Just as employers are finding is increasingly difficult to fill job openings, their own employees are thinking of leaving in droves. The results of a March 2011 Deloitte survey of 356 employees at large global companies indicates two out of every three employees are considering exiting, stage right.  Among employees surveyed in March 2011, only 35% expect to remain with their current employers. What makes this alarming is the timing: the mass exodus could come as employers are finding it harder to fill openings they already have.

Deloitte’s survey findings also suggest that  companies may be at a greater risk of losing women than men. Women appeared more likely than men to be actively looking for new employment in the next 12 months (55% of women vs. 41% of men). Men, on the other hand, were more likely to be passively looking (24% of men vs. 12% of women).  Women’s dissatisfaction is more related to feeling overworked. That isn’t so surprising as layoffs increased the work loads of colleague left behind and women dominated the survivors. This economic downturn is what put women in the workforce majority for the first time in recorded history.

The Conference Board reported this month that labor demand has increased to the pre-recession monthly high of 4.5 million advertised vacancies. It is a trend that is being felt most acutely in mission-critical and highly technical positions and well as at the senior executive levels.  That’s due in part to hiring managers taking longer to make up their minds. On average, hiring managers invited a half dozen candidates for second round interviews last year, twice as many as before the downturn. In other words, while one might think with all the available talent that time to fill would go down when the exact opposite is true.  In fact, now it appears we have the makings of a perfect storm – a pre-downturn number of openings, time-to-hiring that’s quadrupled, and pent up desire to make a move in two out of every three workers.  It promises to be a long, hot summer . . .

Within each of us, in the collective unconscious, there lies a hero — an archetype that Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed lays dormant until called to action.  Studying world mythology, Joseph Campbell built upon Jung’s work, discovering that no matter what the myth, a hero’s journey remains the same. All heroes must leave what is familiar, venture forth, do battle, and then return, forever changed, with new talents and gifts to share.  For those of us in executive search, that means we deal with something far more important than recruiting metrics and candidate tracking systems: with each and every recruiting engagement, we bear witness to the hero’s journey.

The classic hero’s journey begins with a call to action. For executive search, this would be the point at which a candidate is first given notice that everything is going to change.  That step is often followed by a refusal of the call.  A candidate may not be ready to make a move out of fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or a sense of duty or obligation.  Once the hero has committed to the quest, a magical guide or helper appears. The most gifted recruiters and executive search consultants naturally assume that role, helping usher candidates across the threshold to enter the world of the unknown.

Executive search done well is inspired.  We are participants in a spiritual quest that involves forces far greater than any one of us, including Jung’s collective unconscious and Campbell’s monomyth.  Each and every day, let us remember the hero’s journey.

A fascinating piece in the Sacramento Bee made me think about how life for many executives these days is starting to mirror that of our Founding Fathers more than two centuries ago.

Reporter Anita Creamer filed a report that examined the trends associated with “a growing cohort of boomerang commuters – baby boomers who are finding that to pursue promotions and new jobs, they need to leave their spouses and families temporarily behind and relocate to a new city.”

Creamer interviewed boomers who — like the myriad executives with whom I speak — must reconcile cross-country commutes and/or relocations with their family lives.

Their lives are much like those of their class equivalents in the 18th century. John Adams spent months — and sometimes years — away from Abigail on assignment, either at the Continental Congress or in Europe.

What’s even more striking is that the converse situation also mirrors the work-family lifestyle of that period. As more and more call “home” their place of work, they are creating a family structure that resembles that of early settler-farmers, where the home was the work.

It will be interesting to see what impact this will have on traffic to big-box retail stores and malls. As more and more people work from home, I believe there will be a tighter association with home communities — and the small businesses located therein.

CEO searches are on the rise. That’s what we’re witnessing in our Board & CEO practice at The Good Search, a trend that Bloomberg Businessweek is reporting in a recent article, The Recession Is Gone, and the CEO Could Be Next.

“After three years of declining turnover among CEOs, churn at the top is back. As the economy improves, the rate of corner-office shakeups has picked up as more boards replace veteran CEOs with younger leaders with very different résumés.”

Underperforming CEOs are having their heads handed to them, as the economy rebounds and boards are positioning their companies for growth.  Hot on the list of must-have skills are international, sales, and marketing acumen as well as  candidates who have worked in more than one industry, offering breadth of domain expertise. Out is single-company experience. Working for one employer one’s whole life often leads to culture shock and failure at the next company — too many times the transplant doesn’t take.

Interestingly, CEO churn pulled back with the financial crisis. Notes the magazine:

“CEO turnover declined from 12.7 percent in 2007 to 9.4 percent last year, according to a study of Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and Fortune 500 companies by executive search firm Crist/Kolder Associates in Chicago. One likely reason: Boards were reluctant to change leadership during the recession, concerned that if a CEO left, investors might think the company was coming unglued.”

