Within each of us, in the collective unconscious, there lies a hero — an archetype that Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed lies 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 talent acquisition, 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.

Each senior executive, each technologist, each professional in some way is forever changed by his or her search for a new opportunity. If that involves unemployment, and even homelessness, the bravery and determination required of our hero is the stuff of which legends (and movies) are made.

The film The Pursuit of Happiness captures that heroism. Will Smith and his son Jaden star in the true story of Chris Gardner, a San Francisco salesman who rises above homelessness and poverty to become a Wall Street legend. The movie reminds me that we need to remember we are not always aware of the random acts of courage required of the candidates with whom we interact every day.

The Hero’s Journey is a story lives in the subconscious — one that speaks to us, that moves us, and inspires us as human beings. As recruiters, we would do well to reexamine the recruiting lifecycle to discover the archetypal phases of the Hero’s Journey contained within. A candidate’s subconscious may influence his actions and decision-making as much as conscious reason. To start, we need to learn to recognize the classic markers of the epic tale. The story always begins in the ordinary world, until something triggers the first phase: departure.

Departure

The Call to Adventure: For executive search and recruiting, the call to adventure comes when a candidate first discovers that the ordinary world at work is going to change. It may be that an executive has learned that his company has been acquired or is going through a massive reorganization. It may be that the boss who hired him has left, or that there are rumors of impending layoffs. It may be increasing unemployment or outsourcing of his work. Whatever the call, the effect is the same; the landscape has changed. The Hero’s Journey has begun.

Refusal of the Quest: The next step is often refusal to heed the call. Candidates may not be ready to leave their current roles out of a sense of duty or obligation. They may fear leaving what has been so familiar. They may worry that they simply won’t measure up in their next place of employment. And so the candidate stays, as other workers depart.

Supernatural Aid. Once the hero has committed to the quest, a magical guide or helper appears — cue the recruiter. The most gifted search consultants naturally assume a Sherpa-like role, reassuring candidates as they make the decision to begin the journey. In recruiting, it may simply mean that we convince a passive candidate to consider the extraordinary opportunity that lies beyond the four walls of their current employer and to agree to exploratory conversations.

The Crossing of the First Threshold. As supernatural guides, recruiters help usher candidates across the threshold to enter the world of the unknown. The candidate submits his resume, reviews a job description, and journeys into the field of adventure for rounds of interviews with your team. In doing so, he leaves behind the employer that is familiar, and ventures into a strange and dangerous place — your company — because the rules of your corporate culture are not yet known.

The Belly of the Whale. This is the final separation from the hero’s known world and former self. Often it is a dark, unknown, or frightening experience to triggers a metamorphosis. They may enter the belly of the beast when they are handed a pink slip or are fired. It may be simply painful recognition that there is no future where they currently work and that they are undervalued. There is no going back.

The second phase of the hero’s journey is that of initiation. Our hero has left what was familiar and finds himself a stranger in a strange land. He has things to learn about himself and about his new world.

Initiation

The Road of Trials. Candidates, particularly those who are actively looking, experience a series of tests and ordeals that force them to undergo a transformation. Whether it is failing to obtain interviews or failing to obtain an offer after being interviewed. In The Pursuit of Happiness the test is being unable to show up for an interview properly dressed. Still he shows up.

The Meeting with the Goddess. The meeting with the goddess represents a time when the candidate experiences unconditional love. That would be the moment we introduce the perfect candidate to the perfect opportunity — the moment the hiring manager and applicant each recognize they have found “the one.” The opportunity is not “just a job,” but rather a calling that embraces all that we are meant to be.

Woman as Temptress. Inevitably, a counteroffer is made by the candidate’s employer or another company vies for your perfect candidate, tempting him or her to stray from the quest. But while the compensation package is impressive, it is more a material temptation. It lacks a spiritual connection with the work. Why did it take the current employer so long to realize the candidate was worth keeping?

Atonement with the Father. The candidate seeks the blessing of his boss or someone with incredible power. It doesn’t have to be male. In fact, in recruiting, candidates often seek the atonement of their spouses who must sign off on the decision. These are delicate conversations for families as they consider whether they wish to be uprooted yet again, only to leave friends and their community behind.

Apotheosis. An offer is being readied and the candidate is deified, entering a state of divine knowledge and bliss. This is also a period or rest and fulfillment in preparation for the return home to a new workplace.

The Ultimate Boon. The candidate receives an offer and achieves what he set out to accomplish on his quest. All of the steps up until now have prepared the executive for this transcendent moment. In other words, jackpot!

The third and final phase of the journey is the return. It represents a coming home when there is no coming home. It will never be the same because the hero is not the same. He has been transformed.

The Return

Refusal of the Return. The candidate refuses the offer, at least initially. Either it is a negotiating tactic or it is a reluctance to return to office life and all the stresses that come with it. It is intoxicating to be courted. It is quite another thing to commit to one’s next employer and the challenges the new role brings.

The Magic Flight. Sometimes it is difficult and even dangerous for candidates to escape with offer in hand. Current employers may threaten legal action, reminding candidates of non-compete obligations and other contractual ties that bind. Often, they must struggle to break free.

Rescue from Without. Sometimes the candidate needs guides and assistants to help them return home to their new place of work. In addition to the executive search consultant or recruiter, the dream team may also include an employment lawyer, a CPA, as well as a realtor and relocation expert. For proper onboarding, the worker may be assigned a mentor and executive coach.

