Our client, one of the world’s top management consulting firms, needed to hire a Senior Executive to build and lead a brand new internal controls function in its finance department.  Our client had recently undergone a significant transformation. The company had just split their operations in two – half now owned and operated as a partnership, the other half, our client, now controlled by a private equity firm. The original organization’s finance team was absorbed into the partnership, leaving our client with the task of building a brand new finance function from scratch. Not only was our client building a brand new finance team, they were also putting in place the fiscal infrastructure necessary to move the company forward into the future – a future that might possibly involve an Initial Public Offering. To prepare for the potential IPO, they needed a senior-level executive to create and lead the Internal Controls and Compliance team.

The Challenge

The consulting firm came well equipped with a strong internal executive search team. However, finding a candidate who would meet all of their requirements was proving extraordinarily difficult. The client had interviewed a number of candidates from the Big 4 accounting firms, but none seemed right. More importantly, the company couldn’t afford to fail to fill the search. It was simply too high profile and too important. However, the early applicants did not have the right mix of skills. Some lacked the experience of actually building an internal controls team. Others had never been involved in taking a company public. Those who had the IPO experience often lacked the required tenure at a large, publicly held corporation. Another complicating factor was that the candidate pool was confined to a geographic area with a very small, very tight-knit community of finance executives and an even smaller population of publicly held companies. Lastly, the candidate had to be willing to leave their current position for one where there was no program in place and where they would be willing to start from scratch.

Actionable Intelligence

During our engagement, the Federal Government announced that it was taking over the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation known as Freddie Mac.  While they made the announcement on a Sunday, much to the shock and dismay of employees that Monday, we were prepared. Highly-placed sources within Freddie Mac had told us that the institution was in financial trouble. As a result, we had already made the mortgage giant one of our top targets. We had already developed a candidate there who had originally expressed tepid interest in the opportunity. He had just joined Freddie Mac and felt it was too soon for him to leave. Interestingly, when we presented his profile in our initial target list, our client thought it unlikely he’d move forward because he was too senior and too highly compensated. Undeterred, we followed up and learned that he was ideally suited for the role. Upon hearing the news of the government takeover, the candidate’s tepid interest turned white-hot. Within days, using intelligence we’d gathered to position the offer, our client offered our candidate the job. He immediately accepted.

“I think what sets you aside is the data you provide both during the search and at the end. I feel this search was a success because the client understood that we had seen the market. The data we received was a surprise – a pleasant surprise.”

– Recruiting Manager

The Results

Intellerati presented the winning candidate in just 13 business days. In addition, we delivered a second candidate to whom they extended another offer. All told, in just a month’s time, we produced five interested, qualified candidates. Moreover, Intellerati delivered comprehensive research conducted during the course of the search that our client used to launch another search for the finance organization. That valuable research resulted in the hire of an additional member of the team at no additional cost.

Performance Metrics:

• 1 business day: Initial target list
• 1 business day: First candidate presented
• 13 business days: Winning candidate presented
• Bonus Research: 100+ senior finance executive profiles

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Our client, one of the world’s leading management consulting firms, came to us with a voracious need for consultants to feed the growing demand for their services in its Public Sector Organization and Strategy practice.

The Challenge

Ideal target candidates had to have an MBA and approximately five years experience. As a result, they were not easy to find. Limited professional track records kept most ideal candidates well off-radar, toiling away in relative obscurity, deep within the organizations of competitor firms. In addition, these candidates were often moving targets with near 100% travel schedules, their resulting unavailability making them all the more difficult to  recruit. Moreover, our client set the bar high, demanding a rare mixture of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), consulting prowess, cultural fit, and client experience relevant to our client’s current engagements.  And ultimately, he/she had to be willing to make a lateral move in salary and title.

Actionable Intelligence

During our outreach, we uncovered critical intelligence that allowed us to make the search more efficient – an opportunity that we reported back to the client. We determined that extensive outreach into one of our client’s favorite target companies was unlikely to yield a candidate. The reason? Candidates there were often making more than what they would earn at our client company. Moreover, they were generally happy to stay put at a company where morale was remarkably high. In other words, the candidates lacked the necessary motivation to make a move. That intelligence allowed us to streamline our outreach to focus on companies more likely to produce viable candidates. In addition,  Intellerati re-prioritized outreach on a near-daily basis to respond opportunistically to news and market events, significantly increasing the number of contenders whom we forwarded on to our client.

The Result

Intellerati presented the winning candidate in just 27 business days. Over a four-month period, Intellerati developed 41 interested and qualified management consulting candidates, whom we subsequently delivered to our client. To handle the sudden onslaught of so many viable candidates, Intellerati joined forces with our client to usher candidates through the interview process. Intellerati focused on providing concierge-quality care to the candidates, aimed at keeping the candidates warm and engaged. Our client focused on expediting the introduction of candidates to hiring managers, scheduling interviews with team members, and following up with the hiring managers for feedback and details for next steps.

