Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Retrained Search, the podcast where we lift the lid on what it's really like to work retained, discuss the stories we've gathered along the way and give you all a peek behind the scenes of our amazing community and how they're getting ahead. So welcome everybody to the Retrained Search Show. Thanks for listening, and today I'm delighted to be joined by a wonderful, I'd say, friend, now as well as colleagues, peers, clients working together, and Jordan's not here, though, so it's just me and the wonderful Clark Waterfall. Hi Clark, lovely to have you here.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Great to be here. Louise, thanks so much, and we do miss Jordan's humour.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Yes, we do. Yes, it's always a joy, but he's sunning himself in my orca, so he's allowed, he's allowed a break and I get you all to myself, so that's good too. There's so much that I'd love to bring from you into this discussion that our audience will undoubtedly learn loads from um. We've only got a certain length of time, so we can hopefully always have you back, and I know people love listening to you. Let's start with you and your business. How have? Who are you? What do you do? Who do you? What do you do? Who do you serve? Where are you? Let's start with that.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Yeah, just to build a bridge, I think only because I and you're educating me around some of the audience for the podcast. You know, I I started as a contingent recruiter, recruiting hourly workers in the printing and graphics industry, way back in, I don't know, it's hard to even remember, so probably the early 90s is my recollection, or maybe even the late 80s. So you know, having started in contingency, I and another colleague felt there was a better way quote unquote and decided, after a host, five years or so, we actually started a sort of a retained practice inside of a contingency firm and that created cognitive dissonance and all sorts of other issues, and so we thought there was a better way and split off and started our own firm in 97. So that was the origin story of BSG. Bsg originally was called Boston Search Group and then, you know, after a quarter century running anything, you get tired of saying long names and you shorten it to three letters. So that's how it became BSG.

Speaker 2: 2:36

Along that journey, I think you know there was this not aha moment. It wasn't as if it was a light switch, but there was this thought process that that evolved, which was if I try to summarize it, you know, hiring great talent is necessary but not sufficient. So that really broke out the all right. So if hiring great talent isn't sufficient to unlock all the performance that teams can create, what then? Or what else? And then that begat the birth of talent sequencing. So there are these two symbiotic entities. One is all around retained executive search at the board CNVP level, as well, as actually there is another brand called Talent Bench which recruits critical, hard to find individual contributor up into managerial level. But BSG originally started at retained executive search at the board CNVP level and it's remained fairly true to its purpose. There Talent sequencing was all around, all right. So if you have an individual or a team and it's a good individual or a good team, how can you optimize, how can you accelerate, how can you maximize their impact on whatever the goals of an organization or a group or a team are? So that ended up being this talent sequencing piece which was all around sort of diagnostics, right, you have to be able to identify where or how you can improve an individual or a team or accelerate their performance.

Speaker 2: 4:15

And then therapeutics, if you think about sort of the medical metaphor. Right, we have diagnostics. When we go to the doctor, they tap our knee and they, you know, listen to our heart and those are all diagnostics. When we go to the doctor, they tap our knee and they, you know, listen to our heart and those are all diagnostics and they may come out with a hey, you know what would be great, you should try this, or you should do this, or let's enroll you in that. And that's really sort of the therapeutic side of of talent sequencing.

Speaker 2: 4:37

So, in a nutshell, that is the, the, the origin story of both businesses, and I think we have, for the most part, ended up curating both of those offerings for what's referred to as middle market private equity. So sponsor-backed businesses, do we do search work for publicly traded businesses? Yes. Do we do search work for founder and family-owned businesses? Yes. Do we do search work for venture-backed businesses? Yes.

Speaker 2: 5:07

But the core and the fine-tuning of our offerings and our focus is really around sponsor-backed is the term, but private equity-backed or owned businesses in the middle market and the middle market in the United States anyway definitionally is businesses that have a certain minimally viable profit and it's referred to as EBITDA, earnings for interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, and that metric is usually sort of 5 million EBITDA on the low end to usually 50, 75, 100 million EBITDA or profit on the high end. That means that revenues for businesses, depending upon the industry if it's a tech, software, saas business or cloud business it could be as small as 10 million, even smaller, but it could be as large as 250 to 500 million, depending upon the industry. So I have now over-delivered, I think, louise, on giving you both the origin story and our target market and I will throw it back to you in the booth.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Yeah, I haven't over-delivered at all. Well, you have in part, but I love that. That's the whole point. It's about you and your story and we want to hear more. So thank you for giving us the overview. One question on that I remember when we first met that you were talking through the ways in which this symbiotic relationship between the different brands uh in the group and the ways in which they uh together, and it was like a horseshoe, I think, if I remember right.