The Crossing of the Return Threshold. The day the candidate becomes an employee, the start date — that is moment the Hero crosses the threshold. To complete this step successfully, the Hero must remember all that he or she has learned on the journey. The Hero must harness that wisdom on the job and then to share those insights with the rest of the world – not an easy thing to do.

Freedom to Live. It is now a year or two later, and the candidate has achieved mastery on the job. He no longer fears death by downsizing, so he is free to live. The hero’s journey is complete, at least until the next recruiter calls.

I remain humbled by the power those of us in executive search and recruiting hold to transform the lives of the candidates we touch and of their families for generations. We are the door through which an executive or professional must pass for a working wage or wealth creation. In large part, we determine who gets in and who does not, decisions that shape the futures of those with whom we interact virtually every day. It is so easy to take that for granted, but I try never to take it for granted because our smallest actions have the most profound effects on people who just as easily could be you or me.

So often, in so many ways, our candidates are legendary. A hero is defined is someone who is admired and idealized for courage, outstanding achievements and noble qualities. Each and every day, let us remember the hero … and then, let’s recruit him.

Others suggest it more resembles the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, a digital beast that devours our contacts and serves them up to large corporate clients willing to pay for what was once our data.

One cannot really blame LinkedIn for monetizing its business model. It does need to generate revenues to keep the lights on. But as it pursues recruiting revenues, as it encourages business professionals to use LinkedIn more as a marketing platform for “brand you,” as it prods users to pay for the privilege of networking and recruiting on LinkedIn, it is fair to wonder what value we get in return for that investment. While LinkedIn may remain a shiny object to which many recruiters feel inextricably drawn, we are in serious need of a reality check.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn reached two impressive milestones. It went public and it surpassed 100 million registered users. However, before LinkedIn went public, the social network filed a document with the SEC reporting a significant risk factor to LNKD investors: just how unreliable that 100 million figure is.

The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members. The number of registered members in our network is higher than the number of actual members because some members have multiple registrations, other members have died or become incapacitated, and others may have registered under fictitious names.

In other words, LinkedIn’s 100 million number is wildly inaccurate. However, attempting to pin down a more meaningful number is like nailing Jell-O to the the wall. That is why, dag-nab-it, LinkedIn is sticking with the 100 million member figure. Flawed though it may be, it contends it’s the only number it’s got.

Given the challenges inherent in identifying these accounts, we do not have a reliable system to accurately identify the number of actual members, and thus we rely on the number of registered members as our measure of the size of our network. Further, a substantial majority of our members do not visit our website on a monthly basis, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members.

Recruiters: are you paying attention? A substantial majority of LinkedIn members rarely visit LinkedIn. That’s according to LinkedIn itself. Seriously, if that’s the case, one has to wonder how viable LinkedIn is as a social network. LinkedIn wonders as well:

If the number of our actual members does not meet our expectations or we are unable to increase the breadth and frequency of our visiting members, then our business may not grow as fast as we expect, which will harm our operating and financial results and may cause our stock price to decline.

The investor website Seeking Alpha has expressed concern about LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions business — an advertising business unit that provides about a third of LinkedIn revenues — because “a website’s value to advertisers is directly proportionate to its number of active users.” Seeking Alpha accuses LinkedIn of being intentionally vague about its active user base and suggests we examine Quantcast reports on audience size instead. Only 1% of LinkedIn users are “addicts” who visit the site 30 or more times a month compared to Facebook’s 76%.

That disconnect may be starting to unsettle investors. The Wall Street Journal has taken note of recent drops in share price as early investors and executives unload shares in the wake of its May IPO. While many stocks weaken once employees are free to sell their shares after a company goes public, this appears to be much worse. In fact, Bloomberg contributing editor and investor Paul Kedrosky recently opined that LinkedIn’s precipitous decline is because LinkedIn has been broken from the beginning.

Kedrosky, who is also the editor of the popular financial blog Infectious Greed, notes that LinkedIn’s institutional investors make up only about 12% of its ownership, about half the percentage of stocks that enjoy strong institutional support.

Kedrosky’s article was called to my attention by Gary Stock, a longtime friend, technologist, and former code-breaking cryptanalyst with the National Security Agency. Stock participates in an invitation-only discussion group called “The TBTF Irregulars.” The group was formed by technology journalist/physicist Keith Dawson and also features the likes of David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal book on social networking The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. It other words, this is a group that takes social networking theory very seriously.

Gary noted there has been growing chatter among The Irregulars about how LinkedIn may be losing its way. They observe that it is behaving more aggressively and hyperactively. Popup wizards online nag us to enhance our profiles, to give up more and more pieces of ourselves. One Irregular noted an email from LinkedIn to confirm a connection suddenly mistook him for a new user, though he’d been a member for years, and attempted to raid his address book to send out new invitations to connect on LinkedIn. When he demurred, his friends still strangely get hit with those email invites. In other words, even though he said “no,” LinkedIn’s technology apparently said “yes.”

Those hiccups may be due, in part, to the problems with iterative development, of rules and algorithms run amok as large platforms scale. However, it may be that LinkedIn is undergoing a personality change.

