10 ways to close hard searches in 90 days

We just finished our first search for a CEO in health care IT.  I can't even believe I won the search, much less closed it in well under 90 days.  Since I'm passionate about this space, this one really, really mattered.  They all matter, but this one was possibly a do or die situation in my ambition to build a killer, dominant practice in this exciting field.

This is a crazy fun space, but like a lot of technology categories, you have the dinosaurs and you have the newcomers, and not a lot in between that would be your sweet spot hunting grounds, which I would define as "companies who grew solidly, delivered great results and exited or developed enough leadership talent that it's worth exploring for CEOs."  You don't want people from the old world dinosaur companies like GE, and the newcomers are usually too under developed for a bunch of experienced leaders to be running around and mobile.  And they're trying to do what your client is trying to do half the time, get religious about their approach, or are flaky enough to jump from one situation to another before it's an appropriate time to do so.  So what do you do?  Classic conundrum in a growth space in technology.

Here's what we did:

1. Map the market.  No, really MAP IT.  No one else in our industry can map markets as fast as we can, because our research arm is LOCAL, not outsourced to India, and they're all Stanford, Cal, come from great schools, MBAs, etc.  A client once told me she was impressed by Heidrick's ability to map the market, so I got ahold of one of their maps.  It was hard not to laugh out loud.  Our maps are vastly more detailed, more thoughtfully developed and rendered, etc. Who are the people who develop this data? People who would have otherwise gone into Financial services in another era, have now figured out that our industry is a better racket than other categories and we successfully recruit and develop these people.  We spend 10% of revenue on research.  Not a single other firm in our industry does that.  And we think it's money well spent.
2. Who are the M&A's that are nine figures and above and who were the top 3 people in those companies?  Who IPO'd? Who made money for investors or outperformed peers and were really clever, hustled, took nothing for granted and above all, grew shareholder value. Track the lineage of the out performers and track the people down who made it happen. They could be anywhere.  In PE firms, living overseas, about to hit the ejection button after getting acquired, etc. You can't fake this work.  It's a grind and these spaces need to be DRILLED hard to get to the "gems" underneath what can, at times, look like massive lumps of coal.
3. Network like crazy.  You can't delegate this to junior people as many search firms do. Killer people want to hear from senior people who are genuinely interested in them.  The project leader and other senior people need to do this work personally.  Talk to everyone you can, as fast as you can, get to the thought leaders out there, the well-known professors on whom the smarter leaders in a given space will lean for advice, get to VC's and investors in the space, find out who they liked, convince them to work with you vs compete with you for this talent, etc.  This seems obvious but way too many people in our industry do this in a half-assed way.
4. Your client cannot sit around in "shop" mode for very long.  They have to be in "buy mode" where, if you have a tight spec, and you deliver really interesting candidates to that spec, they know they have to MOVE FAST.
5. Sequester the time to do it right.  Too many search people just bill everything in sight.  You have to have the capacity to do CEO projects the right way.  If the search person is overloaded, they won't make that extra call to the candidate between various interviews or events, and they might miss something.  Every candidate in a tight spec search is a precious asset and needs to be treated as such.
6. Be prepared for hard conversations, weekend conference calls, late evenings, etc.  If you let your calendar have no gaps or aren't willing to chip in a little "free time" to make it happen, you won't make it happen.
7. Be aggressive in comp. Understand it's a buyers's market, get over it and be ready to invest in people.
8. Don't mess around with silly things like change of control on second trigger.  You've sold the company, Board voted for it, be aggressive here.  And don't get cheap on stuff like relocation. This is where people get angry.  The core offer will be what it is.  But don't shoot yourself in the foot messing around with the "trimmings" of a deal.
9. Keep your interview team and search committee, small, tight, influential and empowered to act.
10. Resolve that any serious candidate will be "resolved" within 2 weeks max.  First interview to final interview.  You don't have a month.  You might not even have two weeks.

Groupon just grabbed a killer engineering executive from one of our clients who really wanted the guy.  A very senior, A player.  GROUPON!  Yes, the same one that is a spectacular flameout.  How?  They moved from first conversation to close in 7 days, went "yard" with the deal, focused like crazy and grabbed the guy. That is how you close people.  You move fast and you be aggressive.  Be focused.  It's really not rocket science ultimately, but far too many people are living in a dreamland that there are lots of candidates running around.  There really are not great candidates running around.  You have to RUN THEM DOWN.