Speaker 2: 6:47

Oh, it was. You have a great memory. You want me to dig out that graphic. Is that what you want? Well?

Speaker 1: 6:54

but will you describe it, because I love the way that you described it. It just really kind of helped me to understand how you saw it and how it fitted in the life cycle of the, the, the customers you're serving.

Speaker 2: 7:10

Oh my, I think I would have to share screen on that, because now you're testing my my memory and my ability to oh well it was like um go on yeah, if I were to share screen, dare I do? Yeah, of course you can, yeah yeah, I'm not even sure that that's uh, that's viable.

Speaker 2: 7:29

But if I were to um I think you're referring to this, which is sort of the way we conceptualize um, yeah that's it talent growth and optimization cycle, right, you know, acquiring if that is indeed the correct term to use in discussing talent acquisition, you know is part of it, and that's the green stuff, right? So this stuff in the middle and that's sort of there are three legs to the talent acquisition stool. There's the, you know, full top of house board, cmvp level brand called BSG. Then there's that hard to recruit, hard to find individual or non-executive talent that's recruited by Talent Bench. And then there's iExec, which is interim executive, and that's something that's become more and more popular, certainly in the United States, and more and more necessary, I think, and that is building these, filling these gaps with interim executives, especially in the finance function, often in the CEO leadership function, sometimes in some of these other functional areas. You know that was the genesis of, of the business. But then we, we recognize sort of that there's. There are things that need to occur before you end up doing talent acquisition. That's all around org design, right, like what should the organization look like? Not just the X's and O's and what an org chart looks like and who reports to whom, but what are the functions?

Speaker 2: 9:02

And you know Jim Collins has been so brilliant in all the research and work that he's done. You know all the metaphors that are now really, I think, probably accepted as just standard mores within the company building ecosystem, things like. You know what are the seats on the bus that are important? That's his metaphor, which is his bus metaphor. And then who are in those seats and are they the right people?

Speaker 2: 9:33

And cliches like what got you here might not get you there, right, which really speaks to the fact that there are different seasons for leadership, different you know, shapes and flavors and sizes of leaders for different stages of a company's evolution. If you go back to business school, there are four stages, right Emerging companies, growth companies, mature companies and then declining companies. Michael Watkins has done a lot of work in this particular area ex-Harvard Business School professor, who wrote the book that I think is probably best known for onboarding, called the First 90 Days, and he has this beautiful priority star that talks about the different stages of a company and the different types of leadership that map to those stages.

Speaker 2: 10:23

And so there are different types of leaders for different stages and phases of company, and so getting that org design right can be hard, especially if you're doing M&A. So if you have one company and you're stitching another company on or in or God forbid multiple companies, it really creates all sorts of complexity, right, you now may have two or three of the same title and function. Right, three Louises or five Clarks, oh God, yeah, exactly, at least on the Clark side. A nightmare scenario. But how do you end up triaging that? How do you integrate? It's really hard.

Speaker 2: 11:02

Org design is tough and that leads to executive assessment. Right, let's assess those who are in the seats after we've identified what seats are required and see if there's good fit and there's good upside and potential in the headroom. Then the talent acquisition, green stuff and then the performance acceleration that can occur afterward, which goes through both individual coaching, team coaching we're most excited about, or I have a lot of energy around how much more performance you can accelerate by coaching teams, not just individuals and then programmatic learning and leadership. It's a big issue. There are gaps for all of us, and often, when you're bringing an individual or teams on a journey to a new destination, there are chunks of learning that they simply don't have. And how do you gap fill for that? And that is that piece. Then, obviously, some peer groups and, louise, you're, as we know, a champion of peer groups and masterminds, and there are a whole host of organizations out there that do this sort of thing, and we, in our own small way, bring together PE-backed leaders on a recurring basis in order to generate collective wisdom and sort of wisdom of crowds in order to help each other. So that's the ecosystem, and maybe not so much of a nutshell.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Collective wisdom. It was you that sent me the or recommended certainly recommended Adam Grant's Hidden Potential, which I referenced so often, which, for those of you listening, if you haven't read it's an excellent read, particularly chapter eight, as clark quite rightly pointed out to me. Uh, for those of us in search, um, I mean, I love it's always stood out in my mind that that image and that graphic and for those of you listening, um, it would be great if you can go back and watch the video so you can see that image, because you've been hurt. You've heard Clark describe a bit. It's probably harder to visualize. Tell me, and I mean, I think, a background of working contingently, recruiting graphics temps in contractors to now doing stuff like this, like what are the main differences? What do you? How would you explain the main differences between what you were doing then and what you're doing now?

