CFOs & Recruiters, Redux
My friend Cindy Kraft wrote a blog yesterday called “Recruiter Relationships“. The topic is near and dear to me, so I had to comment as I couldn’t help myself. You can read my comments on Cindy’s blog and add to it if you’d like.
This paragraph of Cindy’s got my attention:
What a waste of time for all concerned when recruiters contact CFOs for opportunities that are obviously not a good fit. Which begs the question, who is responsible for ensuring that recruiters can make an assessment based on a crystal clear value proposition and fit for culture?
So who is responsible?
Companies hire recruiters. Recruiters are working a search for a CFO using what they believe is the best approach to help the company hire. If the wrong approach is used for hiring a CFO, it is the company that hires the recruiter that bears the responsibility. If they chose the wrong type of firm for their CFO Search, then it shows that the company may be more interested in factors other than the right CFO for their needs.
Who do you think is responsible?
Comments
Company:
The person responsible for recruiting CFOs had better be a smart CEO/Board member, or a recruiter who used to be a CFO or had CFOs reporting to them. I hate to say this, but having worked with many a CFO recruiter and in helping CEOs I know hire CFOs (including for publicly traded companies), most executive recruiters don't know jack about what a CFO does beyond the buzzwords.
I'll probably get flack for saying this, and for the record, I do know some great CFO recruiters (who have been CFOs or other senior execs in past lives), but most other executive recruiters don't know anything other than the buzzwords when it comes to recruiting. Having come in after a recruiter was tried in a few CFO hiring processes (and having hired many recruiters myself), I see "cast-offs" (rejected resumes) that look like and turn out to be very strong candidates, and I see people in the process who have no business being there.
It's not the recruiter's fault, of course - it's our fault. Every time we hire a recruiter who doesn't have requisite background, we end up doing most of the work (resume vetting, phone screening and interviewing) and they end up just throwing names over the transom. It's crazy that you would pay someone 20%-30%+ of an exec's first year base salary to do this work for you/your company and yet they deliver so little value. And yet we (companies and hiring managers) make this mistake again and again.
Remember, folks, anyone can have a rolodex. And anyone can say they have known candidates X, Y, and Z for decades. But none of that means much in a recruiting process. If you want to know that someone has great experience managing secondary offerings, there is a tremendous gulf between recognizing the words, which is what a typical recruiter would do, and knowing what it means to do fundraising as a CFO. The buzzword recruiter would ask "so, have you done any secondary offerings?", and would give you a pile of resumes that used those words. The great recruiter not only knows what a secondary offering is, but also what it's not, what it's similar to, who they would have worked with, and, critically, they would know how to extract whether the person simply used those words on their resume or whether they really knew what they were doing. The difference is vast, as are the results.