Boston Globe, September 24, 2000, K1 - ©2000 by Globe Newspaper Company- A year into her job as director of human resources, it became quite apparent to Gail Coppola that recruiting was taking up big chunks of her time. It felt like a full-time job unto itself.
So Coppola went to her CEO and carefully delivered an argument for why ISM Inc. should bring on a recruiter. The CEO agreed and Coppola quickly found a short-term recruiter through a senior manager at the firm. But when the time came to hire a permanent recruiter, she did something that may sound a little unusual: Coppola picked up the phone and called a recruiter to recruit her a recruiter.
"It didn't strike me as odd at all," she said. "It was logical."
Faced with a labor shortage at all levels from the factory floor to the corner office, companies are leaning heavily on staffing experts to help them woo and win the very best and brightest workers. Recruitment professionals, in turn, have had to do some headhunting of their own to keep pace with client demand.
Call it recruiting the recruiter. It's a phenomenon that's sending ripples through the field of executive recruitment.
Coppola found a new recruiter for ISM, an advertising and marketing agency on Boston's Newbury Street, through Winter, Wyman, a local executive search company that specializes in a variety of job candidates. But in the last few years, experts say that a handful of recruiting firms have popped up with their sole focus being the recruitment of recruiters.
The first and perhaps most well known is Jones-Parker/Starr. Based in Chapel Hill, N.C., the firm was founded in 1996 by Janet Jones-Parker. She has a long history of starting specialized firms. In 1973, Jones-Parker opened a firm that recruited women and minorities for senior positions at Fortune 500 companies. She eventually became the president of the Association of Executive Search Consultants.
Jones-Parker did not intend for the firm to search only for recruiters. But with her deep roots in the industry, and with the economy beginning to churn at record paces, major recruiting firms started calling on her to help them handle the demand.
"When you're talking about the war for talent, the key to whether or not a company can even get someone to consider coming to work for their company is the recruiter," Jones-Parker said. "A lot of these people have many, many different options being presented. It's the ability of the recruiter to find that right person and tell them why their client is the right place for them to work.
"It's the intuitive art of talking to someone and looking for that rupture, that opportunity. It's a very difficult thing to do," she said. And there is a growing scarcity of people who can accomplish it.
Wayne Cooper, the president of New Hampshire-based Kennedy Information, the leading publisher of executive recruitment information for the industry, said the search business is growing faster than the economy. Last year, in terms of revenue, the market was up 20 percent. There are more than 5,700 firms and 20,000 recruiters in North America, up about 8 to 10 percent from last year, according to Kennedy's research. It's still not enough to handle the demand.
Cooper said the jump in the recruiting market-it has doubled in the last 10 years-doesn't just stem from firms needing staff to do an increasing amount of work.
"There has been lots of turmoil from changes in technology and how things are done," he said. "Recruiters are trying to help companies build teams with the right skills, not only to support growth but for transition purposes as well."
Management Recruiters of Boston, a division of MRI, the largest recruiting firm in the world, has six offices in New England with more than 100 recruiters. Jack Mohan, the president of the division, said he is desperately trying to add to his staff. He said the dilemma has been ongoing for four years and has prompted quarterly meetings within the company to come up with solutions.
"It's a case of the cobbler not having enough time to fix his own kid's shoes," Mohan said.
Many of the new recruiters to the firm come via internal referrals from employees who try to tap friends and relatives for what Mohan calls a terrific career choice. "But our need is so large that it exceeds that source," he said. "We're hampered by a lack of people."
Cooper said it wasn't so long ago that the typical career path of a recruiter involved working in an industry for a long time before moving into a recruiting firm where they could use their connections to sniff out job candidates. Now recruiting firms are searching out people on the Net or recruiting top business school graduates and then training them on the job.
Companies have a simple strategy for trying to woo people toward a career in recruitment: They show them the money.
With firms typically billing clients one-third of the first-year compensation of placed candidates, the average executive in a search firm made $304,000 last year, and many take home well over a million dollars, according to Kennedy Information research. Junior search consultants averaged a $141,000 salary.
Recruiters are quick to point out that sticking to their own models of how they find candidates for clients - often a diligent hunt for the right fit - is vital to how they settle on new talent for their own ranks.
Diane Coletti, the president of Prestonwood Associates, a small recruiting firm in Medfield that handles senior level executive searches for major national and international companies, said her 12-person company has plans to grow - but not haphazardly.
"We want thoughtful, smart growth," she said. "We want to manage our growth such that we can maintain our high level of service. We don't want to compromise our level of service, the way we deal with clients."
"We're not going to grow just so that we can take on more clients. We're very choosy about who we commit to," she said.
Selectivity is especially imperative for firms that have in-house search executives. The in-house model is growing in popularity as the preferred method of recruiting, according to a survey by Jones-Parker, because of its reduced costs, faster hiring results, and ability to breed greater familiarity with a company's culture.
David Kimmelman, the vice president of human resources for Riverton Corp., a Burlington, Vt. B2B consulting firm, has been looking for two recruiters for the last six to eight weeks. He's interviewed five people but said that no one has showed him that they have the right stuff.
He's hoping to conclude his search by the end of November.
"I happen to think there's tons of people out there, but whether or not they're right for our company is another matter," he said. "Is there a real shortage of people or is there a shortage of people who are capable of working in a collaborative environment like Riverton? It's a matter of finding that right fit."
After work, Kimmelman frequently gets together with colleagues who play similar roles at different companies. "A lot of us are doing the same thing," he said. "We're banging our heads on the wall."
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