An executive search reflection

I used to be the co-CEO of N2Growth, an executive search firm¹. N2Growth does other stuff like coaching too, but executive search dominates its P&L.

The firm was small at a peak headcount around 150, generalist, and global. That meant our team worked across industries, functions, and geographies. Before becoming co-CEO, I personally led over 100 executive searches.

My searches were varied. I led the CTO search for a generational tech company before its IPO, board searches for one of the world’s largest family businesses, the MD search for an Australian government unit, the CSO (where S was for Scientific) search for a pre-revenue Chinese startup flushed with billions of dollars in funding to blitzscale, the CEO search for a world-renowned museum, and more.

One commonality across the engagements we did is that they were all senior roles for which clients paid us big, guaranteed retainers. Another commonality is that I’d have days to go from novice to competent as an advisor to executives and board members who have been leading in their industries, functions, and geographies for decades.

The Generalist Approach

Climbing steep learning curves was intellectually stimulating, but I was skeptical about the efficacy of the generalist approach. Surely, a life-long search consultant focused on the museum industry, the technology function, or the Australian market knows more about their niche than I would.

But specialization has its downsides. On the supply side, non-solicitation agreements—normal in executive search—prevent firms from poaching talent from their clients. The more you serve a space, the less you can recruit from it. Over time, deep industry expertise paradoxically makes a practice less capable.

On the demand side, some clients want more than in-group mimicry in their hires. Take Ruth Porat for example. The market and the pundit class have liked her impact as CFO of Alphabet, despite the fact that she had never worked at a technology company prior. Jacqueline Reses was a celebrated CPO (People) at Square (now Block) through its best days. She built a winning team that drove the business to ~20x under her tenure, despite never having worked in the human resources function prior. Carlos Ghosn, effective no matter what you make of his scandals, had never worked in Japan before becoming Nissan’s COO. Some of the best clients take broad perspectives and use independent thinking to make intelligent placements across traditional lines.

Some of the best² placements of my career were obvious. In one flattering³ case, a global recruitment company retained us to find them a President, Americas; we placed the incumbent from their biggest competitor. Other great placements were unusual, like when we placed a financial services executive as CPO (Product) for a manufacturing company doing over $100B in revenue. The generalist approach enabled both types of placements.

There are other good points in favor or against this model. Sober clients chose us and we had good outcomes—as our more specialized competitors sometimes do, too.

Palace Intrigue

The work was fun. I learned a lot. It was also filled with palace intrigue. We were the people that others went to to make confidential, high-stakes hires that would influence the future of their organizations. Sometimes, stuff got weird.

One time, a multibillion dollar publicly traded client hired us to replace a division CEO. The incumbent was performing well, but the CEO who hired him decided that he didn’t like the subordinate CEO’s energy anymore. After a couple of weeks into the search and only having interviewed one candidate, our client changed his mind and decided to keep the incumbent, who remains in place to this day, five years later. The fee we collected on that search that did not consummate was about the price of a 3/2 house in a major suburb.

Occasionally, we were subjected to the performances of ambitious executives who used searches as air time to signal their faculties for discernment to higher-ups⁴. One time, we were doing a Fortune 500 CLO (Legal) search. One candidate was the incumbent CLO of our client’s largest competitor, which incidentally was the largest company in the industry. He had a great reputation in the industry and was an obvious fit for the other parameters of the search. Our team did the hard work of getting him interested in the confidential opening. We weren’t at the stage of recommending this particular candidate for the job, but we were recommending that our client interview him. A C-minus-one executive (an executive reporting to someone who reports to the CEO) auditioning to be CHRO successor asked what she thought was a zinger question, pressing us to evidence the candidate’s “learning agility.” She convinced her boss to hold on advancing the candidate on account of our lack of a thorough substantiation of his learning agility. It was the first and only time we discussed learning agility during the course of the search.