Speaker 2: 13:45

I can probably best explain the differences just from the subjective, from the way I felt right, which is what drove me toward retained search versus contingency. That was missing was a real or what I saw as the one of the problems or challenges in contingency was that there was really sort of a commoditization of the hire right and, and you know, there are all sorts of symptoms that indicate that the client is treating it as a commodity. Number one fees, right, and there is usually a pushback or a negotiation or a meaningful discounting or desire to discount by the client around fees. And it makes sense If I'm at the store buying a dozen eggs, right, I'm going to look at the price. If I'm at the pharmacy buying critical medicine for me, I'm just buying it right, price is not a primary driver for do I choose you know this drug or that drug, right, and that's, you know, a very broad and loose metaphor and I'm sure people can poke holes in that. So I this commoditization thing where it was there wasn't real appreciation for, for differentiation or value added etc. Was something that just didn't sit well with me. The other issue was the process of hiring.

Speaker 2: 15:31

You know Danny Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for proving that humans make some decisions poorly. One of the decisions in his book Thinking Fast and Slow and, by the way, the way better book is the Undoing Project, which is on the same topic but far more entertaining and written by a wildly talented author out there who was the same author of Moneyball For those who have read any, there's the Wall Street book as well. Anyway, danny Kahneman proved that humans make a host of decisions badly. One of them is hiring, and he proved this and there's sort of this, you know, description or explanation to some extent why, and that is that we as humans, you know, have evolved.

Speaker 2: 16:25

If we believe in Darwin and evolutionary theory, we as humans make a lot of decisions really fast because we have to right. And that really comes from sort of the primordial era where, you know, if you heard a growl, you know you're either sort of the amygdala response You're either going to fight, turn around and fight the growl you are going to flight the growl and run or you're either sort of the amygdala response You're either going to fight, turn around and fight the growl you are going to flight the growl and run or you're going to freeze and hope that they didn't see you, and so we as humans, make these decisions, some decisions faster than we should. Hiring is one of them. Malcolm Gladwell also wrote the book Blink there, which is all about Blink.

Speaker 1: 17:03

Love that book.

Speaker 2: 17:04

Gladwell also wrote the book Blink there, which is all about Blink. Love that book. I mean, how many times have we all heard from clients like Louise? I knew in the first two minutes that this candidate was either terrific or a complete train wreck. And I know that after 30 years in executive search sometimes it takes me 30 minutes to an hour to unpack a candidate and react and respond to my amygdala response right, I really liked them. Or wow, I'm really struggling with this candidate and unpacking and understanding sort of the true positive or the true negative versus the false positive or the false negative. And so Danny Kahneman has this proof out there and I've waved that flag for since he wrote the book and since he won the Nobel Prize and even before that it's really a challenge.

Speaker 2: 17:56

Clients, so this commoditization. You know humans don't interview well and those who don't do a lot of interviewing definitely don't interview well. We're born to procreate. We have that. That's just sort of baked in, right, we are not born to hire well, that is a learned skill.

Speaker 2: 18:18

And yet those who either don't do a lot of it or those who don't really care about it I mean the other expressions you hear from clients you know it's a coin toss, it's 50-50. You know, let's just get somebody in here and if they fail I'll fire them. You're going to find me a new one, right? I can do that inside the warranty. I get it for free. Which means that a priori, if I just fire them really fast, I can just churn candidates at the same price point, right. So inside the warranty, if it's a 90-day warranty in contingency and a client comes back and says they were terrible, I'm firing them, get me a new one. You're either replacing the candidate for free or you're giving some sort of partial or full refund. It's horrible.

Speaker 2: 19:01

So all of that commoditization and contingency really drove us to and me in particular to say hey, you know, if we moved up market there is, you know, as you move up the organizational chart, there is an increasing tithing or cost that has to be paid in hiring failure, right? So if you hire a CEO and that CEO fails, it's way more expensive and damaging the organization than if you hire a third shift pre-press operator. I have done those searches and so by moving up the org chart, the importance usually on the hiring authority or the company becomes more self-evident and then they're willing to lean in and listen and not treat it as much as a commodity and it's more. Go to the pharmacy to get that drug. That's really going to help instead of, you know, negotiate the price on vitamins that you end up buying at Costco or whatever your discount warehouse is.

Speaker 2: 20:10

So that was a lot of the reason I think I ended up moving or wanting to move. And then there's just a you know, a greater you know, you get to paint a larger canvas, make greater impact, and you also get to know candidates, usually more deeply. The higher you're recruiting in the org chart, the more time you spend with them, learning about them, assessing them, understanding them. And the deeper I get to know a candidate, the better my probability that I have a true positive or a true negative, versus a false positive and a false negative.

