I find him a Cindy Crawford with tall blue hair? Right that
some somehow approximates what he asked for, but at the same time, slips in all the vitamins and minerals he needs in order to be successful as a business.
It’s so funny. We do the same thing in my line of work. We try to understand what they say. We nod agreement. We take a look or listen to this client,
shrug our shoulders, like I did a conference call this past week with a firm that told me that they want to hire someone with this obscure technology,
maybe 75 people in the country, with this background that they wanted at their particular price point. And then they said, and we want 10 years of experience with us.
I just shrugged my shoulders ago. Could you settle for four?
Because you’re not going to get them for 10 with that amount of experience. Well, we like as much as we can get. Great. Okay, okay,
you know it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like the art of getting little kids to eat their vegetables. I think Jerry Seinfeld’s wife Jessica wrote a book about how to disguise healthy foods in foods that taste good so that kids will eat them. And I see my role recruiting as being a little bit like that
cool. So what else do you do in order to find this right person or identify the right person?
Well, you know, when I started in the business,
the challenge used to be around having a very broad network and deep expertise in specific industries and specific functions. You know there’ll be the guy who knew every HR executive or do you know everybody in the airline industry? And back in the days when we used the word Rolodex, it was your Rolodex and your access to people that made you a powerful executive recruiter. Nowadays, it’s different. You can see everybody, can’t you? Everybody is
the emperor has no clothes. Everybody is visible,
whether it’s on LinkedIn or Alexis next, whatever application or tools you use now with the whole world as your oyster,
what is the value of an executive recruiter? What do you think, Jeff? It’s in the event, the ability to evaluate, assess and understand what it is the client wants and needs, and package the candidate in a way that they’ll eat their vegetables. To use that example from Jerry Simpson’s Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, right? So I agree. I think it’s three things. Essentially. Number one, it’s
how you understand the client need
how you understand it beyond what they’ve told you, beyond what’s written in the job description.
The next thing is how you identify and handicap the players. Right? You have to be the reducing valve, valve we
you know, we’re much more exclusive than we are inclusive in our thinking. So what we want to do is
prioritize or put these people in some kind of ranking so that we see reasonably who would be interested enough in this job to want to talk to the client, and who is maybe not good,
not going to be a change agent, not going to be a powerful force. I mean putting them in a rank, handicapping them like race horses, very important. And then how you present,
how you frame the opportunity to the candidate, and how you manage the process, those are the things I think that are essential. And what’s interesting is knowing that you’re not looking for the active job applicant. It’s not like you’re running an ad in a newspaper or online, saying, great opportunity for such and such contact me. You’re aggressively pursuing people who are probably working, who are probably exceptional at what they do,
networking to find them so you.
A degree of a fashion show going on. So you’re looking for the Cindy Crawford to use that example from earlier, the one that stands whose up shoulders above all the others, so that they can be noticed. And that’s probably one of the ways you find them
exactly right. Perception is everything. And if the perception is this is somebody who is gainfully employed, not under appreciated, not underpaid, at the top of their game, really crushing it for somebody else, for another company, that’s the person that you instinctively want. It’s just like women Jeff, you want the ones that you can’t have?
Well, we now have to clean that one up, because same sex marriage, it’s legal in this country, so it’s like,
exactly right. And kidding you is taking away the kidding here for a second, there is a degree where, because you’re looking for only that individual who’s by the way, I have to pause for a second and back up on something you said, someone who’s not under valued or underpaid. Why did, why did the work that into the measure?
Because, why is it important?
You know, the first thing I say when I call a prospect about a job opportunity is
I introduce myself. I say, I want to let you know that there’s no implication whatsoever by my call that you’re looking or on the market, just the opposite. Okay, and it’s true, I’m calling them based on their credentials, not based on the fact that I think I might be able to get them out of there, or they’re in a troubled environment, or I heard that their boss is a world class jerk or something of that kind. I’m not trying to use some pretext or some rationale to extract them from the environment. I’m giving them the reassurance that I know that they’re at the top of their game, and that’s why I’m calling once somebody has an actual reason to lead the company. Now their motives become suspect.
Interesting,
and what do you think makes it suspect because they’re desperate at that point or some other reason? Well, look, if I don’t like my boss or I don’t look forward to going to work every day,
for one thing, it’s going to cloud my judgment. When I look at a new opportunity, I might jump at something impulsively just because it looks like a ticket out of Dodge, and that’s not the person I want. I want the person who’s making a choice and a decision to look at another opportunity, and potentially to make a move based on its merits, not based on the pain of staying where they are.