Stock theorizes that LinkedIn may have an “all-things-to-all-people” problem. He observes that LinkedIn once insisted we limit our networks to those whom we know and with whom we do business.

Gary being Gary, he took building quality connections in the beginning so seriously that when a college student that he knew attempted to connect with him on LinkedIn, he visited that student to explain personally why he could not make the student a connection: they had never worked together and were not even in the same industry. However, soon Gary realized that he did do business with the student. In fact, he had for several years. The student’s family sold produce at the local farmer’s market that Gary frequented. So Stock relaxed his rules, and it appears, LinkedIn has as well.

A network that first insisted that we network only with those we know has morphed into a place to network with those we want to know us.

That transformation has turned the LinkedIn data stream into a torrent of less-meaningful data. Eventually, Stock predicts, LinkedIn may need to divide itself into separate businesses or risk becoming a “melange of gray goo that nobody recognizes anymore.”

For non-nerds, “grey goo” is a phrase first coined by nanotechnologist Eric Drexler in the 1986 book Engines of Creation. Grey goo is the the result of an apocalyptic scenario in which rogue self-replicating robots consume all matter on earth while building more themselves. If it isn’t careful, LinkedIn may find itself turning into a large mass of replicating nanomachines (members) lacking large-scale structure (promiscuous networking). Yes, grey goo.

In other words, Dodd-Frank is mandating that more women and minorities must occupy lucrative Wall Street jobs that heretofore have been dominated by white men who, in gender and ethnicity, resemble Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of the movie Wall Street and of its sequel.The Dodd-Frank provision is buried within some 850 pages of legislative text designed to strengthen the financial sector, promote economic recovery and job growth, protect consumers, and permanently end taxpayer bailouts of private institutions. Section 342 of Dodd-Frank embeds 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion at virtually every major financial regulatory agency of the federal government: Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the 12 Federal Reserve banks, and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The offices are designed to serve as watchdogs, monitoring the diversity of the agencies and the government contractors and subcontractors with which they do business. The list includes “financial institutions, investment banking firms, mortgage banking firms, asset management firms, brokers, dealers, financial services entities, underwriters, accountants, investment consultants and providers of legal services.”Wall Street’s issues with gender diversity date back to the now infamous “Boom-Boom Room,” Smith Barney’s basement party room where lap dances took place in the 1990s. Since then, females across the industry have shared similar tales about how they were sexually harassed with vulgar talk; excluded from business lunches, meetings and golf outings; and how their careers were hindered or damaged.

While consciousness has been raised and while the numbers of female and minority executives have improved, the vast majority of Wall Street firms lack diversity in the upper ranks. And that disparity could be a big problem in the eyes of Dodd-Frank regulators. Wall Street does billions of dollars in business with the federal government for services that include debt issuances, sales of government assets, as well as more general advisory services.

That business now may hinge on a Wall Street firm’s ability to correct racial and gender imbalances. According to Dodd-Frank language, if a federal agency’s compliance director concludes that a contractor has not made “a good faith effort to include minorities and women in its work force,” the agency head is authorized to cancel the contract. In other words, contracts worth billions are at stake — a dollar amount designed to be so significant even the wealthiest 1% would take notice.How can you determine whether Dodd-Frank diversity mandate applies to your firm? Chances are Dodd-Frank does apply if the following describes your current firm:

• Your company is an investment banking firm, mortgage banking firm, asset management firm, broker, dealer, financial services entity, underwriting, accounting, investment consulting, or law firm.
• Your company does business with the federal government’s financial agencies: Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the 12 Federal Reserve banks, and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

What should you do if you determine that Dodd-Frank diversity mandate applies to your firm? Your company must demonstrate that it has made a “good faith” effort to employ women and minorities. Clearly, “good faith” is subject to regulatory interpretation. However, Wall Street firms that demonstrate incremental improvement year over year in the diversity of their workforce may be better positioned for compliance than those that do not.

Employers also need to make sure that rounds of recent layoffs have not had a disparate impact on protected classes: workforce reductions and reorganizations have a way of eroding diversity ratios. Still, steady improvement may not be enough if regulators determine an organization could and should be doing more. To prepare for impending diversity regulations, potential next steps include the following:

• Define the baseline. Quantify the percentage of qualified women and minorities in the labor markets from which you recruit.
• Quantify the percentage of women and minorities in your current workforce, broken out by level, function, and geography.
• Compare your company’s diversity to the diversity of the labor market and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Focus the diversity talent pool and pipeline initiatives on the levels, functions, and geographies where they’re needed the most.
• Identify, map, and cultivate relationships of diverse talent at all of your favorite target companies.

Because Dodd-Frank diversity regulations are still being written, few Wall Street employers are fully conscious of its impending diversity mandate. One head of diversity for a global investment bank told me he fears that by the time those regulations are announced next year, there simply will not be enough time for Wall Street firms to come into compliance. Consequently, my colleague maintains that the time to act is now.

Dodd-Frank is the law. Wall Street companies can either ignore its diversity mandate at their peril or they can invite a growing occupation of corner offices and trading desks by female and minority employees. Interestingly, the latter choice also stands to make the workforce more economically diverse, which, in turn, may put Wall Street back in touch with Main Street. In fact, what may be most intriguing about the Dodd-Frank is the transformative potential of its diversity mandate. It holds the promise of reforming Wall Street from within.

