By: Chris Mahoney, Boston Business Journal
Executive recruitment: Under the best of circumstance, it’s a challenging intricate dance in which a company, its chief officers and – in many cases- its board of directors look to find the right candidate that can bring a company to the next level and navigate an increasingly complex host of regulatory and market issues.
And for some executives, it’s a dance that’s getting harder to do. According to a survey released last month by the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation, four out of five chief executives polled believe the talent pool for top executives who are being groomed to succeed existing ones may threaten the ability of many firms to achieve their long-term strategic objectives.
This is typically where executive search professionals come in. Typically, these are the folks client companies call in when they can’t find a job candidate in-house.
Their services aren’t cheap. They have to identify, track down, court and woo executives who probably haven’t given a thought to moving. They have to know the company they represent intimately and be able to sell it to a likely target.
It’s a job that requires singular skills and draws executives from a wide range of backgrounds.
The way Geoff Champion sees it, if a larger executive search firm were to anger a client to the point of losing it, they’d probably be able to absorb the loss. They wouldn’t like it, and they’d do everything they could to turn the situation round, but they’d survive.
But if a smaller firm like his were to lose a client, the hurt would potentially be deep.
“There’s probably a sharper edge to it. At the larger firms, if they mess up, they survive. If I mess up, I lose a huge piece of my business,” said Champion, chairman and chief executive officer of ChampionScott. “There’s not the safety in numbers.”
At a smaller firm, he said, everyone shares more of the workload- from client interaction to candidate research to making contact with target executives. ChampionScott’s model consists of a small number of executives in locations throughout the world. Co-founder and company president Tony Scott is based in Menlo Park, and the firm has managing directors heading up practices in Beijing, Geneva, London and Washington D.C.
Champion co-founded ChampionScott in 2002 after a stint at search giant Korn/Ferry, where he was president of the advanced technology practice.
His career in executive search began in the early 1990s, after working in such positions as executive vice president at marketing information firm AC Nielsen Co. and vice president and managing director at Dataquest, where he was responsible for much of the technology research and analysis firm’s international operations.
ChampionScott focuses exclusively on the technology industry and related sectors. It had 60 searches and generated $2.7 million in Massachusetts executive search revenue in 2006.
The firm’s clients include such companies as Summer Street Capital Partners of Buffalo, NY; Atlantic Data Services Inc, an information technology consulting firm based in Quincy; and Spoke Software Inc. of San Mateo, CA. International assignments include placements for the India Operations of Affinity Express and the China operations for Analogix.
Champion said that working with clients is more than just a matter of filling executive level openings. Executive search consultants need to know a client company’s strengths and weaknesses- a strong search candidate may not have certain skill sets that the client company can make up with resources it has on hand.
As for finding the right executive, it’s pretty much a matter of timing, Champion said- on one recent search, he was able to persuade an executive to move from San Diego to Northampton largely because the executive just happened to attend school here and had family in the area.
“The No. 1 criteria is, what’s the opportunity? Will I grow professionally, personally and economically? No. 2, what’s the environment?” he said. “It takes you a while to get grounded professionally.”