No Experience Required

If you've got "a certain steel in the back," Alamo Rent A Car doesn't care where you worked before. Just as long as it wasn't Hertz or Avis.

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Michael Egan became the president and chief executive officer of Alamo Rent A Car Inc. in 1979, he wanted to hire the very best -- and that meant not raiding the ranks at Number One or Number Two. As he saw it, "the best businesspeople . . . were not to be found in the car-rental business. They were so specialized they were almost business cripples." The only ones he would consider for Alamo's management team were running their own franchises, but "they were making a ton of dough on their own and were unavailable."

So he signed up his banker, his auditor, the former chairman of a retail chain, an airline executive a car dealer, a former Navy officer even an obstetrician -- and more than quintupled the company's sales in five years.

According to executive recruiters, the idea of transplanting outstanding performers to unfamiliar fields is more often talked about than put into practice. "At the outset of a search," says recruiter Leon Farley, "many of my clients say, 'Just get me a good manager and we can teach them the business.' But when it gets down to the interview cycle, [the clients] change their minds." Unless candidates are specialists -- lawyers or controllers, for instance -- their ignorance of a new field inner workings may hamper their performance. Large companies in mature business sectors prefer to recruit native talent, and cross-industry hiring occurs primarily in emerging industries, where experienced people are hard to find.

"It takes the courage and entrepreneurial vision of a very secure human being to reach out and pull in the best available talent," says William E. Gould, president of the Association of Executive Search Consultants Inc.

Michael Egan might resist the label "visionary," but he prides himself on his ability to spot human potential. "I have the great good fortune of being able to see the good in things that others may not, he says. He and his management team have courted top performers with a tenacity that has become Alamo folklore. People relish telling their hiring tales:

* Former Navy lieutenant Elizabeth Smith says, "I think I have the record for turning them down. I said no to Ed Rudner [then Alamo's executive vice-president] four times." She laughs. "When I told him I wouldn't take the job, he pulled a cute trick. He said, 'Come in tomorrow and tell me why.' " Smith, who taught herself computer programming and rose to data processing manager at two companies after she left the Navy, says, "My main reservation was that Alamo was so small. It had only a few hundred employees. Rudner was saying that they'd grow 500% in the next five years, and I figured this guy was smoking something."

The night before her last interview, Rudner sent Smith flowers and a note saying, "Sleep well . . . think about Alamo." Over lunch she agreed to oversee the company's reservations and data processing departments. She has since moved to the marketing department and become one of the firm's senior directors. Her salary, she says -- including bonuses -- has grown 500% since she signed on.

* Richard Kirby, like Smith, was in no hurry to join an unknown company. He was "very happy" as a senior vice-president of Southeast Bank, Florida's largest. When the banking field began expanding in 1980, regular nibbles from headhunters convinced Kirby that his future in it was assured. Yet he admired Alamo, one of Southeast's corporate accounts, and -- with a banker's characteristic curiosity about working in industry -- he interviewed with Rudner. Still, he was reluctant to accept a job. "It was easy to understand their hopes and their dreams," he recalls, "but I wondered if they could pull it off." Meeting Egan convinced him. "He was the consummate entrepreneur. He had . . ." Kirby hesitates, "a comfortable confidence . . . a hard-driving business sense that I liked." Kirby, 36, is now vice-president of operations.

* Michael Cole, Alamo's treasurer an vice-president of finance, resisted the company's advances until he had talked with its auditors and reviewed its financial statements. Cole had managed Eastern Air Lines Inc.'s computer sales and service department and then its air cargo accounting operation. Originally an electrical engineer, he also had his CPA and MBA degrees and had taught operations research and computer programming courses while at Eastern. He saw Alamo as a place where "I would have the chance to use all my skills at once."

* Macdonald Clark, former chairman of two divisions of the Associated Dry Goods chain, had left retailing to become a trial lawyer. Egan met him socially, and eventually convinced him to trade a growing practice for the marketing vice-president's slot at Alamo.

* George Pickel was known to many Alamo employees as their obstetrician. Michael Egan knew him as a doctor disenchanted with the state of medical practice and eager to launch a new career in business. Because the doctor "had been trained to care," Egan felt he would be a logical choice to head a new personnel department designed to emphasize employee "wellness" over more traditional administrative functions.

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