In hot pursuit of the best 'unavailable' executives

By Deborah Austin

BusinessRockford.com

Tom Furst is president and one of the founders of Rockford-based Furst Search Group, an executive search and recruiting firm in business since 1971.

Its core business is retained search for manufacturing companies; 91 percent of its 2,000-plus searches have been in the manufacturing sector. Furst Search covers a wide national area, but it concentrates on recruiting for companies in the Great Lakes region because of geographics. Furst Search teams make in-person visits to the recruiting companies to soak up all they can about their corporate culture and needs.

Business Rockford asked Furst to share his insights about executive recruiting in a changing economy and strategies for growing such a business over the decades.

How is today’s economy affecting your business?
Everybody is saying, “I’ll bet your business is terrible.” Actually we’re very busy. So far, we haven’t seen any downturn because of the economy. We’re really busier than we’ve ever been. We had a very good year last year. It really started to pick up in the last quarter of last year, and that’s the time it usually goes down.

What do you think is contributing to that?
Companies are realizing that to financially compete, to get pricing down, they need to improve their operations internally. It’s going on across the board. Financial management, operations management and CEO’s are all saying, “I’ve just got to get better people.”

It’s an emphasis: For survival you’ve got to have cash flow. Companies are not only mindful of competition, but of cash flow these days. We have done a lot of chief financial officer searches; that category was No. 1 all last year.

Yesterday we visited a Wisconsin manufacturer who is recruiting for a vice president of operations, and the CFO gave us the tour. He related everything to the money side: “We have to get this and that because it’s related directly to cash flow.”

Also, there’s a lot of retirement going on. With the retirements, there’s a huge shortage (of talent) and a pressure in the market to find the right people.

And many companies have downsized, including their human resources department — and HR is so busy, they need help. They need to outsource (the recruitment) to someone who can focus on it. It’s very time-consuming.

Can you give me some idea of the volume of business you do?
We probably do 60 searches a year, and the average length of a search is 55 days. If a company has a really big need, an emergency, we can do it in 30 days, but we put more people on it.

We’ve done two CEO (recruitments) this year, and three presidents, and then top senior management at the executive level — directors, plant managers, vice presidents — those types of positions.

We also do board of director services. Getting members of boards of directors has been tough for organizations. We do eight to 10 board of director services a year.

So how do you find job candidates?
Our product, defined by me, is the “unavailable candidate.” We are going to recruit someone who’s doing a great job for someone else but who would pursue the opportunity if given the opportunity.

For example, there’s Bob O’Brien. We recruited him as executive director of Chicago Rockford International Airport. When we called him for the first time, he said, “No, I’m not interested, I’m happy,” and he was doing a great job in Springfield.

More than people looking for work, we’re looking for someone who’s working for someone else. We make 300 to 500 phone calls: “Whom do you know that would be good for this business?” We would be calling people in the industry. For example, with Bob O’Brien, we would be calling members of airport boards, executives with airlines, asking them who’s running a great airport. Then, of course, we would go after the potential candidate.

How has your business changed over the 37 years?
The growth really has been in moving from what we call a contingency employment service, to an executive search firm. We used to place people, but now we primarily recruit people for positions that are open at a company. We have moved up from doing almost anything to concentrating on manufacturing management people.

We made that switch in the mid- to late ’80s. That’s when we started to move more and more to executive recruiting because we started to have companies saying, “We really need a specific effort on this job.”
What other strategies have you learned about succeeding in this field?
You need to take the time to understand the culture of the management team, where they’re trying to go and how they’re trying to get there. That will relate directly to the personality of the division. You’ve got to be willing to take the time to do that.
Then when you sit with the candidate, you really know where it’s all going to fit. Because if it doesn’t fit, it won’t work. We don’t fail very often because if you do, they don’t ask you back. About 70 percent of our business is repeat clients.
Also, we always work in teams because it takes lots of phone calls. You’ve got to network like crazy. ... The same team interviews the company and the candidate. That’s very, very important.
We make the reservations, get the candidates in, guide the hiring company. In fact we’re very good at recruiting to Rockford. You’ve got to orchestrate, find out what (the candidates) are interested in, do their kids play soccer, what kinds of schools do they want. We set up appointments at the schools and with real estate agents, make sure there’s something welcoming in the hotel room, like a fruit basket or something for the kids. ... Once they get hired, we find them temporary housing.
You mentioned before this interview that you’ve modeled much of your approach on insights from Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great.” Can you explain a little more about that?
We’ve been using that approach for six or seven years. It’s basically the “who” and then the “what.” The whole emphasis of the book is that you’d expect “good to great” leaders to begin by setting new vision and strategy, but instead they’ve found that you’ve got to get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus, and then the bus will go wherever you want. People are not your most important asset; the right people are your most important asset.
BusinessRockford.com Editor Deborah Austin may be reached at 815-987-1295 or daustin@rrstar.com.