When I first spoke with David Perry, it wasn’t by choice.

David had been harassing me on LinkedIn for weeks. Finally, I gave him two minutes. I figured he’d do his spiel, I’d get bored, and then we’d be done. I get a lot of calls from recruiters, and they’re typically over before they begin. Typically, they’re far more focused on selling an opportunity than on truly understanding the role their client is looking to fill. I assumed that when I spoke with David, it would be more of the same.

I was wrong. Those two minutes soon turned into more than an hour.

David’s approach was different. I could tell the minute he sent me the position profile, which was a detailed document that he himself had created, outlining the perfect candidate for the opportunity. The role he was recruiting for was in my wheelhouse, so he was talking to the right guy, but it was extremely rare to see it framed the way his client wanted.

David had already burned through nearly every company in the Fortune 500 without finding anyone qualified for the position — and now he was talking to me. I suggested my head of research and consulting — my second in command — for the job. I knew full well there was no chance he’d take it, and I told David just that. He must have taken that as a challenge, because within a few months — and after really getting to know the what’s-in-it-for-me (WIFM) that made my head of research really tick — he’d won him over.

David’s brand of raw determination shines through in Executive Recruiting For Dummies. This book is a game changer for anyone who hopes to attract top talent to their organization, but who doesn’t necessarily want to engage an executive recruitment firm themselves or, if they do, who wants to extract maximum value from an executive recruiter. David and his co-author, Mark J. Haluska, step readers new to the world of recruiting through some of its most important elements, including why talent matters, the importance of research and of properly defining a position, and key personal characteristics that will ensure a good fit not only with the position, but also within your organization’s culture.

Hiring the wrong person — especially for an executive role — is a critical mistake that at best can torch deals and at worst can sink a company. For proof, look no further than the anecdote relayed in this book about a meeting between Nike and basketball star Steph Curry, who at the time was a member of the company’s stable of athletes. Curry was set to re-up with Nike, but the meeting went badly. When the Nike official displayed a PowerPoint slide featuring another athlete, things went from bad to worse. Curry went on to sign with Under Armour, resulting in a $14 billion boost to that company’s valuation — all because of a (seemingly) incompetent executive at Nike.

This kind of result simply doesn’t happen with David’s executive searches. There’s a reason why the Wall Street Journal nicknamed him the “Rogue Recruiter.” It’s because his approach is refreshingly different. He’s not just concerned with ticking a box and filling a role; he’s also concerned with the long-term fit of the candidate he eventually puts forward. It’s why he guarantees his placements for one year after the hire date.

Even though it took David 11 attempts on LinkedIn to finally get me to agree to a call, I’m now very happy I did. Sure, he coaxed my second in command away. But he also made me realize that there are good recruiters out there — and if you read his book, you’ll realize it, too.

Timothy Keiningham, PhD
New York Times Bestselling Author of The Wallet Allocation Rule
J. Donald Kennedy Endowed Chair in E-Commerce
The Peter J. Tobin College of Business
St. John’s University

When we told our peers in the recruiting industry that we were writing this book, they said, “You’re crazy! Why would you give away your secrets?” But we felt differently. We believe anyone tasked with hiring real leaders should have access to a handy reference filled with expert-driven insight and information. And that’s precisely what Executive Recruiting For Dummies is.

These days, strong leadership is more important than ever. Companies with great leaders significantly outperform their peers. At the same time, globalization, attrition, and changing demographics have led to a scarcity of executive talent. As a result, the competition for top leadership talent is fierce.

In spite of this, most recruiters attempt to draw the best talent by focusing on people who are currently looking for work — the ones posting on job boards or responding to job ads. But your goal in an executive search isn’t to find the best talent currently looking for work; it’s to find the best talent, period. And trust us: The best talent isn’t looking for work. They already have a job — a good job.

All this is to say that you need to look at executive recruiting a little differently than the average recruiter. That’s what this book is for: to help you make this important shift.

If you want to ensure your company’s survival by hiring great leaders, you’ll need some effective way to find them, to hire them, and to ensure they stick around. This book outlines everything you need to do to achieve this.

But that’s not all. Before you can hire well, you need to take a page from the playbook of the ancient Greeks and “know thyself.” That is, you must know who you are and what you want as an organization. You can’t give proper guidance to an executive recruiter until you truly understand your business. This book will help you clarify your needs.

If you’re ready to build a winning executive team, stocked with the best talent money alone can’t buy, then Executive Recruiting For Dummies is for you!

About This Book

The structure of Executive Recruiting For Dummies is designed to help you get in and get out of the text with just the information you were looking for. Consider this book your ultimate executive recruiting reference tool. Read it in any order you want and bookmark sections you expect to return to again and again.

You’ll notice several sidebars sprinkled throughout the text. (You can identify these by their gray shaded boxes.) These are simply extra tidbits that are interesting but not critical to your understanding of executive recruiting. You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to!

Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

IN THIS PART …

Define and make the business case for executive recruiting.

Gain an understanding of the knowledge economy and its implications on executive recruiting.

Grasp the high cost of poor hiring.

Identify core attributes of top leaders, as well as attributes that don’t matter as much.

Ace of Case: The Business Case for Executive Recruiting

According to a study by BTS Group and the Economist Intelligence Unit called “Cracking the Code: The Secrets of Successful Strategy Execution,” companies with great leaders significantly outperform their peers. Great leadership is also a prerequisite for strong employee engagement. That’s a big deal, say David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, authors of a report called “Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance through Employee Engagement.” Here’s why:

• Companies with low engagement scores earn an operating income 32.7 percent lower than companies with more engaged employees.
• Companies with a highly engaged workforce experience a 19.2 percent growth in operating income over a 12-month period.

