The Duncan Group really took off when it got a boost out of the blue from the Today show. Recall that Duncan's first search assignment was to replace herself in Peterson's office; she knew she'd need a candidate who "liked the phone, who liked the PR side of things. Somebody who liked talking to people. So I thought maybe I'd get someone out of the media." One of Duncan's first calls was to the woman who was then Bryant Gumbel's assistant, whom she'd known for a while, with the idea that a few media-savvy candidates would surface in their conversation.
As it happened, to Duncan's total surprise, Gumbel's assistant was much more interested in talking about the fledgling business venture. She thought it sounded like a perfect Today story. Jump-cut to the summer of 1985: bright and early one morning, there was Bryant Gumbel interviewing Duncan, Reynolds, and Peterson. "By the time Gumbel wrapped it up and said, 'For more information, call the number on your screen,' well, the floodgates had opened," Duncan says. Among the callers was Barbara Werber, fresh from a seven-year tenure as director of placement in New York City with the famous Katharine Gibbs School. "There on my television set were Melba and Pete and Russ, talking about the need for the placement of administrative assistants," Werber says. "So I called." She joined the Duncan Group as a recruiter, and happily contributed loads of hard-won practical experience along with her giant Rolodex that was crammed to the gills with the coin of the search biz: contacts, the people she'd met and placed and worked with over the years. She's been with Duncan ever since.
"This business was built to respond to the needs of the CEOs who call us," Duncan says. "What we offer that's special is a really good understanding of the psyche of the hiring executive. We're set up to accommodate how a CEO thinks." It is, in the end, chemistry that makes the difference between a match made in heaven and one that heads south.
David Banks, executive chairman of Toronto's Newcourt Credit Group, would agree. Banks first met Duncan nearly 15 years ago, soon after she'd launched her practice. He needed an assistant, and Duncan found him one. Here's how he describes the experience. "I'd thought deeply about what I wanted in an assistant--the skill mix, the personality, the ideal candidate--and I wrote it all up. Finally, I honed it down to a two-page document, which I gave to Melba. A couple of days later, Melba came over with an associate to observe and deepen their understanding of how I operated. The day after, Melba came back; she said, 'Here's your list of things you want, and here's our list--it's what you need.' I was astonished: there had been a dimension missing from my list, and it was my own curious habits and idiosyncrasies. I'm a pedantic bureaucrat, and that could drive somebody nuts." Duncan, he says, "helped me shape my thinking to compare candidates, and she taught me an awful lot about how to work with an assistant in a productive way."
To deliver 3 solid finalists to a client, Duncan knows she needs to start out with a pool of 100. Recruiters work the phones like air-traffic controllers, muscling through Rolodexes and otherwise tapping into their network of contacts. That initial screening cuts the original number of possibilities in half, to 50, which, after completion of a written questionnaire, is narrowed to 15.
Duncan puts those 15 through their paces in a four-hour testing and profiling extravaganza that gets a bead on written communication and clerical skills, problem solving, math, management aptitude, and personality. That also is the point at which candidates sit down for a chat with Lee Shain, a clinical psychologist in private practice who devotes about two days a week to the Duncan Group. Fair warning: Shain misses nothing. Her write-ups, which are kept in a corpulent three-ring binder in Duncan's office, are short, astringent, and dead-on. "The interview is about finding your limits," Shain says. "I know that at the executive-assistant level, it's not a 9-to-5 job. You get there when you're needed, and you leave when you can. The last thing we want to do is to send somebody into a failure situation."
Within five days of the official opening of the search, the first three solid prospects can be presented to a client, along with a complete dossier about each candidate's background and work history, deepened by the addition of a short write-up about his or her potential fit with the organization in question. "It turns out," Duncan says, "that a good personality fit with the executive is the single most important factor in determining the success of the relationship. More important than background. More important than work history."
