Economic transformation and employability is a key factor towards making India’s demographic dividend, the young workforce, a significant competitive advantage. In this context, the National HRD Network (NHRDN) Mumbai Chapter, recently organised a Career Fest at Nehru Centre in Mumbai. The aim was to provide a common platform to bring together industry, academia and student community, with the intention of helping students to make informed career choices.
In a session, Suresh Raina, Managing Partner, Hunt Partners, talked on careers in executive search. Raina, who has two decades of cross-functional experience in various Indian and multinational companies, has held leadership positions and worked in different geographies including South Asia, Middle East, Africa and North America. His areas of business include executive coaching and talent management.
Until I joined executive search, I didn’t know such a profession existed. That was not too long back, I joined in 2010. You could call us poachers or headhunters. We help our clients to get senior leadership hiring. Why to specify senior leadership, because only then, it justifies the efforts one puts in. The role of the job is very simple. You have to find the best fit for the job. There are a lot of ways of going about it. It is still not a mature industry in India at least. I guess executive search started in the US around 40-50 years back. In India, probably it would have started about 20 years ago. If you look at the entire recruitment industry, executive search makes a small part less than 5%. Like any other industry, or growing sector we need young talent to join us.
If you look at search firms, there are not too many in India. Most likely, there will be 10 search firms. If you want to start your search firm and be an entrepreneur the best way to start is to join a search firm. Work for a search firm for a while and see how the work is done. You will understand what do you need to start your own search firm, what is involved, how do you get your clientele. That would be the best way to go for it.
"You get to meet many people. on any given day, i will be interviewing 4-5 senior professionals, trying to understand who this individual is. every person is unique. how do You evaluate the person, assess the person that is interesting for me, personally"
The difference between search and recruitment is, firstly, recruitment is in the commercial design. Secondly, the positions that you work for in a search firm and in a recruitment firm are different. Thirdly, the people who will execute the mandate for instance, if you look at a consulting world, we will not work with a client unless the client retains us for the mandate. So in the search world, we are known as the retain search firm. The client has to sign a contract with us on an exclusive basis to work. Fourthly, we will not work on a position unless that is a senior leadership position. Fifthly, only experienced people work on a mandate. And that’s what the client expects. You will have a lot of experience and expertise when you work on any position.
In the recruitment world, you may work on any position, there is assessment but not too much of assessment. This means that you could have someone who is young, who would be working on a mandate even when you may not know a lot about that sector. Because it is not in a leadership position.
When I go for a search, firstly, I need to understand the company that I am working for and I need to understand the role I am hiring for. When I say understand the company, I do not mean going through their website, know what is mentioned there that doesn’t suffice. That is where the grey hair comes in and helps, you really have to know as much of the industry and as much about the candidates as the client itself. You usually find the CEO or Head HR, for example, if you are the CEO of Cipla Pharmaceuticals-since you are the CEO, you at least have 25 years of experience. So you would know the business, manufacturing, retail and the market in the US. You call me and say that you need my help in finding a president for your business. If I do not understand your business, you explain to me the nuances of formulations, and what are challenges that are faced today. I mak sure that I understand them and what other companies are doing about them. If I don’t understand the candidate and what are the requirements of that candidate, I won’t be able to do justice with this search. Therefore, I need to know everything. And if you say this is the guy we have found and when I start talking to him, I will know that he is not the right fit within five minutes of talking. End of the story. The challenge is how you manage to know the client, the clients’ business, and the candidates who can do different jobs in that company.
Culture is another important element when you are searching for a leadership position. Consider an organisation we know it is a pyramid, we know there are senior leaders, then there are leaders, then you have the big middle management and then there is the workforce. People who are in these positions be it the CEO or people who are not directly reporting to the CEO, but are managing functions or businesses, these people usually have 20-30 years of experience. India still prefers elder people in senior leadership roles, even though the world is moving away from that. So you have people who come in the age bracket of 40 to 60, they are the people who are sitting in the corner offices and they are managing teams, they are managing people who are in their businesses to get the work done. Let’s take a look at the skill set and competencies that these people use and work with. Firstly, it is the knowledge that they are heading, be it HR, finance, marketing or business. Secondly, how you work with your colleagues, if I am in the HR function, I work with everybody else in the firm; I am a support function. I have to work with the finance, business, budgets etc. What it really means is that you end up working with everybody else, which becomes one core requirement for a leader. On the other hand, second core requirement is the under standing the business. Third requirement is the ability to develop other leaders, and if you do not have that required cultural fit, the people skills and interpersonal skills, it is not going to work.
