At this point, you won't even know what Lander does, or what the job entails. Some people hang up, compose an answer, and call back. Others just go for it. "I boiled down my life from kindergarten to the time of that phone call in a two-minute synopsis," says Duval, who needed a job after building latrines in Angola and attending graduate school.
If you're an experienced recruiter, no matter how good, that's a strike against you. Too predictable. Too much to unlearn. (Westberg appears to be the exception. But remember, there are no rules.) On the other hand, if you've done something unusual, passionate, or intense, Tuck will pick up on that right away. He calls back people who sound, as he puts it, "a bit spunky." If the person still holds his interest after a brief phone conversation, he might suggest he or she drop everything and come over. "I told him, 'I'm sitting here in cutoffs, combat boots, a T-shirt, and an old hat,' and he said, 'Sounds like you're dressed for an interview for my office," says Duval. "And I was like, 'Oh God, unbelievable."
Because of his goal in the interview--to find out how well you know yourself--Tuck never tells you what job you're applying for. "The main part of the conversation was about my interests, teasing out my outlook on life," Duval says. "I remember one question he asked me was 'How much of a chameleon are you?" Not surprisingly, Tuck prefers asking questions to which there are no right answers.
Still, he's very straightforward about who's in control of the situation. When recruiter Todd Weinman showed up at Tuck's house for his first interview, he was surprised to find himself beside another candidate interviewing for the same job. At one point, Tuck asked each one what he or she thought about the other. "You can trash the other person or take the high road, but if you take the high road, you don't want to make them look too good," Weinman reasons. "So I said I thought she was good." He got the job. Two days after he was hired, Weinman was left in charge of the office when Tuck flew off for a three-week vacation. Weinman knew he didn't want to be an office manager permanently, so Tuck gave him another task while he was away: "Think about what you want to do when I return." Weinman decided to start training to become a recruiter. He reacted, in other words, exactly as Tuck had expected.
Just as Tuck doesn't want the responsibility of figuring out how to make anyone else happy, he's not likely to preach to employees about balancing their work with their other interests. By his own example, he makes it clear that while others may concern themselves with balancing their work and personal lives, his goal is to integrate work and home as seamlessly as possible. His home features his collection of 18,000 movies, which he can watch on a large-screen TV or on one of 13 smaller sets. And there's a kitchen closet filled with soda-fountain syrup, 43 flavors in all. But 5 of his 9 phone lines (he has 19 phones) are reserved for business. (The lines are also used by Tim Sauer, Lander's cofounder, who shares Tuck's home, and by another friend and housemate.) And he's even negotiated recruiting deals from pay phones at amusement parks. Business and pleasure, friends and colleagues, all seem to blur into a unified whole--for Tuck, anyway.
Others at Lander seem to have to work harder at blending the two. Weinman, whose personal passion is playing trombone with classical-music groups, admits that he hasn't yet found the right mix in both pursuits. But that doesn't mean that he, or anyone else, is ungrateful for having the choice. Navigating alternatives is what Lander is all about. "Everyone's always in flux around here," office manager Winters says. "Everyone's always redefining jobs."
Winters certainly has. A single mother, she worked as a recruiter for six months last year and was getting deeply frustrated by the amount of time she was spending away from her kids. Ill from the stress, she resolved to quit. She met with Tuck. "She said she really didn't like the job," Tuck recalls. "And I said, 'OK, but why does that mean you have to quit? Maybe we can figure out something else for you to do." Tuck called up then office manager JoAnn Peters, who he thought would do well as a recruiter, and asked if she would like to swap jobs with Winters. Peters agreed, and both women seem to have taken to their new jobs.
Last June, Tuck even redefined his own job as CEO at the behest of one of his most recent hires, a researcher whose efforts didn't produce the job leads that Tuck had envisioned. When Tuck asked Jeff Kost what he wanted to do instead, Kost told him he wanted to be trained as a recruiter--by Tuck himself. Doing that meant Tuck would have to shuffle his responsibilities and return to recruiting for the first time in four years. So he thought about it over a weekend before he agreed. Now, in addition to his role as CEO, Tuck also covers the Pacific Northwest region, with Kost as his assistant.
Tuck, who is 50, is a large man whose relaxed physique belies his personal intensity. On the sunny day I went to meet him, he greeted me in his living room, which has a stunning picture-window view of San Francisco Bay. He was wearing a sweatshirt crawling with Disney characters. He spent the first 30 minutes posing a steady stream of questions in a very relaxed manner. Within the first 15 minutes, I somehow found myself talking about my parents and my Brooklyn upbringing.
Perhaps because of the surroundings--the house is overflowing with curiosities, and I hadn't yet seen the portion that rendered Schulterbrandt mute--Tuck conveys the impression of sweeping away all formalities. Intimacy is the currency of our exchange. The dynamic isn't that different from what the company's customers experience. "Richard does an extremely thorough job of scoping the skill set, of interviewing people, and I know because I was an intelligence officer," says the Ness Group's Mary Ness. Joan McBride, who has used Lander three times since 1989 to find a job, first met Tuck when she was on her own, cold-calling companies for openings. "One of the first things Richard asked me was about the people I had talked to and the corporate cultures I had seen," she says. "He was really interested in how I viewed these cultures and what I liked, instead of what I wanted out of a job." Over the years, job placement evolved into career counseling and then into a friendship.