Performance Metrics:

• 5 business days: Initial Target List
• 4 business days: 1st Candidate Presented
• 27 Business Days:  Presented 1st winning candidate who was hired
• Bonus Research: 1,700 Management Consultant Profiles

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Our client, one of the leading marketing communications agencies in the world, needed to find a President to lead their digital marketing team based in Detroit, Michigan, a Rust Belt city under significant economic duress with the highest foreclosure rate in the Nation. Moreover, the ideal executive had to be capable of managing a team of more than 200 professionals, as well as spearheading the digital marketing initiatives for one of our client’s most important accounts. The executive had to be capable of providing the agency’s largest Detroit client with the vision needed to turn their struggling business around – a U.S. automaker that, much like the industry, has seen its sales get hammered by the tough economy.

The Challenge

It was far easier to entice most top executives to move away from Detroit than to commit to packing up and making the Motor City his or her family’s new home.

Actionable Intelligence

Intellerati uncovered a critical piece of intelligence from several candidates: we learned of a great digital marketing firm under duress. The firm was experiencing significant growing pains at its offices across the country. As a result, the company’s executives felt overworked and unappreciated, assigned too many client accounts as the firm scaled in size without the necessary manpower. Executives there told us that they didn’t feel they had the opportunity to make a real difference for their clients because they lacked the time and resources. In other words, it wouldn’t take much to convince one of their executives to leave. Intellerati then applied a cultural filter asking, “Which executives from the target company might be more willing to make a move to Detroit?” As we examined the backgrounds of executives working at the newly prioritized target company, we found our answer – an executive who grew up in a similar industrial city: Buffalo, New York.

The Results

The Winning Candidate in Just 16 Business Days.  In just four weeks, Intellerati developed six screened, qualified and interested candidates for the President role, one of whom was subsequently hired into an alternative role at no additional cost to the client. In addition, Intellerati delivered comprehensive research profiling 130 executives in the digital marketing space, which our client could leverage to build out their internal search function.

Performance Metrics

• 2 Business Days: Target candidate profiles
• 5 Business Days: First candidate Presented
• 16 business Days: Presented winning candidate hired as President
• Bonus Hire: 2nd hire at no additional cost of strong successor to President
• Bonus Research: 130 Senior Executives Profiles

Presidential ROI: $30 Million+

• Selected to lead team that saved $25 million luxury automotive account. Created innovative marketing ideas and effectively pitched ideas to executive management.
• Delivered 2-year, $30 million project for a leading US automaker on-time and within budget. Project heralded as key contributing factor in the company’s turnaround and profit growth during tough economic climate.
• Implemented new Delivery Services department responsible for taking agency’s net profitability from 15% to 22%+ during a 2-year period and delivering $8+ million in new service-line revenue (Social CRM).
• After 3 years as President, promoted to Country President where his successes continue.

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A growing number of employers are investing in LinkedIn recruiting licenses, and for less important roles, it can be an effective tool. However, for most executive, mission critical, and hard-to-fill technology roles, it simply does not go the distance. The talent pool is too shallow and, well, it’s been over-fished. Recently, a number of our clients have observed that an increasing number highly sought-after candidates — the ones you actually want to hire — are experiencing recruiter-fatigue.The minority of passive candidates that are on LinkedIn are getting barraged with LinkedIn InMails from talent acquisition teams. The more they hear from recruiters on LinkedIn, the less inclined they are to respond.

Another disadvantage of focusing passive recruitment efforts on LinkedIn is that you are competing with every other employer that is vying for your candidate members’ attention. LinkedIn candidates are the proverbial low-hanging fruit ripe for talent acquisition’s plucking. By climbing higher up in the tree — by conducting original investigative research to identify and recruit top talent that is not so obvious — employers gain a powerful competitive advantage. Investigative research consistently uncovers candidates employers never dreamed existed. Even better, these candidates are not actively marketing their wares on LinkedIn.  In other words, by climbing higher in the tree, you pretty much get candidates all to yourself.

There are other things you should know about LinkedIn:

• Only 1% of LinkedIn users visit daily, compared to Facebook’s 76%
• The more senior the person (SVP, EVP, CXO), the less likely they are to have a member profile.
• Many profiles like the most basic detail. (i.e. a profile with the title “Engineer” do not tell you what kind of engineer or what level.)
• Many profiles are abandoned and outdated.

Ask yourself why LinkedIn doesn’t display the “last updated” date, a critical field that is available in every database. In other words, they have that data, but are choosing not to show it. If they displayed it, users would be shocked to discover that the vast majority of members haven’t updated their profiles or logged in for a very long time.