The longer I recruit for a living, the more I see recruiting inextricably linked to the economy. Our finger is on the pulse and, at any given time, if we’re honest, we can give you a pretty accurate read on whether the patient is thriving or on life support.

In fact, the longer I recruit, the more I start to think like a VC. At least, that’s what venture capitalist Stewart Alsop observed when we got together at the Money: Tech conference in NYC, a gathering where Web 2.0 meets Wall Street.

Stewart is a partner in Alsop Louie Partners, a former general partner with New Enterprise Associates, and the former editor-in-chief and executive vice president of InfoWorld. Whenever we get together, our conversations careen from news observation to relevant startup ideas back to news observation back to hot startups.

Stewart uses news and economic intelligence to be opportunistic in his investments. He focuses on spotting trends early, deciding on the direction of a new technology or market, and ultimately, on getting out in front of everyone else. The same approach works well in recruiting, particularly when times get tough economically.

What follows are the five lessons for profiting from a down cycle:

• Lesson one: Conserve cash. Now is the time to sock away as much cash as possible, both personally and professionally. Don’t spend needlessly, and don’t rack up debt. There is a great deal of speculation on how bad this could get. You may need the cash to survive. You may need it to serve as a bridge between the time you work and/or pay your people and the time your client pays you. But even more important, you or your company may be presented with amazing opportunities to acquire products, services, or even other firms at a deep discount. . .that, my friends, is how fortunes are made.
• Lesson two: Find less-expensive alternatives. The tougher times become, the easier it will be to negotiate great deals. So use that to your advantage. If you’re on the corporate side and have a vendor who is non-negotiable, such as a retained or contingency search firm that always charges the same percentage of annual compensation, consider alternatives. Also, expect more from your vendors, such as having the vendor hand over all of its candidate research in addition to all the candidates. Alternatively, you might want to experiment in the economies of scale brought by candidate pipelines in place of hugely inefficient one-off searches.
• Lesson three: Grow your ROI. Corporate recruiters face downsizing in down economic cycles. Sometimes, entire internal executive search teams get shuttered. So if you haven’t taken the time to prove your worth in dollars and cents, you need to start doing the math. Approached the right way, you may uncover hidden ROI to explode your numbers for the better.
• Lesson four: Scan the horizon for opportunities. Set up alerts in Google News or Indeed to gauge who is hiring or laying off. I just spoke with the CEO of a startup in the Silicon Valley who has, within the past two weeks, noticed an uptick in the number of viable candidates at his doorstep, most of them applicants from other startups that ran out of cash. There is opportunity in that. Great talent is becoming easier to acquire: you just have to get them first. So invest in some serious phone ID and org-charting of your favorite target companies and proactively recruit those candidates before they put their resumes on Monster for all of the world to see.
• Lesson five: Jump from one bubble to the next. As the economy stumbles, hop from one bubble to the next. Instead of worrying about the current bubble that’s deflating, start thinking about where the next one will emerge and pounce on your foresight. A fascinating article in Harper’s details the next possible bubble: alternative energy.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines research as a “careful or diligent search,” a “studious inquiry or examination,” and “the collecting of information about a particular subject.” Why is it, then, that most executive search and recruiting professionals so often think of research as mere “name generation?” “Name gen” is rarely careful, diligent, or studious. More often, it involves a relatively haphazard scooping up of names and titles, willy-nilly. And that leads to a “kiss every frog” approach to recruiting in order to find your prince.

As the execution engine of executive search, your research can be either a Ferrari or an Edsel, a car that failed spectacularly due to poor workmanship and a failure to understand the American consumer. The Ferrari is Human Capital Intelligence: research that, through analysis, is transformed into actionable intelligence to provide your search with a competitive advantage. When you embed intelligence into virtually every step of your search process, you dramatically improve search performance. I’m not suggesting that you work harder. I am suggesting that by doing the following 10 steps, you can work smarter so you don’t have to work as hard.

1. Link your human capital intelligence strategy to the overarching strategy for the company. A company may be focused on growth and expansion into new markets, or alternatively may be focused on divestiture (selling assets that have been weighing the company down, while at the same time distracting it from its core business). Strategies are as varied as the businesses they inform. Ideally, your hires should provide a strategic advantage linked to that overarching strategy.

   You could, for instance, target candidates who have deep domain expertise in a new market your company is entering, with relationships and knowledge to leverage. Alternatively, you could raid primary competitors to knock them back a rung while you gain the advantage. Your understanding needs to be informed by deep background knowledge of the industry, its history, and its players. So read a few books that bring the history of the industry to life, keep up with industry publications, and continually track business news. (I keep a television tuned to CNBC throughout the day in a room adjacent to my office.)