Gotcha, it’s a great point, folks. Now let’s go one extra layer, and that’s in the process of finding them. We’re going to tie in something that’s been said on other of my shows before. Really well here now, since you’re not advertising to find people, you’re going out to locate them. How do you find them? Yes, you’re using certain data tools to start off with, but I presume the power is in your network.
The power is not in our network, and we never, I mean, we have a database, obviously, with 10s of 1000s of people in it, we almost never go there. I mean, it’s just a giant warehouse that we hardly ever visit, like a, you know, like a storage locker.
We see each search as being a de novo project, and we do our research in real time. My research has been with me for 12 years. We work very closely together, like Batman and Robin, sort of, or maybe more like the FBI, you know, we talk to the client, we hear what the client says, and I take those ideas that we come away from the meeting with, and I put them in an order for her, for Eva, and I say, Okay, we want somebody who’s been doing brain surgery.
We think that this person is coming from where, where in Eastern Europe. Let’s focus for right now on Armenia right and let’s use a real search here, for example, rather than this hypothetical the left handed Armenian brain surgeon. I
don’t think you’ve done that search recently. Correct me if I’m missing we’ve done it a few times, but it’s always in a different form.
Yeah, sometimes we’re looking for people who have very, very, very specialized
knowledge in technology. Sometimes we’re looking for people who have achieved certain very lofty numbers in terms of ultra high net worth wealth management. Sometimes we have to look in certain organizations, but in general, we
go down the list of boxes that we want to check. We want somebody to have a combination of, let’s say, big company and small company experience. We want somebody who’s been in a turnaround situation. We want somebody who has strong relationships on Wall Street. All of these were true when I did a search for a CFO, for gateway, for Ted wait at Gateway computer about a decade ago, and
the sign of the stock had tumbled public confidence. So again, we have a checklist. We want somebody who has consumer experience. We want somebody who maybe has some retail experience, but is very familiar with technology. So we have all those things on our laundry list, in addition to the fact that they have to be a world class CFO,
now I say to Eva, okay, you’ve got the algorithms. Go run them and find me people who check as many of those boxes, many of those categories, as possible.
And she starts to generate names. And I look at those names and the ones that really speak to me from the page. I call them, and I talk to them. I listen, and I listen to the quality of the questions they ask, and I can hear in the first five minutes whether I’ve got the right stuff or not.
This is terrific.
And we don’t really have a lot of time left for today. I think I’ll try having you back at some point in the not too distant future. But
let me just ask one question that I suspect my listeners aren’t going to be happy with the answer to,
how does a candidate get noticed by you?
Well,
you know, there’s been a lot of discussion in recent years Jeff about whether accomplishments are, are even mobile or even transferable from one company to a next, somebody who who shined at American Airlines, is he going to be able to go make the move to delta and perform the same miracles?
It’s not clear. Michael Dell used to fire his management team every time he achieved a new plateau or goal, because he felt like he had seen all the tricks from that group, and now he needed a new batch of people to come in and perform new material.
Basically, though we’re stuck with that as a crucible, so we look at who has done what, where, who has knocked the cover off the ball over here, who has turned this company around, who has been a major force for change or transformation in another organization.
We go by reputation. To a large degree, we go by an environment. To some degree, we look at what kinds of tools and resources someone had available to them. And we looked at where the where the company did and he started, and
where they were after two years. And you know, aside from all self promotion and you know, chest thumping and
reputation, keeping your head down, doing a great job, sometimes being under the radar. Those are some of the things that are important to us. Interesting. I just want to follow up on one thing so far. What I heard you talk about was what I call primary source data,
Robin, and you wind up
searching for individuals who fit a particular profile using whatever tools that you have. I didn’t really hear a lot about secondary sourcing, which I would have thought I would have heard about in the course of your answer, because I would think that sometimes the first person you’ll reach to isn’t right, but they may know the right person.
Sometimes, sometimes that’s the case. And you know, that’s 20 years ago. That’s how I did most of my research. It was all word of mouth. It was all based on my trusted network.
But now I you know, we just have a
much more dynamic source of data as as Eva runs these algorithms and shows me people I very rarely Jeff place someone in a job who I knew before I had that.