LinkedIn does not tell employers who is interested, who is qualified. and who is able to make a move at this point in their career. More important, it does not tell you who is good. In other words, there is still a lot of recruiting that needs to be done to turn LinkedIn prospects into viable candidates.  We regularly provide additional bandwidth to corporate executive search and recruiting teams.

In passive candidate sourcing strategy, LinkedIn is a but step in the process. To recruit the best talent, it is a step that must be followed by original, investigative research to uncover, map, profile, engage, screen, and qualify the contenders. In other words, LinkedIn is not a panacea. It is a starting place, not the finish line.

We invite your observations and comments.

Related Posts

• November 23, 2011 -- Passive Candidate Sourcing: Shallow versus Deep Data (0)
• November 28, 2011 -- The Dumbest Things Recruiters Do, Redux (0)
• November 15, 2011 -- Random Sourcing: Missing the Best Candidates (0)
• October 22, 2011 -- Preemptive Calibration: Determining Who Is Good (0)
• December 7, 2011 -- LinkedIn Street Cred: Low User ID (0)

LinkedIn decided, in its inimitable wisdom, to make it impossible for users to select text in profiles by layering in some javascript that interfered with the ability to copy/paste. Needless, to say, the change did not fly with paying customers. Glen Cathey’s Boolean Blackbelt blog captured the angst as we puzzled over how LinkedIn could do such a thing, especially to those of us who pay hundreds of dollars monthly per seat for LinkedIn access.  AmyBeth Hale, ResearchGoddess that she is, weighed in:

Glen, we are experiencing that here at Microsoft right now with the Recruiter accounts. Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past LinkedIn at this point to re-introduce ‘copy/paste functionality’ as a paid feature after this move. Perhaps if we collectively make a big enough stink about this, they’ll reverse the decision.

Or…

We could just not become over-reliant on one tool ;)

SocialTalent CEO Jonathan Campbell put together an excellent webinar detailing the recent LinkedIn changes with instructions on how to track them in the coming weeks and months.  Never one to miss a legitimate opportunity to partake in public discourse , we chimed in as well:

We’re experiencing un-selectable text here as well   . . . at our recruiting research firm Intellerati in Connecticut.   Thanks, Glen, for your superb documentation on a work-around. My issue is the following: 1. We helped build LinkedIn. They are penalizing the super-users who are the very people that evangelize their product and who serve as a powerful magnet attracting users to LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook where the vast majority of users login daily, only a small percentage on LinkedIn do. (That would be us.) 2. I am a paying customer. 3. Their security settings are idiotic. They cloak 3rd degree names that are visible in public profiles. So where’s the logic? The choice is pay and we hide the name as our way of thanking you or don’t pay and you get to see the entire profile because the member has chosen to make it public. Not only that, as you have documented so brilliantly, LinkedIn is also attempting to prod people to increase their privacy settings. Who’s the genius that came up with that brilliant move? If you encourage people to do things so that they will be found by fewer and fewer people, that would seem to me to be an invitation to shrink, not grow, a social network.  

This isn’t the first time we’ve noted LinkedIn toying with its members.  In an ERE.net article in December, The Trouble With LinkedIn: Grey Goo, we detailed our concerns:

Our “issue” with LinkedIn has to do to with how it attempts to be the arbiter of relationships. To this day, LinkedIn asserts in its list of  user agreement ”Do’s and Don’ts” that one must not invite “people you do not know to join your network”.  They assert the “legally binding” right to define how one must “know” an individual, and will (as it once did to me years ago) kick you out of the network without warning or explanation should someone forget how you two met at a conference. LinkedIn knows very well that a significant portion of its member base really does want connect with people they do not know.  Clearly, members who indicate they’re open to career opportunities want to network with recruiters — people they don’t yet know but are eager to meet — an activity that I sense is one of the leading drivers of growth in LinkedIn membership. By comparison, while it is by no means perfect, Facebook defers to its user’s own ability accept, reject, or ignore friend requests and to friend and unfriend people at will.

While LinkedIn’s skewed take on relationships is a disconnect that dates back to the very beginning in the fine print of its user agreement, a growing number of users just now are waking up to that reality.  Consequently, when LinkedIn made text impossible to select without first announcing when or why it would do such a thing, users on the site  thought it might first be a technical issue — some small bug or glitch –and then it dawned on them.

Social networks are built on trust and trust is a fragile thing with connections “loosely joined” on the Internet.  We may be Facebook “friends”, but we don’t really hang out.  We may network on LinkedIn, and for the ability to do so, we may have uploaded our entire business “social graph” to LinkedIn. But this latest move by LinkedIn and others like it are not “right purpose”.  LinkedIn explained they decided to make text un-copy/paste-able to protect the “data and privacy” of its members and “of the LinkedIn website”. Actually, I don’t think so.  Redacting data in profiles that LinkedIn users have chosen to make public is not acting in their best interest. Quite to the contrary, it is doing the opposite of what members have said that they want. Interfering with the ability to copy/paste to hinder networking is not acting our best interest. In other words, LinkedIn’s turning out the lights has nothing to do with us, and everything to do with LinkedIn,which is why our rant on Boolean Black Belt continued . . .