Speaker 1: 20:44

Thank you, clark. There's so many other questions I want to ask you about it and hopefully we'll have time for me to do that, but the first one that springs to mind is you made this move right from hiring press operatives to world leaders. And now what advice can you share on like how you did that? Was that an easy transition or journey to make from being, you know, transactional, commoditized contingent to where you are now, at the, the c-suite and operating as partners to your clients?

Speaker 2: 21:28

You know this is. I think it's the right question. I think it's really hard to answer, louise.

Speaker 1: 21:36

I think it's hard to answer truthfully, for a couple of reasons.

Speaker 2: 21:39

Number one I have a pretty crappy memory.

Speaker 1: 21:43

You don't know how it happened, just happened.

Speaker 2: 21:45

No, no, not at all, but I sort of only have RAM memory left. So you know, my hard drive got full and crashed, so I have to load in everything at the beginning of the day that I'm going to need to use, and then it goes away when I go to sleep. So I think there are some easier pathways from contingency to retainer and, yeah, one of them is to find and ask clients for their hardest search or the search they've had the biggest challenge in either finding or being successful in retaining an accretive talent Right.

Speaker 2: 22:28

Because if you go to hard, automatically, if it's easy, they're like I'm not paying a retainer. That's ridiculous. I mean I could put an advert out there and you know I should be able to drum up X number of candidates, do the perp walk and pick one and you know I'm good to go. So that is one pathway which I believe we took often, although I think some of the search work we did earlier in the firm's history was just really tough because we had started at the dawn of the Internet so this is way back in 97. And it was really hard to find Internet experienced talent, right. So by definition, we were looking for really hard to find talent and therefore hard to find. Clients were willing to put some money on the barrel in order to have some dedicated effort.

Speaker 2: 23:23

So I think that was maybe a little bit of luck, and that is if you go for hard to find the probability that there are clients that are willing to partner with you on the cost of finding because that's what they're really doing right and they're saying, listen, we'll help defray. It's almost like a joint venture agreement or a joint development agreement, a JDA in technology right, where you get one company that's bringing this to the party and other companies bring that to the party and they're both going to sort of pay some of the freight and hopefully the output's going to be better than the input. So the I think that is part of it. The other is to work with clients. If you've worked with them on contingency to, if you built that trust and that reputational capital with them to to approach them and say, listen, you know, do you believe that we do a good job on your behalf?

Speaker 2: 24:28

Yes, do we have a track record of identifying talent that's been accreted to your organization? Yes, do we have. Do you believe we understand who you are as an organization, beyond just the T's and C's, right beyond the surface level, what anyone can Google, or or or AI as an answer? So we know your culture, we know your chemistry and personality preferences for each hiring authority. If we do, we're adding a lot of value and we actually have a lot of work right now and we'd still love to work with you.

Speaker 2: 25:05

But would you be willing to partner with us on the economics? And that really sounds like retained, because if we work contingency and then all of a sudden you promote someone internally or you put it on hold, well, there's a lot of opportunity, costs and we could have used those hours on behalf of another one of our clients, and now that's gone and lost. So would you be willing to partner with us? And you usually can work from contingency to retainer, excuse me or, uh, right, some sort of advance up front. I'm not a huge fan of that because it feels like a win for anyone moving from contingency to oh my god, I got some money on. But there's still this performance-based uh, heavily performance. And loaded number, uh, heavily performance and loaded number and I think it's a bit of a false God.

Speaker 1: 25:57

I really do.

Speaker 2: 26:08

So I think going to you know, uh, retengency or container are the expressions is is probably not that great an idea. Going full retainer is the best way to partner. So those would be the two ways I think. Look for really hard roles where folks really are willing to put some money on the table, or work with those clients to validate your value to their organization and just change the economic model.

Speaker 1: 26:26

For the reasons I think you know I articulated it's like I couldn't have said it better myself. Couldn't have said it better myself. Um, okay, good, thank you, clark, I love that. Um, I had a very similar experience. That's exactly, uh, what happened to me, um, but you've just done it way better and much more in depth, um. The other question that sprung to mind was you talked about you know this. Let me just go back to what you were saying the interaction that you have with you know these decisions that we make, this fast hiring right, and so many times clients do that, don't they? They say you know, I always know straight away whether they're right. And I knew straight away and I think we do the same. You know lots of it's not just on the client side. You know recruiters do the same thing right. How, in your process that you run with your clients, do you start to try and mitigate against that? How do you help or reduce that from happening?

