Search Employ

George Clement was stymied. Developing imaginative new publications was critical to the continued success of Clement Communications Inc., a Concordville, Pa., publishing company that markets motivational posters and training programs through direct mail. But Clement, president of the company, which has annual sales around $10 million, and Brian Kirby, his vice-president of sales and marketing, no longer could handle the job. "We'd make a crash effort, then turn our attention back to other areas of the business we'd ignored," Clement explains.

"The obvious solution," he says, "was to find someone who could develop new publications on an ongoing basis." But Clement was uncertain how he and his top managers, especially Kirby and senior vice-president and general manager Ed Dwyer, would deal with a powerful newcomer. Even more worrisome, Clement didn't have any inkling where to look for the new person, aside from a handful of competitors.

"If you're looking at direct competitors as a source for candidates," remarks Clement, "especially if these companies look very much like your business, you'll end up bringing in someone who doesn't have a fresh perspective." Clement wanted to develop publications that would lead the field, not follow it.

"To tell you the truth," adds Clement, "not only didn't I have a clear picture of where to find -- or even who would be -- a qualified candidate, I wasn't sure I'd know how to handle that person once he or she was sitting across from me. Conducting the search was only the first hurdle."

Until recently, Clement Communications had solved its hiring problems at the top management level by promoting from within. At one time, the company did hire an executive recruiting firm to search for a direct-mail manager, but, after spending thousands of dollars, the search came up with "zero," says Clement.

Then, through a twist of fate, Clement discovered the catalyst for the search. At a dinner party in mid-August, he struck up a conversation with an ordained Episcopalian clergyman-turned-businessman named Calhoun Wick.

Cal Wick had attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management in 1974-75 with the intention of bringing some management skills to the Episcopalian Church. "After MIT, I went out to be the rector of a parish church outside Toledo," says Wick. "Then I began to realize that the church had muddled through for 2,000 years, would probably muddle through for another 2,000, and I'd rather work in the business world."

Wick joined MBA Resources, an executive recruiting firm in New York City, which fills senior management posts that pay anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 a year. MBA uses its own resources to find job candidates and charges a client 30% of the first year's compensation.

After a while, however, Wick had an idea: Why not take the skills he'd learned in the search business and teach them to other businesses so that they could do their own searches? Wick would help companies capitalize on their knowledge of their own industries, instead of having to rely on a search firm to find contacts.

"I wanted to teach businesses to become virtually self-sufficient in hiring top managers," explains Wick. He left MBA to start his own company to do just that in 1980. For a fee of $2,500 a month for the first search, Wick claims he'll teach a company a system for hiring key people. The system includes building an internal hiring team, defining the new job, developing a source network to find candidates, learning an effective interviewing style, and creating ways to bring the new person on board. "Each step must be done thoroughly and professionally," explains Wick. "If you short-circuit any step, you greatly reduce your chances of finding the right person."

Wick meets regularly with a client, generally once a week for one to three hours a session, until the hiring process is completed, usually a period of about three months. If the client wants to work on a second or third search with Wick, the rates drop to $2,000 and $1,500 a month respectively, since each time the client conducts another search, he needs less assistance.

A month after George Clement's and Cal Wick's serendipitous encounter, Clement hired Wick and Company, which is based in Wilmington, Del., to lead him step by step through the hiring process. "I thought to myself," recalls Clement, "I'll be satisfied if we do it in eight months. I was just hoping that Cal would be patient enough to work with us for that long."

The first order of business was to create an internal hiring team. Under Cal Wick's supervision, the team would conduct every aspect of the search, from defining the job to bringing a new director of publications development smoothly on board.

According to Wick, a hiring team should consist of three or four people, usually managers with line responsibility who have the confidence of the person at the top. George Clement appointed Brian Kirby and Ed Dwyer, both men he'd worked with for more than 10 years. Kirby had excellent contacts within the industry; Ed had fewer contacts but a better sense of internal operations. Both had the full confidence of George Clement.

"When we formed the hiring team," says Clement, "we decided that no offer would be made until all of us agreed." Wick grants that this decision was made more out of prudence than our of gentlemanly spirit: "If a person gets ticked off because he doesn't get his say," he explains, "he's more likely to sabotage the new person's success. That's why a lot of hiring doesn't work."

Sitting around the table in the conference room next to Clement's office during the first meetings with Wick, Ed Dwyer, Brian Kirby, and George Clement discussed very specifically what they thought an "ideal" director of new publications would do. They not only decided what skills and experience the person should bring to the company, but also pinpointed what they expected him or her to accomplish over the next three years. The exercise forced the members of the hiring team to organize their thoughts about the company's business plan and future growth and made them think about their own responsibilities and how they were interrelated.

Creating the job of director of publication development meant separating Kirby's job as vice-president of sales and marketing from his other role as director of new product development. "Somebody could get put in that position and just get angry, saying 'Why is this job being taken away from me?" says Wick. "But Kirby, the person who was most affected by the decision, was involved in figuring out just how to separate the two jobs."

Defining the position took several meetings, which Wick generally sat in on. Personal disagreements, remembers Ed Dwyer, were partly tempered by a remark from Wick. "One of the things that hit home," says Dwyer, "was when Cal described this person as someone who could carry us in the future. I think that was important. At least it crystallized in my mind the importance of this new employee."

Once the group had agreed that the ideal candidate would have a background in direct mail and publication development, the next step was to figure out what he or she might be doing currently, then to think of whom they knew in the business who might come in contact with such a person. The exhaustive list of attributes the hiring team had drawn up made the group realize it wasn't limited to a handful of candidates.

Developing a network of sources to find these candidates depends, says Wick, on being "almost playful in thinking about who you know." Besides reviewing research files and trade directories, and going though company Rolodex files, they telephoned and wrote to various members of the Direct Mail Marketing Association in New York City and Philadelphia, asking for their help in finding candidates. They ran a classified ad in Advertising Age, the trade magazine probably most read by the kind of candidates they sought.