4. How is it that I cannot select data of my first degree connections or for public profile data that LinkedIn users have chosen to share with the world? Remember, all of the data that they’re steadfastly shutting off access to is only in the database by the grace of every user. (Well, that and they did a pretty good job of vacuum-cleaning up every name in our Outlook with ‘nary a thank you . . .) 5. I’ve noticed in Google search results that my public profile doesn’t have a Google cache link for the page. What’s up with that? Is that something that also has gone the way of the buffalo? I thought one reason people participated in LinkedIn was to “brand” themselves and to enable others to find them for business purposes. If LinkedIn text is not selectable and if, in so doing, they make it not indexable or if LinkedIn slowly disappears its public pages from Google cache as appears to be the case with my public profile, then how are people going to network? I mean, seriously! Even more important to LinkedIn, how are people going to find LinkedIn? It appears the social network is becoming decidedly anti-social as it attempts to monetize its recruiting business. We should take LinkedIn’s move as a cautionary shot across the bow and remind ourselves about the many implications of LinkedIn entering the recruiting business. Randomly doing stupid things like throwing a switch so that the UI frustrates its most loyal customers is a very risky move on their part. Social networks can turn on you. But apparently treating its relationship with us as disposable is the thanks we recruiters get for being the very reason so many people come here. LinkedIn is taking our money, our business relationships, and competing with us and as it does, it will continue to shut off access in every way it can so it can jack up its fees, even if it is to information that is otherwise public. Whenever Facebook has introduced a change that was an overstep, users objected en masse and Facebook,to some degree, relented. Perhaps its time we expressed our disappointment in their misbehavior. Alternatively, we can take our toys and go elsewhere. Google+ keeps looking better all the time . . .

 And then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over.  We awoke today to discover LinkedIn had turned back on the lights. We could see again because we could copy/paste again for legitimate business reasons. Because in the end, the information belongs to us, to our friends, and to friends of friends,  not to LinkedIn, no matter how hard it tries.

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Intellerati Launches: Recruitment Research Firm With Investigative Advantage

Westport, CT, USA — December 11, 2011: The Good Search, LLC has spun out an exciting new recruitment research division and has named it Intellerati. Intellerati offers recruitment research and intelligence services to corporate executive search, talent acquisition, and recruiting teams.  Intellerati offers research in support of recruiting as well as custom intelligence that gleans insights through the study of the talent ecosystem.  Intellerati transforms research into actionable intelligence, giving employers the qualitative data they need to make the best hire, to diversify the executive suite, to inform workforce planning, and to deliver unprecedented ROI through the study of the talent ecosystem. Its custom research also informs merger & acquisition activity of private equity and corporate M&A teams.  The Intellerati blog, features commentary, analysis, and practical tips on talent acquisition research best practices.

“Talent acquisition has undergone a transformation in the last several years. We see an opportunity in that”, says CEO Krista Bradford. She continues, “The economy has hit the ‘reset button’ for retained executive search.  A lot of recruiting that went out to traditional search firms has gone in-house, but there also has been tremendous pressure to keep the recruiting headcount low. Consequently, corporate recruiters don’t always have the time, the resources, or bandwidth required to fill every opening. Our research services provide support wherever talent acquisition teams need it the most — whether its candidate identification and profiling, candidates development and screening, or in-depth interviews and calibration.  We also offer talent diversity pools,  succession benches, and custom intelligence.”

For more than a decade,  The Good Search has  been a thought leader and proponent of driving superior results in search through more robust investigative research.  The Good Search was founded by CEO Krista Bradford, a former award-winning investigative reporter and television journalist.  Her blog, The Investigative Recruiter, is counted among the recruiting industry’s Top 20 blogs.

About The Good Search, LLC
The Good Search recruits luminaries in technology and media for some of the most successful and highly-regarded employers in the world. The Good Search does it in a way that no other retained firm has before. Our investigative approach delivers candidates clients never dreamed existed; its flat retainers eliminate conflicts of interest; and the firm hands over all the research, something traditional firms never do. Clearly, search has never been so good.

About Intellerati
Intellerati offers expert talent acquisition research and intelligence in support of corporate executive search and recruiting teams. Its investigative approach identifies, profiles, calibrates, and delivers top talent clients never dreamed existed. Founded by an award-winning investigative television journalist and staffed by investigative researchers, Intellerati has ways. Services include Recruitment Research, Diversity Talent Pools, Succession Benches, and Custom Intelligence.

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