Speaker 2: 27:40

Yeah, it's really, it's really hard, louise. I think there are a couple of things that we try as standard operating procedure, best practices, to do. Number one there are tools that you can use in order to help guide your assessment of any executive or any individual contributor, whatever you're recruiting, and those tools can be really, really helpful. Do keep in mind that hiring is hard, right, because what you're doing is, you know, if I have an hour and a half interview with a candidate, like anyone can, should, any smart person should be able to hide their inner crazy for an hour and a half, right? So I mean, it's only an hour and a half, and if it's in person, it's a little bit more difficult, right. If it's by video it's way easier, but it's really so. These are these controlled conditions, right? It's not in the wild that you're interviewing these people. What you've done is you've put them in this sort of controlled environment with air conditioning, and they've been able to premeditate and dress right and do research and a whole bunch of other stuff. So they've studied for the test, and that makes it way harder, I think, to drive at true positives and true negatives and getting clients off of a true negative. I mean, we had one and it's infamous within our organization. So, number one there are tools. Number two you've got to spend as much time as you possibly can with a candidate, and that's not just in interviewing, or we try to spend as much time and internally we read every tea leaf. How long did it take them to respond to an email? How did they write it? We have one candidate right now who keeps sending email from his work email and this is deep into a search, senior level search, $500,000 comp package. And we keep coming back and saying you know, we're really sort of uncomfortable communicating via your company's email address some very confidential information. So can we go back to your Gmail and sort of recidivist in this, you know, is that an indicator of something? Maybe, maybe not, but reading all of these exogenous, weird, you know sort of things that you get to read, you're like, hmm, really interesting.

Speaker 2: 30:26

There was another CEO search recently where, um, we got to comp, I think, or, or there I know, there we got to having the CEO interview with his would be direct reports and he was testy, or he appeared to have some testiness across the interview process and our interview process is not for the faint of heart, right, we really there's no question that we've had clients and candidates both say you know, respectfully, you really have a rigorous process, clark, we know what that's code for. But he ended up saying you know, like, until we pre-negotiate comp, I'm not going to interview with the rest of the team, and you're like huh, okay, now that could be reasonable and it could be unreasonable, right, and you have to sort of look at that contextually and figure that out and understand why. I will tell you it did not sit well with a private equity investor because you know they felt there was an order of operations that was, hey, let's get somebody all the way through the qualitative process and then we'll dig into the quantitative process. So these sort of tea leaves are really important. And then there are tools, and using tools are really important, and so we use a host of assessment tools that measure both culture and personality, which are really good. The other thing is, you know, just expose yourself and have the client expose themselves as much as possible to the candidate, because you can only hide your inner crazy for so long and at some point something will happen.

Speaker 2: 31:59

There was a circumstance where we had a candidate who we flew over to the UK. Final interview happened to be flying back to the United States with the chairman of the company, who happened to be in the BA British Airways line at the exact same time, but like six or seven people behind, and the candidate threw a hissy at the check-in counter and was super prima donna, et cetera. And we got a call the next day saying we thought this candidate might be the one, but we have reconsidered and we're withdrawing the offer. And so, again, you only learn this via more exposure. There is an expression which is wildly politically incorrect now and I apologize for it, but there was a book written using this term which was go native, right, go native with the candidate and travel with them. You know, put them on, make the client drive to a location with the candidate in the car.

Speaker 2: 33:03

Finishing up another CEO search where we intentionally had this particular candidate get picked up by an EA at the airport. So somebody you know five levels below and then rotated through a bunch of different levels to see how much the candidate engaged, how respectful were they, how inquisitive were they, or was it? I have my nose buried in my phone. You're an EA, you pick me up. Whatever you know, tell me when I'm I'm on right, so all these sorts of things can be levered at. Trying to, trying to minimize or improve, I guess, true positive, true negative, in those circumstances, way more than you want to hear the wheeze, but it it is super hard and we fail all the time never enough as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 1: 33:55

Clark, you can keep talking all day. I learn something every time. Are you enjoying this so far? Don't miss a single episode. Hit the subscribe button right now so you can be part of the conversation that's shaping the future of recruitment. That's shaping the future of recruitment. So we dive really deep into the strategies, the stories and the truth about retained search. So if you want to hear more about it or you know someone else that needs to hear this, then share it with them. Right, let's get back to the good stuff. What you have done. A lot of work in the space now for several years, and you, I know you were part of a network when we met and you now are part of ours, which I'm grateful for. Um, you see a lot of people, uh, operating in this space. Um, what mistakes do you see? People that are new to this making you know if there were.

Speaker 2: 35:01

I can just speak to the mistakes that I made when I was never agreeing with the client.

