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The Net scare
The Web will survive this week's spate of site attacks. Can it get past the hysteria?
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[02/10/00]

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[02/10/00]

Criminal code?
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[02/09/00]

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[02/08/00]

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As the founder of Taylor Winfield, Albertini has spent 14 years placing executives in technology firms; in the past year alone, her company placed 40 executives at high-tech powerhouses such as EarthWeb, Ameritech and Monterey Systems. For her efforts, she receives the standard executive recruiter compensation -- a third of the annual salary and bonus of the new employee (if a highfalutin CEO can pull in a million-dollar salary, she pockets $300,000).

And, following the latest recruiting industry trend, she works exclusively with companies that also give her equity; she considers her recruiting firm a long-term "strategic partner" for venture-capital-backed pre-IPO companies. As Albertini puts it, "I have limited time and I only want to work with people I believe enough to invest in."

She talks about her methodology as her "intellectual property" and refers to her database of nearly 25,000 executives living all over the world -- 25,000 people with whom she says she has developed relationships and maintains regular contact. Albertini often works with venture capitalists who are building executive teams for new start-ups in their portfolios -- for each new search that she starts, she'll dig through her contact file and call 200 to 300 people, meeting a smaller number and eventually narrowing it down to around 10 candidates that she'll present to her clients.

"You need intuition: What is someone saying, and what do they really mean?" she says, explaining that her firm (composed primarily of women) prides itself on analysis and matching of personality types and needs. It's a skill, she says, that few companies boast on their own. "When you have to look at yourself, you have a blind side. The hiring process really needs objective perspective, a third party."

But the business has become more difficult, she says. Because of increasing demand, the number of potential candidates that she has to screen for each job has doubled. At the same time, the amount of time that clients allot for finding the appropriate person has halved -- the typical search takes three months minimum, but clients often want a polished exec in that leather chair within 30 days. The recruiters' work has as a result become more challenging -- most have increased their fees and now many, like Albertini, demand equity stakes in their clients' companies.

This has sparked a kind of gold rush within the recruiting industry itself, as new recruiting firms pop up every week to deal with the high-tech industry's insatiable demand for new start-ups and talent. Zach Simon, a director at the prestigious recruiting firm Christian & Timbers estimates that there are around 500 to 1,000 CEO searches being conducted at any one time in the Internet space; the number of experienced candidates is much smaller than the number of available positions. Qualified candidates are probably getting between five and 10 potential job calls a week, he says.

Add to this the Internet time crunch -- where companies are increasingly conceived, funded, built, launched and going public within a matter of months -- and you can understand why recruiters have become so critical. Who has time to hire anyone, let alone find and woo the very best?

According to executive recruiting firm Ray & Berendtson, there are more than 20,000 executive recruiting firms in the United States, generating more than $3 billion in revenues -- and that's just the companies on the lookout for the top brass. Even more firms are popping up to address other critical, but lesser-titled, employees -- programmers, engineers, technical writers and such -- and big Silicon Valley companies like Oracle and Cisco keep recruiters on staff.

Many firms, such as Taylor Winfield and Christian & Timbers, work solely on "retained searches," an exclusive relationship where a set fee is paid upfront; but others do "contingency searches," where multiple firms offer candidates to the client but are paid only if they provide the hire. This can result in a kind of industrywide scramble -- Hedlund and Marioni both talk about the "shysters" who have called them several times a week, desperate to get their warm bodies into a job. As Hedlund describes it, "Many times when I dealt with recruiters it was just, 'Are you a body and do you know Perl?'"

Next page | Start-up takes the plunge