2. Conduct an internal intelligence review. Critical information is usually scattered like buckshot across departments and teams within companies. Sales departments often have conference attendee lists. Marketing departments often have big market research reports. Your company has already paid for this information. Use it for recruiting, and you increase your company’s return on investment.
3. Study what actually works. Review the resumes of the people who have actually been hired into the position and team into which you are recruiting to determine what, if anything, they have in common. How many years of experience do they have? Is that experience aligned with the job description, or are they expecting more of the candidates than they are of themselves? Is there a cluster of candidates from any one particular company? For instance, check out Microsoft’s Distinguished Engineers and Technical Fellows, executive-level personnel on the engineering career track. What do you see in common? I’ll give you a hint: take a look at Hal Berenson, Dileep Bhandarkar, and Darryl Havens, or examine Technical Fellows Butler Lampson, Charles Thacker, and David Cutler. In fact, about a dozen engineers came from another company. (Have you figured it out yet?) The cultures are a perfect fit.
4. Consult with the hiring manager. Intelligence provides a platform upon which to build out a consultative relationship with an executive who serves as a hiring manager. If that manager is in need of a critical hire, he’s likely overworked and understaffed. The last thing he wants to do is to stop and download the information you need to find the perfect candidate. However, that is exactly what needs to happen. Rarely do position descriptions tell you what the candidate will actually have to accomplish his first year on the job to be considered a success.

   So ask. And don’t accept a simple explanation. Get granular detail, starting with the 5 Ws: Who (org chart), What (tactics), Where (travel), When (timetable), and Why (strategy). And, while you’re at it ask, “How?” Then, test the requirements by inquiring, “If I find someone who has successfully done what you need to have done, and if he only has eight instead of the required 10 years of experience, do you want to see him? What if he’s successful, but has only an undergraduate degree?” Start knocking out unnecessary requirements until you get to the core “must haves.” Review the compensation, and ask, “Are you confident the salary and scope is competitive when compared to other opportunities in the marketplace?” Set expectations and describe how you will provide him with actionable intelligence from Step 5 to make the search bulletproof, while at the same time find the candidates he needs.

5. Conduct market intelligence. Conduct research to capture and report out the number of similar openings against which you are competing. Find out what your competitors are offering in the way of salary, benefits, and relocation. Often, hiring managers and the financial personnel controlling the purse strings assume that the salary is competitive when it doesn’t offer a candidate enough of a difference to warrant making a move. You know it. The hiring manager knows it. Almost everyone within the organization knows it, but weirdly, everyone remains stuck for political reasons or simply through inertia. A market intelligence report serves as a powerful wake-up call for everyone involved and provides hiring managers with the hard data they need to go to bat for an adjustment in compensation, title, or scope.
6. Develop a search plan and work the plan. In Steps 1 through 5, you have gathered a great deal of potent information. Take a moment to analyze what it all means. Resist the impulse to dive in and scoop up big buckets of candidates from target companies. There isn’t enough of you to go around. Instead, work your sources to find out who the best people are. Report out a list of initial target candidates with biographies, and incorporate the feedback into your plan. Look for patterns upon which you can capitalize. Ideally, cherry-pick the rock stars. Never target entire companies. Rather, track specific luminaries or specific teams that are outperforming. To avoid wasted time calling the wrong people, reverse engineer the titles by examining job postings to determine what precise titles at each target company map to your opportunity. Prioritize the best targets and push less likely suspects further down on your to-do list.
7. Set news alerts for opportunistic swoop-ins. Visit the news page in Google and set alerts relevant to your search. Track RSS feeds. Scour blogs. Track reports of layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, and earnings disappointments, events which often make candidates a little more willing to make a move. If a company or an entire industry goes into free-fall (as was the case with subprime), it offers a significant opportunity to capture talent at virtually every level and function.
8. Develop a bench of executive candidates and candidate pipelines for staffing level. If you find yourself recruiting similar senior-level executives, it makes sense to proactively recruit a bench of candidates in advance of a role opening up. Building out candidate benches or candidate pipelines across a range of positions offers you the opportunity to drive time-to-fill to near zero.
9. Demand superior research and transparency from search firms. Retained search firms often tout their personal networks and proprietary databases as the reasons why you should choose them over their competitors. But those advantages have been largely rendered irrelevant by social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook and by the proliferation of candidate information on the Internet. There is no shortage of candidates or of networks. What we have is too much information, too little intelligence. So before you waste your time with shootouts between firms vying to win a retained search, simply check the websites of Egon Zehnder, Heidrick & Struggles, Korn/Ferry, Spencer Stuart, or search firms of your choosing. If their definition of search process makes no mention of intelligence and revolves primarily around target company and target candidate identification, walk on by.
10. Conduct intelligence on intelligence: Share best practices. There is no one association for you to join that will help you leverage intelligence in search. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals will teach you about competitive intelligence, but it is not specifically focused on search. The Association of Independent Information Professionals will teach you about research, but not necessarily intelligence. David Lord has built a network of corporate talent officers for the sole purpose of advocating for best practices in search, but it is not focused on intelligence, and the same goes for the IACPR, an organization committed to that same end. As a result, we at The Good Search have had to build out our own roundtable. Collaboration speeds innovation and when done properly, all participants stand to benefit from the collective knowledge.

Clearly, harnessing the power of intelligence is a best practice that has long been embraced by other industries such as finance and marketing. Its arrival in the search business is long overdue. Recruiting that fails to leverage human capital intelligence is like searching with your eyes closed, with far too much stumbling around in the dark. Search that harnesses the power of intelligence continually scans the competitive landscape. It is as if the scales have fallen from your eyes.

I once was blind, and now I see.

As experts in careers, those of us involved in human capital are well aware that most people usually change careers several times over their lifetimes. That’s a given. This applies to candidates as well as the people who recruit them because we, too, are counted among those with multiple careers. But the really cool thing is that each of those changes presents an opportunity for even greater success.