But now that the economy is rebounding, experts are predicting a return to double-digit turnover in 2011 and 2011.   For CEOs who slashed their workforce while they spared themselves, this trend carries with it a whiff of comeuppance.

This is a post about intangibles. We once had a client ask for candidates who had “gravitas.”

Come on. Gravitas? What is that, really? A kind of wine? A Greek side dish? Waiter, I’ll have the souvlaki with extra gravitas, parakalo.

Where does one detail gravitas in a resume? Under accomplishments? References? Skills?

In “The Godfather,” the translation for a guy with “gravitas” would be when Vito Corleone tells Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo that he agreed to meet with Sollozzo because “I hear you are a serious man.”

Of course, next thing you know, Sollozzo is having ol’ Vito gunned down in front of poor Fredo.

I probably can’t tell you what gravitas looks like. But unwisely chosen photos on Facebook are occasionally where I learn what it doesn’t look like.

I mean, standing in front of your new Jaguar … ?

In the world of executive search, candidate slates often grow to six candidates or more, when research suggests that we should limit finalists to a number we can count on one hand — as in “eeny meeny miney”.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz has conducted research that demonstrates abundance robs us of satisfaction. The research suggests we would be better off if we embraced “voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them”. Ironically, Schwartz learned that instead of seeking the “best” choice, we would be better off seeking “good enough”. In other words, “good enough” is actually better than the “best”.

The reason? While conventional wisdom holds that the more choices we have, the better off we are, in reality the opposite appears to be true — if we want to feel satisfied with the decisions we make.

So in search, as in life, less is more.

I recently interviewed author Scott Eblin, whose revised and expanded 2nd edition of the book, The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, is relevant to talent acquisition on both a micro and macro level.  First, since we’re in the business of candidate assessment, it provides insight on how well an executive is handling his or her responsibilities and whether that individual is ready for advancement.

Scott observes that in order to progress in our careers, we must acquire new behavior and habits as we let go of old ones.  Scott explains,

“The whole premise of the book is, as you move into different roles or even if you’re in the same role, the competitive environment or the business situation can change so that the results and expectations are a lot different than what they were before. And it’s like that Einstein quote about insanity: doing things the way you’ve always done them and expecting different results. You almost have to pick up some new behaviors and mind-sets and let go of some other ones.”

It sounds simple enough. What makes it tricky is that frequently we need to discard the very behaviors that made us successful in more junior roles.  For instance, if you’re the “get-it-done” person on a team that works like a maniac and consistently delivers on deadline, then that has likely made you successful.  However, that trait  will experience diminishing returns the further you advance up the ladder.  You will become an executive who is increasingly burned out, lost in the weeds, and hasn’t had the time or energy to develop a coherent strategy.

As I listened to Scott, it dawned on me that not only does his observation make sense for candidates that we recruit and for the recruiters themselves (the micro), but for search practices as a whole (the macro). In order to take talent acquisition to The Next Level, we not only must adopt new “best practices”, but we must also let go of what isn’t working.

And old habits die hard, my friends.  In fact, the bigger the company, the longer they often remain on life-support. Large employers have invested mightily in candidate portals and candidate tracking systems that, while making some things easier, have made other things far more challenging and time-consuming.  The road to Recruiting Hell is paved with unintended consequences. And thus, how we do our work deserves a reset, particularly if we want to do it better next time.

Old Habit: Job Postings
The Internet is a wonderful thing.  And there are candidates out there that deserve the opportunity to apply.  But, it has become a wildly inefficient as more and more unqualified applicants submit their resumes. A number of colleagues now estimate that only 1-to-2% of applicants have the necessary skills and qualifications to move forward as candidates. So, as our eyes grow bleary reviewing curricula vitae of candidates whose qualifications bear no resemblance to the position description, it raises the question, “is this really how we want to be spending our time?” Do we actually want to have 98.5% of our effort wasted for a paltry 1.5% yield? More importantly, job postings leave recruiters powerless as to outcome. We are left hoping, wishing, and even praying that the ideal candidate surfs by the help-wanted ad online and is seized with the impulse to apply. I’m not suggesting that we abandon job postings, but rather think about ways to reduce our dependency. Next time, before taking a detour through the wilderness of wannabes, think about ways to take a more direct route.