Speaker 1: 35:05

What did, what mistakes did you make then?

Speaker 2: 35:07

yeah, yeah, the client is always right, is wrong right, yeah, I love that, that's so true, I mean, you're really not helping.

Speaker 2: 35:17

There's this beautiful expression the client of ours uses, which is being kind or being nice. And being nice is saying the client's always right. Yep, absolutely Yep, that one's a terrible candidate. This is a great candidate Yep. Let's put that together. That sort of you know sin and haste, repent and leisure, and allowing the client to do that, that blink, hiring that.

Speaker 2: 35:43

Getting back to this, we don't do it innately well and just letting the client take the bit and run with it and be super mirroring. Yes, Louise, I think you're brilliant for selecting candidate C out of that lineup of candidates. I can't believe how strong your insight is. Shall we go to offer? Really, was candidate C the one you thought was the best? You probably spent more time and have more expertise in your interviewing skills to identify which is and which isn't so having an opinion, I think executive search has, for the most part and this includes the large firms often abdicate responsibility when it comes to assessment and selection. I use this metaphor that I think retained executive search, and all search, has pretty much resorted to the safety of the bird dog Right, and the bird dog is the hunter's apprentice or assistant, and again, this is probably a horrible metaphor. It's again probably politically wildly incorrect and I apologize for using it but it is quite visual and I apologize for using it, but it is quite visual.

Speaker 2: 36:57

And and that is, you know, if a hunter goes out and they happen to have a bird dog, you know they, they point to a direction and they say go over to that, bush, see what you can scare up. And the bird dog rushes over, makes a lot of noise and barks and then flushes out whatever is in there and then the hunter selects what they may want to bring down and if they are successful, then they tell the bird dog to go fetch. And search has ended up in this and that's why it's called search. Actually, it's ended up in this find-fetch duality where they've abdicated or we as an industry we've abdicated the select, the assessment piece and, by the way, it's way safer because if you're my client, we find and fetch. I'm like you picked that one we have no responsibility for picking that.

Speaker 2: 37:51

We found a bunch that looked good and flushed them out, and then you picked that one and then you said, go fetch, we found a bunch that looked good and flushed them out, and then you picked that one and then you said, go fetch, we help negotiate, we help land them, we help get them into your organization, but we don't want any ownership over that assessment thing. It's on you if that person fails. But I would tell you in our experience that clients own the successful hires, yeah, and search firms own the failed hires, from the client's perspective.

Speaker 2: 38:23

So, never, rarely ever, have I had. We had two CFO hires that went sideways and had a. I had a two hour meeting with the private equity client to try to dig into why right Like too close together, why what were the issues? And we really tried to dig into why right Like two close together, why what were the issues? And we really tried to dig at them. And kudos to the private equity firm for being willing to A have that discussion, which is sort of a forensic discussion. What can we learn from it? How can we do it better? We came up with an action plan to do some stuff that they weren't doing, that we'd done with other clients, that we thought might improve the outcomes and selection. But you know, clients tend to always want to hire those that look good on paper, right, and one of these CFO hires had the perfect industry fit, the perfect everything thing again.

Speaker 2: 39:28

Uh, there's that cliche or aphorism uh candidates get hired for resume but fired for fit right, and they looked really good on the surface but underneath their fit really created a can't get there from here. This isn't working, either a chemistry fit or a culture fit, and it's usually the how they do things, not the what they do. It's the how that ends up creating the problem. So those sorts of learnings I think in in pushing back on clients, it's really hard. It's way easier to say yes, brilliant, we'll go get them, find and fetch Play that find and fetch role.

Speaker 2: 40:03

In my experience it's, um, you know, playing the long ball, or the long game is is long, medium and longer term, both more rewarding and, I think, engenders a better, deeper relationship with a client.

Speaker 1: 40:22

You talked a bit about where things, mistakes that you've learned from and things that we encourage clients not to do and we help steer them away from, and the responsibility we should have as search firms. I completely agree with you. It's much easier to abdicate responsibility over the uh, over the choice, and lots of people do do that. Um, where have you had particular success? Can you tell us about where that's been, whether it's a particular project or a client relationship or a phase of working? That is truly what you wanted to be doing and what you enjoy doing, and what is it that makes that has made that so successful?