That’s why I am here today to build on the theme from my article about candidate spotting. Today, we’re focusing on career spotting, or scanning the horizon for changes in your environment that will lead you to that next better thing, while at the same time scanning your history for unique experiences and insights that give you a competitive advantage.

I am a “woman with a past.” I find a certain delicious humor in the phrase as it implies, well, I won’t go there. Let us just say that I have lived, and thankfully, it has been an interesting life. One reader, aware of my former career as an award-winning investigative reporter and television journalist, asked me to talk about how I came to change careers.

While I could say I laid out a tidy career plan and that my move to executive search was exactly what I had planned, that would be untrue.

Rather, I had invested every ounce of my being into become the best reporter a reporter could be, and I woke up one day and discovered the industry had changed. I spotted a trend (someone had moved my cheese). In response, I made an adjustment that ultimately allowed me to capitalize on the opportunity.

I started my news career shortly after Watergate, inspired by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. At the time, there was nothing cooler than extracting information from highly placed sources in secret meetings in a darkened parking garage. But by 1997, television news had become a shadow of its former self. Investigative reporting was a costly, highly litigious pastime, prone, if not designed, to upset the powers-that-be.

Moreover, television news had seen a fragmenting of its audience from the days when the triptych television networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC dominated the news. By then, with the advent of cable, the audience had been scattered like buckshot across 200 channels.

In response, producers no longer decided to lead the news with the most important story of the day, but rather with the story they felt you most wanted to hear. That was so not what I had envisioned and while I could argue on behalf of journalism and the better story, it was an argument I wasn’t going to win.

So I left, went back to college, and ended up at Columbia University surrounded by kids who were born around the time Reagan was elected president. I had a blast. Ultimately I had to return to work and so a friend suggested I assist her with candidate development in recruiting. I had no idea that there was research aimed at recruiting. I was delighted to learn about something I could do from the comfort of my own home.

Moreover, much of the work seemed easy in comparison to what I used to do. It is far, far easier to call someone to offer them a job than to explain you are investigating them. Then I started applying my investigative expertise to identifying and ultimately recruiting executives and technologists, spinning in my computer-assisted research acumen, and my business was born.

One might say I fell into recruiting. But rather, I practiced the art of career spotting, which involves the following steps:

1. See career change as opportunity: capitalize on it. Everyone gets downsized, even recruiters. Industries contract and expand. Markets have up and down cycles. What worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. Instead of focusing on what you have lost, focus on what you stand to gain. It doesn’t happen overnight. You may have to mourn the loss of a former career, workplace, and co-workers, if not the loss of a former identity. For the longest time, it felt weird to tell people I worked in executive search. Now it feels weird to say I was a TV journalist, though that investigative background gives our practice a competitive advantage.
2. Read the tea leaves: read the newspapers. To career spot, you must be aware of the business world’s ever-shifting sands. Industries expand and contract, markets have up cycles and down, and what worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. You must be ever-vigilant and anticipate where things are headed. When you see a critical mass coalesce, or spot a pattern that resonates, it’s time to take action. For our business, it may mean realizing when we’re entering an economic downturn and refocusing or repositioning business in much the same way investors rebalance their portfolios.
3. Realize that you are your own competitive advantage. Everyone is an individual. Everyone has their own special set of strengths and weaknesses. The trick is to capitalize on your strengths by aligning them with the trends you’ve observed in Step 2. I’m not saying this as a general platitude, as a generic warm-fuzzy, or as a Hallmark card bon mot. Rather, I’m suggesting you go beyond resume text and consider themes that have emerged over the course of your career. Examine your successes as well as the flip-side of your failures for the hidden strengths you may have embedded in them. During my journalism career, I was extraordinarily idealistic about the Fourth Estate and frequently jousted with my superiors, advocating for a great story and for the greater good. Was I a total pain in the derri?re? Definitely. Would I do it differently if I had it to do over again? Definitely. But the passion, determination, idealism, and depth of concern I had about advocating for doing the right thing were simply building blocks that were in their formative stages. Years later, it all came together when I rebranded our search firm and human capital intelligence practice “The Good Search,” the first search practice committed to serving employers-of-choice.
4. Blink. Trust your instinct: use it to guide your innovation. Trust your gut. The older I get, the more I realize that if something feels wrong, it probably is. Moreover, we may be hard-wired for intuition, for profound knowledge and intelligence on a subconscious level. You still need to be educated, and to advance your training through conventional means. Often the thing that makes the difference between success and failure or between success and blow-the-roof-off super-stardom is trusting your inner wisdom.
5. Spark a revolution: become more evolved. If you haven’t failed lately, then you may have gotten too content operating in your safe zone. If you find yourself blaming others, circumstance, or other outside factors, you’re wasting energy and valuable time. Instead, capture the lesson contained in every challenge you encounter. Not to go all New Age on you, but increasingly business people are turning to meditation as a way to become more present and aware as they engage in business. Being fully present and devoid of distraction makes you more successful. You don’t have to do yoga to get there. Other forms of exercise can put you into a meditative state, and biofeedback devices can as well.

Honor one’s past and use every lesson contained therein as recruiters. The lessons might come from childhood as an extension on the thesis, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. (Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people.) The lessons can come from relationships with significant others or from raising children. They can come from failure and loss as much as they come from success and acquisition.