Old Habit: Contingency
I have good friends who work at contingency firms.  Most of us do. They work hard and they deliver great candidates. But, (forgive me), that doesn’t make it right: when you get right down to it, the contingency search model is flawed. Its touted as “free” until a placement is made, but mama taught us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Contingency firms must operate opportunistically and so they must abandon searches that are difficult or too time-consuming.  That means that you may think your contingency firm (or firms) are working feverishly to fill your opening when they may actually be doing no such thing: they’ve moved on — because they’ve had to in order to survive economically — without bothering to tell you. They don’t owe you an explanation because, hey, you’re not paying them to recruit.  Worse, when they do find you a great candidate, they shop that candidate to all your competitors.  And while that may seem like a huge conflict of interest, you realy can’t blame them, because, hey, you’re not paying them to recruit. They’re simply trying to increase their chances of making a placement for which they would get paid. To top it off, let’s say you put your search out to contingency, gave it a couple of months and didn’t get the candidate you needed.  What do you do then? Well, you’re now in a serious pickle. You don’t know what to do next because don’t know what’s already been tried. In fact, now that you stop and think about it, you have absolutely no idea what the contingency firms did on your behalf — whom they did and didn’t recruit. They don’t owe you an explanation because, hey, you didn’t pay them to recruit. Not one thin dime. (Some might suggest you got your money’s worth.)  The greatest risk of contingency is that it offers zero due diligence.

What makes breaking old habits for an recruiting organization challenging is that these methods are embedded inside employer processes. Companies direct amazing candidates to apply through the website where they get lost a tsunami of applications, when quality candidates deserve so better than that. For vendor management, a number of employers direct more innovative search firms to sign up with contingency aggregators such as RecruitAlliance. Inevitably, those firms never sign up because it makes no sense: they aren’t contingency. In doing so, employers that are stuck in recruiting ruts lose the chance to work with the very firms that can help raise the bar.  More competitive organizations regularly refresh their talent acquisition processes to capitalize on opportunities to take it to The Next Level.

For more on my interview with Scott Eblin and his book The Next Level, you can listen to my interview or read the transcript.

If you’re a buyer of retained search, you should check to see whether your executive search consultant is ahead or behind the social networking curve.  Since real world analog and online digital networking is essential to surfacing the best candidates, you want to ensure that your consultant has clocked enough hours in the digital realm to achieve mastery of that medium.  More important, you want to avoid hiring those that were latecomers to the social networking party, a delay suggesting that they are not as forward thinking and as plugged in as they need to be in order to serve your organization well.

One way to calibrate the social networking savvy of a retained search consultant is to simply visit that consultant’s LinkedIn profile page and check the web address for the recruiter’s member number.

For example, if you visit my LinkedIn Profile, you’ll notice that the URL is http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=59572.  My member identification number is 59572, which means I am counted among LinkedIn’s first 60-thousand members. That is no small feat in a network that now totals 80 million members, a population larger than the United Kingdom, Germany and France.  Unlike those countries, the population of LinkedIn is growing by one new member per second.

When you do the math, (59,572/80000000) less than one-tenth of one percent of LinkedIn members (.074 percent) managed to join LinkedIn by December of 2003 when I became a member — the same year the social network launched.  If you plug that percentage into the Everett Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle model, this .074-percent is counted among the first wave of users in a technology lifecycle, a wave referred to as Innovators. According to this model, Innovators are more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented — the qualities you’d generally want in a search partner. Innovators embrace new technologies before Early Adopters, and well before the Early Majority, the Late Majority, and the Laggards.

So before you engage a retained search partner, do your social networking due diligence and check the recruiter’s LinkedIn member ID.  The smaller the number, the better. Or simply ask the consultant when he or she joined.  If it is long after the network’s official launch in May 2003, then you are at risk of doing business with a consultant who doesn’t entirely get it.  And that, my friends, is a frightening thing.

I recently heard Sonja Holt speak at HCI’s 2010 Government Talent Management Conference. She is the  Deputy Chief of Diversity and Outreach for the Central Intelligence Agency and her comments were a lesson in how to recruit intelligently.

First, they must educate potential candidates to get over the mistaken impression that everyone who works at the CIA has a job like Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) in the trilogy of movies The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum where the CIA is less an employer-of-choice and more an assassin out to kill its own people.

“We’re going doing targeted recruiting as well. A lot of people know “CIA”, but unfortunately they kind of look at that and say “spies”. They don’t  think of  . . . other areas that we have that are critical to our mission.”

Next, they operate opportunistically.  They track news events and leverage those events to their benefit.

“Earlier when you mentioned the economy, we try to take, I wouldn’t say advantage, but we’re in tune to that.  For example, our Director of Intelligence was looking for economics analysts, so we took a group of individuals and hiring officers  to New York and did a lot of advertising focusing around that niche and hit the ground running.”

Most intriguing was the CIA’s use of social network analysis in recruiting, which The Agency mashes together with geo-spatial and geo-census data to map hot spots of talent.

“I have an officer who used geo-spactial tool and geo-census data as well as other information he’s  feeding into our mapping system.  If I go to Michael and say I’m looking for this, then I can populate by specific skill set — if I’m looking for language or if I’m looking for a specific race — he he can pull that up on a map and show me different areas around the country where I should be able to find the talent.”

