Courtenay HR
HR Resourcing
"Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else."
Searching For a New Way
At a seminar last year, Dr William Scott Jackson from Oxford University outlined the results of a research project entitled ‘What Clients Think About Executive Resourcing’. He had 2 slides. The first slide had the positive points and the second had the negative. Ill give you three guesses which one was the longest.
It was interesting stuff and, speaking as someone who spent 10 years client side, was way overdue in being stated. Looking round the room at the collection of suited and booted search consultants, however, I got the distinct impression that I was alone in my thinking. The apathy and indifference (arrogance?) was almost palatable.
Living the dream?
Fast forward to today and the picture is very different. The search industry has embraced the criticism, key players are leading the way with innovative approaches to delivering executive recruitment and the whole industry is winning praise for the way it has responded to client feedback and criticism….
Cue sound of needle being dragged across a vinyl LP on record player! Remember those?
Sadly, in reality nothing has changed. There may as well have been a bucket of sand in front of every chair with each persons head in it. Using that very same analogy it’s a bit like the record company still trying to sell us vinyl LP’s when we have all converted to CD’s or MP3’s. Worse still is the company trying to produce CD’s using equipment designed to produce LP’s. It just doesn’t work.
Not that I’m knocking the search industry in particular. It’s our business too and there are many executive search organisations out there doing great work. The problem is that what we are offering is increasingly not meeting client needs. Not withstanding the shocking statistics regarding assignment success in the industry - a whopping 50% of assignments fail at CEO level but the client still pays - clients want to work in different ways, find talented individuals through different sources and according to both the research and my own experience, the search industry is failing to come up with a solution. Worse still, it’s in a collective state of denial!
Rearguard action
In a recent edition of the Executive Grapevine magazine, David Longbottom, HR Director for the Dixons Group wrote a provocative piece, outlining the need for change in the search industry and called for the industry to ‘modernise itself’ in the light of changing client needs. He talked about how the search businesses were failing to respond in terms of the issues of price, structure, approach and process but also in terms of service offering. He made a lot of valid points and went on to make various suggestions about how his search partners might work in a more innovative way and how they might change their business model accordingly.
Unfortunately, it seems that many, including the president of the Association of Executive Search Consultants, Peter Felix, disagree. Peter responded to the article by saying how inappropriate his suggestions were, and how important it was to continue the status quo. He went to great lengths to point out that what David proposes, in his opinion, will result in “inferior executives being presented” and the relationship “disintegrating into a contingency arrangement”. Perish the thought.
Well I’m sorry but I don’t buy it. Day in day out, our industry trots out the same old excuses and propositions to defend our sacred cows but does little to respond with something new. Yes, the retainer arrangement, to name one, is still the bedrock of our own business, but we are not too naive to think that this is not going to change, because it will. As night follows day, change is coming and we are all challenged to look to the future and develop alternative business models rather than stick our heads in the sand.
Future challenges
Whether David’s prognosis proves to be accurate or not remains to be seen but if the search industry does not start listening to and embracing what David, and others are saying, no matter how unpalatable it may be (and that’s the key point) then I fear there will be casualties.
Ultimately the biggest challenge we face is responding to what is happening in the market and defining a new business model that will add value. I don’t think it will be a subtle change. The way we move around in the world of employment has changed significantly, so has the technology and infrastructure that supports those interactions which inevitably has a significant effect on our industry. Considering our methodologies have change relatively little in 30 years it’s not hard to understand why it’s creaking.
Do we have any answers? Not yet, but what I can tell you is that it’s a priority for our business and we are dedicating a significant amount of time and resource to the issue. If we start now, we may just be lucky enough position our business appropriately to ensure our survival and prosperity. If we don’t the outlook for ourselves and the industry could be very bleak indeed.