Search. Every search begins with us asking, what do we need here? As opposed to, who do we know, or who, or who do we think we know that might be able to do the job? So we never go back to the stacks. We never go back to inventory and say, well, but what can I brush the dust off of here and present to the client that might be a fit? We want to get the sharpest point on this thing that we can based on our understanding of the client’s needs.
But yes, if somebody says big for this, I’m perfect for this job, but there’s no way I’m moving. I’d be giving up $60 million worth of stock if I, if I took off at this point, I would say, okay, great. Tell me, who do you know that could do this job brilliantly? Don’t think in terms of who’s looking just think in terms of who could kill it.
That’s one of the big mistakes. Whether you’re at the level you’re recruiting at four or $500,000
or the one that I’m recruiting at which is a lesser price point, people always respond with, oh, I’m happy where I am right now, instead of thinking in terms of exploring opportunities. Because, Hey, folks, people get ahead rarely by being the smartest for working the hardest, although those are great qualities to have. People get ahead by being alert to opportunities. Rarely agrees internal to your organization. Most of the time they’re external. So you have to respond well when the recruiter calls, and instead of dismissing them with that, I’m happy. Wouldn’t you be happier with another 25,000 if you’re at this level, or another 75,000
if you’re working at Mark’s level?
People don’t generally move just for the increase in salary. And in fact, if someone puts that up front and foremost, I take a few steps back. That’s off putting to me when people tell me that they’re motivated by the culture and the values of an organization, by the degree of autonomy that they would have within a company, with the prestige of the of the organization, or or where they would be in the hierarchy, and, you know, in the pecking order, those are much more reasonable criteria in my mind. But Jeff, when someone says to me, I am totally happy where I am,
the only thing to say is that’s terrific. I wouldn’t be calling you if I didn’t think that was the case. And in fact, I believe that that’s the best perspective from which to evaluate any new opportunity.
One final question for you, Mark, so you run into this applicant who you’re not sure about.
What do you
do? You might even judge them so far as to go bad applicant or bad potential applicant.
My language from contingency,
we don’t have applicants here, I’m sorry to say
we only have people that we have personally cherry picked. So if somebody sends me a resume and and they, they they look like Einstein on paper, unless someone is paying me right now to find a dead German nuclear physicist,
I’m like, Okay, nice resume.
I’ll call you when I need you.
Your question is, when I interview somebody and I’m not overwhelmed, yep,
you know,
aside from some aside from what I believe a client needs in any given situation, there’s always the perception. And as you know, perception Trumps every other consideration. Right? While I was doing the CFO search for gateway, I went to the airport to pick up a CFO of a very famous consumer company, and as soon as I saw him standing on the curb, my first impulse was to put my foot on the gas and just zoom by him, because I knew soon as I looked at him that he was not a guy that my client would like. He didn’t have the cool gene. He didn’t have the cool factor, and that was an important ingredient in what I needed.
So, you know, you get those from time to time, I had somebody in my conference room once who was laying out an org chart. And.
And I knew he had fluffed some of the data because I had a better org chart of his organization already, and instead of sending him on to the client for an interview, I sent him back home. Oh, I’m so sorry. Something came up. We’ll have to do it another time.
Beautifully put folks this is really a great insight into how an executive recruiter thinks and how they conduct themselves. If you need to listen to this one again and again, there’s been a lot of different pearls here. Hey, Mark, how can people find out about your book? Or where could they order it? It’s really hard.
Go to amazon.com,
if you can
find it and put in Mark Jaffe. Let me give it to you straight or just put in Mark Jaffe. The only other Mark Jaffe is a
writer for The Denver Post who’s published a few books about dinosaurs. But if you put in Mark Jaffe, you’ll see it right away.
J A, F, F, as in Frank E, Mark Jaffe, and the book is called, let me give it to you straight. You’ll know you’ve come to the right place when you see a book cover that has a 1234, diagram on how to tie in news.
Hysterical. Hey, Mark, thank you for making time today.
It’s been my pleasure, Jeff.
You’re welcome, folks. We’ll be back soon with another SME subject matter expert about job hunting. I’m Jeff Altman. Hope you enjoyed today’s show. Subscribe to me. Subscribe to job search radio and iTunes.
Give people a great review of the show, if you liked it, and I hope to have you back next time, and hope I’m able to help you again.
Have a great day. Take care.
For more job search advice. Visit Jeff’s website at thebiggamehunter.us.
That’s thebiggamehunter.us..
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