The Agency also uses social network analysis, not simply looking at who is connected to whom, but also identifying super-connectors and outliers and as they profile ideal candidates to recruit.  (But then again, so do we.)

This year, women become the majority in the workforce for the first time in American history. It is a critical milestone, one that we in executive search ought to pause to consider by reading an intriguing article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The End of Men”. The reason? 75% of the 8 million jobs lost in the recession were lost by men, as testosterone dominant blue collar and Wall Street jobs have gone the way of the dodo bird. At the same time men are having a tougher time getting by, women appear to be on the rise. One reason may be that companies that employ woman leaders are simply more profitable. (Do I have your attention yet?)

At a time when excessive risk nearly drove our global economy to its knees, studies also suggests that men may be hormonally inclined to make reckless mistakes. Ironically, women’s hormones — the very chemicals held against us for so long — appear to make us better decision-makers, especially in today’s economy.

In fact, women’s recent majority win in the workforce may be just the beginning because women are graduating in higher numbers from college. “For every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same.” The article goes on to explain the implications:

The domination is also being expressed in gender selection at fertility clinics. Based on anecdotal evidence, parents seeking assistance in getting pregnant are choosing girls over boys three-fourths of the time. While that particular fact and the idea of women’s collective rise to power may be shocking to some, it is yesterday’s news to my teenage daughter and others her age raised on a steady diet of girl power videos from artists that include Beyonce who tours with an all-female band. In song after song (Irreplaceable, If I Were a Boy, and her earlier Destiny Child’s Survivor), she conveys that rather than being worthless or worth less than men, we of the female persuasion are actually worth something — at the very least, a ring.

Beyonce’s Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) begat a flash mob in Piccadilly Circus in London . . .

. . . and morphed into a gay power subplot on the Fox show Glee . . .

If Justin Timberlake feels secure enough in his manhood to don a leotard and high heels in a Single Ladies send-up, then perhaps we have, indeed, arrived. However, the major retained search firms yet to come to that realization when you examine the percentage of women they employ. I actually stopped and counted the women listed at each of the U.S. offices. The unofficial tally is as follows:

• Korn Ferry: SeniorLeadership: 20% women – 3 of 15, U.S. Consultants: 24% women – 75 of 311
• Heidrick: Senior Leadership: 16% women – 1 of 6, U.S. Consultants: 25% women – 46 of 184
• SpencerStuart: Senior Leadership: 0% women – 0 in 7, U.S. Consultants: 38% women – 54 of 141
• Russell Reynolds Senior Leadership: 0% women – 0 of 1*, U.S. Consultants: 39% women – 41 of 108

Despite the paucity of women in top leadership roles, the retained search industry hates, hates, hates to discuss sexism as if closing its eyes to gender bias will make it all go away. It is the same kind of wishful thinking practiced by a toddler who thinks covering his eyes with his hands makes him invisible. The old boys that remain of the Old Boys’ Network are Masters of Denial, an impulse rooted their privileged white male DNA.

The retained search industry emerged in the 1950s as firms spun off from professional services companies. Gardner Heidrick and John Struggles were both veterans of the management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Spencer Stuart worked for them for a year before leaving to found his own search firm. Lester Korn and Richard Ferry met at accounting company Peat, Marwick, Mitchell. Russell Reynolds worked for a time for William Clark, a firm that had been spun off from another accounting firm Price Waterhouse. Sid Boyden was ahead of all of them, founding his firm in 1946. However, in the decades since their founding, not a single firm has chosen to name a woman as their CEO. That paticular glass ceiling has yet to shatter, mirroring the vast majority of the Fortune 500 firms that they serve.

Understandably, gender bias has long been topic that most people would rather not discuss. Most of us prefer to focus on the positive, because sexism, like any other kind of ism, is such a bummer. Besides, people get all squirmy and uncomfortable in much the same way people don’t like to talk about race, which is why President Obama rarely goes there. However, the bias now appears to be getting turned on its head. Whatever was working against women now appears to be working for us as a gender. More important, it appears to be working for our society as a whole. It isn’t that women benefit: we all benefit. The End of Men article by Hanna Rosin goes on to point out:

In other words, countries where women are on the rise simply make more money. (Do I have your attention yet??) That capitalistic truth should be reason enough to pursue gender neutrality within our own ranks, and to inspire us to help our clients usher deserving, hardworking women up into middle and upper management where they have yet to enjoy their fair share. The reason is as simple. To quote a campaign slogan of former Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The End of Men, as a thesis, simply means that whenever a woman advances and gets more, it’s not that she get a male colleague’s slice of pie — the pie actually grows. That fact alone ought to be enough to inspire even the most serious among us to break out in dance. Of course, Ms. B is going to help us do it in style. To learn the Single Ladies dance, simply study her dance routine below, slowed to half time.