"executive search are the king makers, because we will build someone’s Career or destroy someone’s Career. i don’t think it is as easy as that but you really play an important role in helping to acquire"
There are practices at a firm. In a consulting world too, there is always a practice. You have partners who are leading the practice and they run the team. Teams will work with the partners on assignments. In our firm, we do have people who are postgraduates and undergraduates. To execute any decision for an assignment there is a significant amount of research that has to be done. For example, we are working on an assignment, which is not the usual kind of mandate that we work on. We are looking for a principal, director, or dean of a school. The school has not started yet. It is interesting because the client wants to produce world leaders. That is the description. For instance there might be some school, which is good in extracurricular activities like fine arts, performing arts or music. That’s how we tend to categorise schools. Our client doesn’t want to categorise the school, he wants to welcome anyone who is able to combine academics with arts and leadership to create global leaders. He wants to find someone who is an academic but not from India, because he will be restricted and constrained by the definition of school curriculum that we are used to in India. He wants someone who has experimented with academics, with school system, and can be called to start the school and not run it but actually start the construction. He feels that the design of the school should be like what this individual thinks. Do I know much about this, I don’t, so we have to start doing basic research, we are going to speak to about 100 academicians around the world. We will find out which are the alternative schools around the world, how are they run, what is the fundamental design, what is the thought that has been kept in the mind when the school was started. By the time we are done with the result, it could be one or two months, then we will have enough information to identify the potential candidates. Then we will start the headhunting. We will identify the institutions, they could be anywhere in the world. My job is to find those potential candidates who according to me are capable of doing this role. And I will try to convince them, take this role, come to India and start to create something that is in the mind of this individual, who is our client. This is how the research comes in.
There is a team of mine, which focuses entirely only on research. Then there is another team, which focuses on execution. In our world, even though it looks very narrow, we look at finite space of candidates. But, when you start to look deep in each individual then things start to get interesting. That is why we have opportunity for people who are graduates and undergraduates. We don’t have any engineers fresh out of college, but they join with an MBA. The common trait is they enjoy working with people, because on any given day, you are talking to people all day and you are trying to understand what makes one role different from another.
LinkedIn is one source for searching a candidate. Executive search also existed before LinkedIn. LinkedIn has made it easy; everybody uses it. It is the best place to start. If you ask me about a particular function, or a sector, we will have sufficient data on sectors where we don’t need LinkedIn now. The reason is, we have enough knowledge on our database, the database would have about 50,000-60,000 people who are senior leaders. We have found them at some time, mapped them, and then we go back and start using filters until we zero in what we are looking for. At the research level, we start with about 100 candidates and deliver 4-5 candidates to the client.
I came from a search firm like typical search people do. I have run a business, I know how an organisation works, how to work with people. Given my experience of working in a corporate world, I have realised that though you stay long in search, how long you stay in the search is not enough, because you are dealing with a product which has mind of its own. Usually, you deal with a product or service, you deliver and it is end of the story. Here, the product that I deliver, nobody knows how it will perform, so how do you assess all that, how can you guarantee that the person that you find is going to deliver in that role. It makes you work very closely with human mind and how it functions, what are the motivations for anyone to perform, why one person performs good in one organisation and not good in some other. We don’t have a magic recipe that will work every time when we hire somebody, it will work but the thought is how can you make it close to perfection. Executive search are the king makers, because we will build someone’s career or destroy someone’s career. I don’t think it is as easy as that but you really play an important role in helping to acquire.
When I work with a client, he has lot of trust in my ability to help them with their search. If you are hiring at an entry level, for example, Infosys hires around 10,000-20,000 at entry level. Because of 50% attrition, it doesn’t matter as long as that person can write a code. You already know that in one year’s time, half the people will leave. You also know how it will affect the company. There is a little damage. Let’s look at middle management, you hire one person, and that person will be managing an account, managing a team, business or something a management role. Now if that person is not doing a good job you would have a problem. There will be an impact on the business but you can still manage, because the stakes are low and you can find someone quickly in the team and replace. We have seen the cost of a wrong hire, which is very high, for a business the setback could be by a few years. Things move very fast. Therefore, you have to get it right the first time.
Exciting part is that you work with your clients and your clients are CEOs and HR heads. They are the two people that you work with very closely. You get to engage with professionals who are best in their field. You get to understand businesses very closely. If you are a person who enjoys thinking about a business and knowing about a business the nuts and bolts, then you should consider this field. On any given day, I will be interviewing 4-5 senior professionals, trying to understand who this individual is. Every person is unique. How do you evaluate the person, assess the person that is interesting for me, personally.
By Vineet K