Speaker 2: 41:24

um, maybe three things. One, you know, a decade ago or so I think, we had a firm off site and I said I would like a goal for the firm to be fewer clients, deeper, deeper relationships, and it wasn't received very well than the firm you know like. Fewer clients what are you kidding me? That means less revenue, less searches, less something. But in my experience I had, I had determined that the the fewer clients I had, the deeper the relationship, the better proxy and thinking partner from a talent perspective I could be and we could be on behalf of our client. So I think when I think to those really successful relationships, they're predicated on a few things. Number one, that we've had the opportunity to do a lot of work with a client, and the more work we do it's a snowball right. Each search adds to our three-dimensional knowledge of the client and their strategy and their culture and their people and their you know all sorts of other personalities. So that would be one.

Speaker 2: 42:40

The second is I and I will not speak for the rest of the firm, but I have found it particularly difficult or much harder to work with younger hiring authorities, and not younger in terms of age per se, but younger in terms of experience, because again it gets back to the Danny Kahneman issue, right, and that is if you haven't had a lot of reps. If you haven't, and the more hiring experience a hiring authority has, usually the humbler they are in hiring, right, because if you ask them the question, so you know have you ever had a failed hire? Now, number one if the answer is no, never or almost never, there are a couple of things that could be in play. Number one they have only hired from those they've worked with in the past, so that actually can be wildly successful, right, it's super low failure rate because I've only hired from the pool of talent that I've worked with in the past They've all moved with me or from three companies ago until now. I've had this ability to build a stable and reach into that stable and hire people that I've known, which is great, by the way. But usually in a growing company, you outstrip your Rolodex, right? You simply at some point tap out and you can't do that. So when you ask that question, have you ever had a failed hire? If their answer is rarely or never, and it's because they hired from the pool of talent that they worked with in the past. They get a Paul pass, they get to get out of jail free Totally legit, not because of that reason. I've seen no other reason that is legitimate.

Speaker 2: 44:22

And usually they're they're not self-aware, they're they're not really aware of. You know those failures and in that circumstance it's really really rough to to work with a client that isn't self-aware enough around the humility in hiring Cause it's hard, it's hard to do it Well, it's hard to do it right and it takes time and it takes process. So when we get to know clients more deeply and we have a lot more sort of longitudinal experience with them, that is one success criterion that we look at. Number two when a hiring authority has more hiring experience versus less, they usually are humbler around the challenges and difficulties in getting it right. Number three if they are, and if you look at psychometrics or personality profiling or any of the five-factor models that are out there that are out there, many of them will measure for learning and science.

Speaker 2: 45:29

If a hiring authority is low learning and low science, so low science would be. I'm sort of a gut decision maker, right, I go with my heuristic sense and my instinct versus data that can be problematic for us. And or if they're a low learner, which means they don't really like learning new things. They're a pragmatic learner. Hey, I only learn things that I can directly apply and I'm not sort of a learning junkie. That can be difficult for us because there's a lot of learning in hiring that usually clients have not had, and if they're not open to it or interested in it, then our process either falls apart or they don't allow us to run the process that we need. So those would be the three things that I think have been successful for us in trying to identify, you know, better clients or from relationships versus less good.

Speaker 1: 46:26

Is there anything you? Someone asked me this the other day. Is there anything that you wish you'd known earlier?

Speaker 2: 46:36

Again, I forgot so much that wish I'd known. Yeah, I think I've articulated a couple of these. Number one I think hiring is super hard and I mechanics of it, but I think assessment is is really hard. So the complexity of this. I guess I wish I had rocked earlier in my career. I think I had took me a while.

Speaker 2: 47:18

I thought it was just like, yeah, great, you know, got the spec and you got candidates to call and yeah, they fog a mirror and they seem to have what's right and you put them together and boom, I get paid. Very naive, very different and very sort of stockbrokery, you know the worst you know image of a stockbroker churning client accounts.

Speaker 2: 47:45

So that would be one. Second is that it's really hard to be the challenger in educating clients around how hard it is and to change their hiring behaviors. The third is the executive search industry is a human trafficking industry, right? So that means that we're dealing with animate, not inanimate, and that means animate changes.

Speaker 2: 48:15

And so we all may identify a terrific performer who gets into a role and performs for a period of time wonderfully, and then their life changes, sometimes due to tragic circumstances, sometimes due to life stage circumstances, sometimes and there's a lot written around distractions for CEOs, you know there's. You know, when CEOs decide to build their trophy house, company performance almost always suffers. When CEOs have, or any leader has, these meaningfully timebing outside distractions, company and team performance almost always suffers. And so the fact that we're trafficking in these animate changing entities is really hard, because it's not like hey, you're buying a new Mercedes or BMW or something inanimate where you're like, yep, it's going to run like this and as long as we do maintenance and you know here's the trajectory and it's all good, and then we replace it, you know, in nine years, because that's the way the math works. It's totally not that way, and that can be really frustrating.