The secret to career spotting is developing symphonic awareness by noticing emerging and repeating patterns, the themes and counter-themes, the harmony as well as the dissonance. In the end, it empowers each of us to serve as conductor of one’s vocation and avocation.

There is no shortage of job applicants these days. Rather, what we have a shortage of is qualified applicants. And whenever there’s a severe shortage, posting a job often makes it worse, not better. After all, when you post you waste precious time sifting through candidates who leave you wondering why they’ve bothered to apply as they have so little in common with the job requirements.

When you base your entire recruiting strategy on job postings to attract active candidates, you are giving up control. And that is a frightening concept. You’re left hoping and wishing, if not praying, that a contender will somehow surf by your posting and be seized by the impulse to apply for your job over every other opportunity out there. It’s wishful thinking he will send his resume off into the great unknown with no guarantee any human being will ever see it or respond.

Candidate spotting is all about control. It involves identifying, profiling, and filtering passive candidates to come up with a hotlist of the most viable prospects. Instead of targeting every potential candidate at every target company, you’re going to target the passives most likely to convert to interested, qualified candidates.

To recruit passive candidates, it no longer is enough to simply ask, “who is working in similar roles at our competitors?” and then attempt to recruit those people. Because, my friends, you will waste an inordinate amount of time recruiting people who are wrong or who simply won’t respond to your outreach.

The problem with targeting everyone is that you are targeting everyone. There simply isn’t enough of you to go around. It makes no sense for you to call and email everyone, often multiple times, to transform a mountain of names into viable candidates. Who has that kind of time?

This is where most passive candidate efforts fail. Candidate spotting puts you in control and makes the recruiting of passives far more manageable because you turn that mountain of passive prospects into a molehill. You replace the shotgun approach with one more resembling a sniper.

Candidate spotting is about surveying the landscape and spotting candidates who will be more likely to be responsive and more likely to be just what you are seeking. So you start with the same list of target companies as you would with any typical sourcing project, but now you’re going to filter that list down to a select few.

I want you to start thinking like an investor picking stocks using stock filters, only you are an investor of a different kind. You are investing your time as well as your company’s money and resources to find the people your company needs to win in the marketplace.

So you take that same group of target companies out of which you plan to recruit (usually your competitors), and you filter that list down to a tight target company hotlist.

The number and kinds of filters you employ are limited only by your imagination. That’s where the real art of candidate spotting really comes in.

• Filter on duress. Companies that are under duress make ideal targets. Look for poor earnings reports, depressed stock prices, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, and rumors of layoffs. We call these opportunities “swoop-ins.” People working at companies under duress are far more likely to return your recruiting calls. So set up news alerts to track all target companies. The moment a target company experiences uncertainty, target their people. If you respond more quickly than recruiters at other companies, you’ll have first mover advantage.
• Filter on annual reviews. People often decide to leave after annual reviews. So set up alerts to follow up with candidates as those reviews are being completed. If you don’t know, they often occur at the fiscal-year end, a fact you can easily look up on information services such as Hoovers.
• Filter on cultural fit. Find out where most of your company’s hires have come from and target those companies.
• Filter on location. Target companies whose offices are closest to yours.

Candidate spotting also leverages candidate profiling. Names and titles are no longer enough when so much information can be had through the Internet. Taking a moment to check for available biographical information can help you prioritize hot candidates and eliminate candidates who fall short of your standards.

• Filter out recent hires. Generally, unless a candidate has a compelling reason to leave, job-hoppers are frowned upon. So eliminate candidates who have been on the job less than two years. We mark those in our system “on the bench.”
• Filter out odd career trajectories. Prioritize candidates whose career trajectories make sense, preferably a steady path upwards with no gaps.
• Filter out companies with high retention. Every industry has them. These are companies that are generally the market leader and who treat their employees very, very well. Unless your company is prepared to spend what it will take to lure those candidates away, don’t waste your time.
• Filter out anyone who lacks must-have requirements. It may seem obvious, but when you are working off a list of names and titles, it is impossible to tell who has requisite education or experience. That is why we profile candidates, aggregating available biographical information whenever possible. The moment or two it takes to quickly Google for additional information or to check LinkedIn can save you wasted effort recruiting the wrong people.
• Filter in award-winners. Prioritize individuals who have achieved recognition in their respective fields. This also includes inventors of patents and other forms of recognition.
• Filter in top school alumni. Prioritize individuals who have attended the best schools and with an above-average GPA. Like award-winners, attending a top school makes them stand out and more likely to get an offer over the competition.

Candidate spotting is an effective way to proactively target and recruit by finding the shortest path to the best candidates. The time to try it is when you’re not finding the candidates you need using other methods.

If you run the filters as suggested, you can narrow your target candidate list down to a hot list of the 20 or 30 most viable prospects. The technique can be applied to executive search as well as recruiting at the non-executive level.

Use candidate spotting to address a single opening or a group of openings by building out research on pools of talent and then filtering on profiles according to circumstance and your own recruitment needs.

Candidate spotting can be outsourced or done by internal search teams. However, if it’s the latter, consult with a human capital intelligence expert to uncover the subtle patterns and markers that separate the wheat from the chaff, the rock stars from the roadies, and the Prince Charmings from the toadies.