One search for the CEO of a hedge fund was stopped when one billionaire business partner sued the other. We kept our suburban-home-sized fee on that one, too. Another time, the CEO of a world-famous social impact business asked me what I thought the teeth of a candidate for CMO said about her character⁵. Yet another time, and the only failed search⁶ of my career, we spent 16 months trying to find someone with an exceptionally niche fossil power plant consulting skill set for a US-based company; we were only able to identify one adequately skilled person under retirement age on planet Earth, based in South Africa, who declined the role.⁷

I got to experience and compare cultures at the top. Some trends surprised me. Tobacco company executives and boards were the nicest to work with. The worst, most toxic industry I ever touched—by far!—was the consumer vacuum industry.⁸

My experiences were fairly broad. I peeked into C-suites and board rooms across the economy and learned how companies work from pre-revenue stage to hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. I worked with business celebrities and sampled a full breadth of personalities, philosophies, and styles in the process.

What I Learned About Hiring Leaders

There is a ripe canon on hiring full of overbroad scientific takes and difficult-to-falsify artistic ones. Idk, hiring is complicated. I have my own overbroad and difficult-to-falsify perspectives on hiring, and perhaps I’ll examine those another day.

For today, I made a list of the engagements I conducted that I could remember. I got to 132 of them. I tagged them with the details that I could remember. Since I haven’t led a search myself in four years, each placement has had enough time to let reality show what would happen next. I omitted searches where I had too little information of the aftermath, or when a mitigating factor distorted the outcome⁹.

The biggest takeaway I found: a search was 3.54 times more likely to end in a smashing success¹⁰ when the hiring party has a strong hiring point of view, irrespective of what that point of view was.

One CEO I worked with didn’t like job hoppers and defined them as anyone with more than one employer per decade. Another client had 13 dense pages of DEI guidelines for us to follow to make sure the search was maximally diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Yet another client, a multibillion dollar Asian company hiring for its US subsidiary, communicated to its US-based CHRO only by communiques in the form of PowerPoints that were specific about the boxes a candidate needed to check to be hired. If the boxes were checked, the Asian parent company authorized the hire without any interviews on their side despite the seniority of the role. Each of these searches was a smashing success.

By happy coincidence, a dear friend told me a story on Tuesday about a famous businessman he met that N2Growth happened to work with, too. The businessman told my friend that when he’s hiring people, he likes to hire the ones he imagines are good at sex. He doesn’t look for attractiveness, but instead sexual performance related characteristics like vitality and verve.

I’ve got no clue if that’s a good way to hire, but I’d bet that having a defined point of view makes this guy more likely to win at hiring than an anything-goes competitor.

1. I’m still on N2Growth’s board of directors. This is not a puff piece.

2. By best placements, I mean the ones that tend to come from searches that progress ahead of schedule and end in the hiring of a very talented person, where the very talented person achieves very coveted results and gets retained and promoted, and then the client loves you and says nice things about you to their friends and comes back for more business.

3. Flattering because until that point, I hadn’t considered that a recruiting company that happens not to focus on executive recruiting might hire an executive recruiting firm, and those insiders chose us.

4. The ultimate leaders are at fault here. If you see a subordinate using airtime with a consultant to flex their specialness, you should encourage the subordinate to heal their inner child and cut that shit out.

5. This was the only time executive search consulting invoked my training in forensic odontology. I had nothing helpful to say.

6. Searches get canceled all the time for reasons like M&A, changes in corporate strategy, hiring manager turnover, etc. This search was failed, not just canceled, because the client maintained a sincere desire to place a candidate and we were unable to find a fitting candidate to take the role.

7. This my first first-hand view into something we all wonder about… are there tiny and consequential corners of the economy that are a few missed heartbeats away from collapse? Yes, there are.

8. There are many decent people in the consumer vacuum industry, but it has a significantly higher rate of fostering assholes than any other I’ve seen. I wonder if my team and I had the perfect storm of bad samples, or if there’s an economic argument for these people being sour.

9. For instance, one placement of a seeming rockstar CEO at a company I bet he would have led to great heights ended months in when he was diagnosed with a serious form of cancer.

10. Synonym for best placements, see footnote 2.