Speaker 1: 49:35

And also very interesting. It can be interesting, but you know, again, again, there's nothing worse than having a client come back saying you know, he, she has changed and you're like yeah, humans do that really I mean, I am so grateful that you're a part of my world now and our world as a, as a team. Um, how did we? What brought you to retrained and why do you work with us?

Speaker 2: 50:10

I've thought about that and I've tried answering that before. I don't know that I've been very articulate around it. I would uh and at the risk of making this sound like pandering, I truly believe it actually starts with the leader. In this case, as most executive search and leadership and company performance does, and I think one, louise Archer brings a set of values and a mission that is a combination of authentic, vulnerable and transparent and that attracts like-minded people who are authentic, vulnerable and transparent. And if I can you know, reflect back to a meeting in majorca I believe the leader got verklempt at the very end of the last session.

Speaker 2: 51:05

You're making me emotional, Clark All right, but it showed, you know, authenticity, transparency and vulnerability in a way that I think everyone leaned in and everyone felt that we got a lot from each other, but it started with leadership, so I think that therefore brings a community together of like-minded people, right. That has sort of a community of shared values, whether they're one year into retained executive search or some odd years in search.

Speaker 2: 51:39

And I've learned a lot. Keep in mind, a lot of those in Retrained are younger than I am, both in experience and perhaps chronology, and there's an energy, there's an innovation, there's an experimentation that's really infectious really infectious.

Speaker 2: 52:01

Those would be two reasons, plus the global nature, I think, is for me it has always been a thirst, and that is hey, given what's happening in the United States today. Effectively, I believe we're building a wall all the way around the country. Forget about just between Mexico and the US. I think we are building a wall all the way around. I have always been sort of this global citizen, fascinated with you, know how other people think and different cultures and anthropology, et cetera, and so the group that you brought together is quite global, and so you know, every time I interact, it's with somebody in Australia or someone in the EU, or someone in the US or someone in Asia, and each brings their own perspective and their own set of experiences. That, you know, in the crucible of learning, is just wildly powerful.

Speaker 1: 52:54

Yeah, good. Well, we're very grateful and humbled by your, by your choice to join us. We're delighted. And what's next for you? What's next for you and your business? What's the next chapter? Louise you actually have that dark and sordid story.

Speaker 2: 53:37

There's a lot of energy that I in particular have around, you know, continuing to learn and go to school around assessment best practices, because it is valuable both in the talent acquisition side of our business in BSG and the talent optimization acceleration side within talent sequencing. I, to me, that is I, can you know, I was running on the beach this morning listening to you know, a podcast around you know executive assessment via Hogan and some of the stuff that that instrument brings to the table. I find it eternally fascinating. But I think I just find people eternally fascinating. So I will continue to go to school on that and continue to try to get better at it, but knowing how infinitely difficult it is, you know, I, I don't know that that will ever end.

Speaker 2: 54:17

I will continue to do that. We'll see where all the rest goes.

Speaker 1: 54:21

I love it and we'll see you in Richmond in September.

Speaker 2: 54:25

I hope so. Yeah, I'm going to put that together with another European meeting and love to see. I know I've been remiss. We've had the blessing of a lot of client demand in Q1 and it's really sort of forced me to spend time on client needs that have not allowed me to do as much learning as I wish I could.

Speaker 1: 54:50

Okay still here, not going anywhere right here Well, apart from Richmond, of course. There we go. It's such a pleasure. Thank you so much, clark, for sharing all of that with us and for spending so long doing it I'm really grateful and for those of you listening. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you found it helpful.

Speaker 2: 55:08

Thanks, louise, have a great day.

Speaker 1: 55:10

Well, that's another episode of Retrained Search the podcast in the bag. Thanks for listening to our wild tales, linkedin controversies and our top tips on how to sell and deliver retained search. Get involved in our next episode. Send in your questions and share your experiences with us by emailing podcast at retrainedsearchcom. And don't be shy. Connect with us on LinkedIn and come and say hi, we don't bite, unless you're a Shrek firm, that is.

Speaker 1: 55:39

We want to say a special thank you to our retrained members for sharing what's working for them right now and innovating new ways to grow and evolve. It's an incredible community. If you're wondering what exactly we mean when we mention our communities, well, we have two separate programs. Our search foundations program is for recruiters who want to learn how to sell and deliver retained search solutions consistently, and we have our search mastery program. That's for business leaders or owners already at 50% retained or more and looking to scale and grow and structure their search firm. We cap memberships to these programs to protect the integrity of the community. If you want access, just talk to us. Okay, thanks for listening. We'll be back very soon with another episode of Retrained Search the podcast.