In the end, you shouldn’t have to kiss every frog to find Prince Charming. You shouldn’t have to turn over ever stone. The next time you feel as if you are, it is time to try candidate spotting.

1. Type the web address into your Internet browser: www.fec.gov.
2. Click on the “Campaign Finance Reports and Data” link on the left-hand column.
3. Click on “Search Campaign Finance Data.”
4. Click on “Candidate PAC and Party Summaries.”
5. Type “Microsoft” into the name field.
6. Click on MICROSOFT CORPORATION POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE.
7. Click on “Individual Contributions.” Voila! The search engine pulls up 611 individual contributions for just the 2000/2001 election cycle.
8. Drill down by entering the first name listed, “Abrash, Michael”, into the Google search engine. You quickly learn Michael was one of the developers of “Quake” ó a god in the computer game world. He was hired by Microsoft to work on Xbox, Microsoft’s answer to the Atari video game console.
9. Skip-trace his name in the Merlin Flat Rate database (see my previous article on skip-tracing). Bingo. You pull up Michael’s unlisted phone number and address in Plano, Texas.

Michael Abrash is an example of someone who is easy to background once you have a name. But you wouldn’t necessarily come across him without it. Often, if you don’t have the name or precise title of an executive or senior technologist, you can’t find them in Google because you pull up too many records. Try typing in “Microsoft” and “SDE Lead” (Michael’s title) in Google, and watch your head explode. But the really neat thing about the FEC database is it not only gives you the names of employees, it also gives you the titles as well. When starting a search, ask yourself what government agency has dealings with that business or with individuals working there, then check to see if the data exists online. The FEC is a great place to start. The nice thing about checking government records is that so many of them exist. Just think about the points of contact any individual has with government: voter registration, driver’s licenses, divorce court, the IRS. At each of those points of contact exists a record ó the famed bureaucratic red tape about which everyone complains. Only this time, don’t complain! The information can be used to a recruiter’s advantage.

1. Obtain the executive’s middle initial. Whenever the executive’s name is somewhat common, I start my detective work by quickly locating a middle initial of the executive I am seeking. Why? Often a skip-trace search will pull up hundreds of John Smiths in a state, but if you know you’re looking for John Q. Smith, you’ve just winnowed that list down to a handful of possibilities. Sometimes you can obtain a candidate’s middle initial by searching the Internet for corporate biographies or press releases. Sometimes you can find it in speaker biographies at conferences. SEC filings are also a good resource to check. Better yet, check out transcripts of testimony in court or before congress ó often the most fertile sources of a middle initial, as it is standard protocol to cite a person’s full legal name in legal situation (the recent Microsoft antitrust lawsuit has been quite fruitful for my technology recruitment practice in that regard).
2. Determine the last known state the person lived in. Usually it’s the same state as the person’s last known employer.
3. Log on to your skip-tracing database and try running name-state searches. Make sure you try various permutations of the person’s first name (Joe, Joseph, Joey, etc.). Start with the version that the person goes by most often. Try searching with and without the middle initial (on Merlin, you don’t enter a period after the initial).
4. When you pull up several people with the same name and state, use Mapquest to pinpoint the right executive. Common sense tells you if that person used to work for Company X in Texas, he had to live in the same city or at least in a suburban town within commuting distance of the corporate office. So enter the former company office address in the Mapquest driving directions interface and then, one by one, enter the addresses of the five “John Q. Smith” listings you pulled up in Texas. Mapquest will compute how long the commute is for each of the five. If for some reason there are a couple of people within commuting distance, check the date of birth and do the math. If one of the John Qs is 92, chances are he’s retired and this isn’t your man. Or if the candidate you seek is a senior-level executive, but the database has a John Q listed who is just 25, again, eliminate him.
5. Click through to find the current address. When you’ve narrowed the list down to the right executive, click on the old address and it will pull up every former address belonging to that person, including the current address. Bingo. You’ve just discovered where the executive is now living. If you’re still winnowing, the address list is a chronology of where the person has lived. So if you know your executive worked in New York before moving to Texas to join his former employer (and before becoming MIA), then you know your John Q has to show a New York address.
6. Look up the right area code. Often Merlin lists a current phone number lacking the area code. Merlin provides an area code lookup in its interface. I prefer to use Langenberg.com for this.
7. Call the executive. If the number is out of order, don’t despair. Call directory assistance and ask for a listing for the executive now that you’ve located his or her new address. Nine times out of ten, you’ll get the listing that way.
8. If you can’t come up with the right phone number, send a letter to that address (or a business gift if he or she is a star candidate).
9. If time is of the essence, Merlin can pull up the listings of neighbors. Simply contact them and ask if they have the executive’s home number or if they’re willing to carry a message to the executive. Tell them it is for a time-sensitive job opportunity.
10. Contact their relatives. Merlin also pulls up the names of people who’ve lived in the same household ó spouses and grown children, for example. If you’re still hitting the wall, try contacting them to find the executive.

If you give up trying to recruit a valuable executive when they turn up MIA, you’re missing a chance to close the search. I once tracked down a key AT&T executive who had just left the company and was contemplating various opportunities that were on his plate. His home number was unlisted. But by using a skip-trace database, we were able to pull his home number and recruit him as a marquis-name chief marketing officer for a best-of-breed startup here in New York. Investigative recruitment certainly has its rewards.