The Right Staff

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.

Recruiters at Lander insist that they'll walk away from a deal if it doesn't seem right. "I wouldn't place anyone in a company I wouldn't want to work for," Peters says. The recruiters, many of whom are in their twenties and thirties, often make more than $100,000 a year after a couple of years and can take in as much as $175,000.

There are also gratifying moments, like the time last year when Peters got Frank Cordima a job after nearly a yearlong search. Cordima, 47, had worked as an information-systems auditor for the state of Massachusetts for 24 years and carried the stigma of a 9-to-5 government worker despite the fact that he had continually upgraded his skills. With two young kids, he was making $36,000 a year and knew he was underpaid. Peters coached him through interviews, channeled him to several prospects, and then landed him an offer at Staples Inc. in Framingham, Mass. His package included a 66% raise, a year-end bonus, and stock options. "When she told me I got the job, my wife ended up crying," Cordima says. "I feel like I'm in a good situation, with my pride and integrity back to where it should be."

Tuck himself knows what it's like to work for a boss you don't like, in a company that feels stifling. He felt the same way not so many years ago--except that he owned the company. Founded in 1979, Paramount Personnel was the first incarnation of Lander; he changed the company's name in order to hire a woman who didn't want to work in a "placement" firm. (Her mother's maiden name was Lander.) To grow the business, he hired the kind of employees it made sense to hire at the time: experienced recruiters. Even so, the company barely squeaked through the recession of the early 1980s. "My accountant told me I should close down. But I thought Mickey [Rooney] and Judy [Garland] wouldn't have done that. So we hung on," Tuck says.

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