A study by the Corporate Leadership Council called “Driving Performance and Retention through Employee Engagement” revealed similar findings — most notably that companies with engaged employees grow profits as much as three times faster than competitors with a nonengaged workforce. And a 2013 report by Gallup, “State of the Global Workplace,” finds that engaged workplaces

are engines of job creation around the world. Companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share so it should come as no surprise that the companies with the most engaged employees have excellent leadership.

The point here is that hiring the right executives can reap tremendous benefits. And yet, all too often, it’s the wrong executive who gets hired. No one knows this better than Kevin Kelly, CEO of one of the world’s best-known executive search firms. Kelly’s firm studied 20,000 executive searches and discovered, as he informed the Financial Times, that “Forty percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail, or quit within 18 months.” This, he says, is expensive in terms of both the costs associated with hiring the individual and lost revenue. It’s also, says Kelly, “damaging to morale.”

Others paint an even darker picture. For example, according to one study by the Corporate Executive Board, 50 percent to 70 percent of executives “fail within the first 18 months of promotion into an executive role, either from within or coming from outside the organization.” Of those, the study revealed, “about 3 percent fail spectacularly, while 50 percent quietly struggle.”

In a word, “Yikes!”

A Demanding Supply Issue

In the early 1800s, our forebears witnessed the beginning of a colossal economic transformation with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Within a single generation, old city neighborhoods and rich farmlands were cleared out to make way for the construction of steel mills, rail yards, warehouses, and office buildings. To fuel this economic boom, people migrated from the far reaches of rural America to take on jobs they would hold for the rest of their working lives.

Today, old city neighborhoods and rich farmlands are still cleared to make way for trade and industry. (China and India are prime examples.) But now, businesses exist in a completely different environment than they did during the Industrial Revolution. The tidal wave of economic change, pressure to increase shareholder value by the quarter rather than the year, outsourcing and right-sizing — all these trends have greatly increased the demand for top talent.

Recruiting top executives is hard. And in the years to come, it will only get harder. This is due to three key trends:

• Demographics: A lower birth rate in North America combined with the aging of the Baby Boomer generation has resulted in a contraction of available executives. In other words, when an older executive retires, few younger workers are qualified to fill his shoes.
• Brain drain: In the 1980s and 1990s, companies may have saved money by trimming senior management ranks. But that brain drain coupled with attrition robbed them of their ability to grow the next generation of leadership.
• Globalization: Companies in first-world countries have expanded their market around the globe. At the same time, countries that were once considered third-world nations have become economic powerhouses. As a result, the global need for executive talent has been pushed beyond our capacity to produce it.

Over the last three decades, demographics, attrition, and globalization have profoundly affected the labor supply — particularly for executives. The result: a scarcity of executive talent. This global shortage of leaders drives organizations to aggressively seek the best.

In this talent-hungry environment, the rules of recruiting have changed. It’s no longer enough to passively collect résumés. The people who have the talent you need — who can design a top product, manage complex projects, perform marketing miracles, sell new customers, or lead your organization — are already employed, can take their pick of top opportunities, and will make a career move only if the opportunity is truly compelling.

Waiting around in the hopes that your ideal executive will miraculously become available precisely when you need her is foolishness. You can satisfy your requirement for people with talent, tenacity, and dogged determination only by pursuing them.

This is the impetus for executive recruiting.

Value Pack: Redefining Value in the Knowledge Economy

In 1994, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen formed a new Hollywood studio: DreamWorks SKG. Although each invested $33.3 million, that was nowhere near enough money to get the venture off the ground. That meant the trio would need to attract investors — fast.

There was just one problem. As noted by Richard Corliss in an article published by TIME in 1995, “DreamWorks, which plans to make movies, TV shows, records, toys and computer software, has no film studio or recording studio, no products — indeed, no pedigree but its owners’ résumés.”

But oh, what résumés they were! Steven Spielberg was, of course, the Steven Spielberg — Oscar-winning director of such film classics as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park … the list goes on. Then there was Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was credited with turning around Walt Disney Studios between 1984 and 1994. Films produced during his tenure included such family favorites as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. David Geffen was no slouch either, having launched several record labels during his career, including the eponymous Geffen Records.

DreamWorks SKG may not have had hard assets. But it did have the intangible value of its founders. Because of what these visionaries had done in the past, and because of what promise DreamWorks might hold for the future, investors from Seattle to Silicon Valley to Wall Street and beyond lined up — to the tune of $2 billion.

We’re not saying hard assets are no longer relevant. But today’s new knowledge economy is built more on the intangible value of people — who they are, what they know, and their ability to apply that knowledge. Instead of resources or land, capital today means human capital.

Unlike resources or land, however, human capital has control over its own worth. That is, human capital — knowledge workers — can continuously invest in their skills and training to drive up their price. In a world where practically every organization has access to a certain baseline level of technology, people are the difference maker. They’re the value adder. As a result, the best people are highly sought after. If they choose to leave a company in the morning, they’ll be hired by someone else by noon. They’re in the driver’s seat — and they know it.

You’ll find that today’s top performers have a couple things in common:

• They’re competitive. Like athletes, top performers are driven to improve. They want to be better and faster, to break barriers, to achieve things no one has ever achieved before.
• They’re individualistic. High-performing people want to be part of an elite team — but they also want to make a difference all on their own. The people you’re after need to know for selfish and unselfish reasons that they’ll be given the latitude to succeed both as part of a group and on an individual level.