Recruiting at the C-Level presents some unique challenges, perhaps the most prominent being the long-standing inequality of the number of women hired at board level. The sudden move to remote recruiting has also significantly disrupted executive search’s traditional high touch candidate experience.
My guest this week is Venesa Klein, a partner at international search firm Calibre One. Venessa worked as an in house recruiter earlier in her career and has some valuable knowledge and insights to share on the current challenges in executive recruiting and the drive for more equality in the C-Suite.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Building an effective in house executive recruiting team
▪ How high touch candidate experience has adapted to remote
▪ Is female representation in the C-Suite improving and what are the key issues
▪ Why internal career pathing is critical to equity at the top
▪ Being inclusive
▪ How has 2020 changed the market
▪ The value of the CHRO
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI delivers the talent Intelligence platform, the most effective way for companies to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into into a competitive advantage.
Matt Alder [00:00:47]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 325 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Recruiting at the C level presents some unique challenges, perhaps the most prominent being the long standing inequality of the number of women hired at board level. The sudden move to remote recruiting has also significantly disrupted Executive Search’s traditional high touch candidate experience. My guest this week is Venesa Klein, a partner at international search firm calibre 1. Venesa worked as an in house recruiter earlier in her career and has some valuable knowledge and insights to share on the current challenges in executive recruiting and the drive for more equality in the C suite. Hi Venesa and welcome to the podcast.
Venesa Klein [00:01:41]:
Hi Matt, great to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:43]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Venesa Klein [00:01:49]:
Sure. My name is Venesa Klein. I’m a partner at an executive search firm called Calibre One. We are a smaller but a large on the boutique side of Executive Search and we have offices in London and throughout the United States and I focus on consumer technology companies and helping them build out their leadership teams.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
Tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you got to do what you do now.
Venesa Klein [00:02:19]:
Well, I think very rarely have I met a recruiter who set out to be a recruiter. It seems like the sort of thing that people often fall into, which is also true for me. I actually started out in major gifts donations, so fundraising for a large national nonprofit and fell into Executive Search with a small firm in the Bay Area. And from there my career took off and I’ve worked in house with internal executive search functions and then on the retained search side where I’ve spent the bulk of my career. And I’m now I can say that I started out initially focusing on nonprofit clients and that lasted for about six months before I got pulled into all sorts of different projects, initially ranging from recruiting VP of engineering candidates to enterprise technology companies and then focused on go to market roles with enterprise companies and then transitioning to consumer and really recruiting the gamut, initially from CFOs to engineers to marketers and then found myself Kind of settled into chief human resources officer searches, general managers, CEOs and CMOs.
Matt Alder [00:03:47]:
Executive search is something that we’ve, we’ve covered a few times actually in the last few months on the show. And an increasing number of employers are sort of building their own capability when it comes to executive search in house. What would your advice be to employers who are doing that?
Venesa Klein [00:04:07]:
I think there are a few companies, a few good examples of companies that have done that really well, one being Apple, another being Nike and Cisco have all done a great, great job at building internal executive search functions. And what they have all in common is they recruited partners like myself from search firms to lead that effort and then build out teams that are a mix of both associates from retained search firms and internal recruiters who’ve spent their career working with companies on the inside. And I think that mix is really important because you find that executive search partners are used to working with clients and internally that would be various stakeholders, hiring managers, and helping them flesh out what it is that they really need and educating them on how to go about finding that person and the most successful way of recruiting them and getting them interested and what the interview strategy should look like. And I think that skill is essential. Then you combine that with the research chops that you find in associates or research analysts at external firms and you combine that skill set with the people that have grown up on the enterprise side and been spent their career within a company. And I think that’s pretty, I think that’s pretty much the magic, the magic mix. I think it’s a mistake to rely only on internal recruiters because they don’t tend to have the breadth of experience getting different personalities, different hiring managers on the same page. And external partners are often persuasive and able to help guide the search in the direction that it needs to go. In other words, managing the client well.
Matt Alder [00:06:01]:
So executive recruitment is obviously very high touch when it comes to candidate experience. How has the pandemic changed the way you work this year? How are you able to do what you do under the restrictions that we’ve had?
Venesa Klein [00:06:17]:
Well, Matt, that’s a great question. I think it’s constantly evolving and the biggest challenge has been I’ve recruited a number of C level executive that I’ve only met via Zoom and that the client has only met via Zoom. And that’s a completely new thing to ever happen. You know, you can never previously imagine bringing on a chief revenue officer and having never met that person in, you know, face to face or shared a meal. And when I’m working. For instance, I have a CEO search that we’re about to extend an offer on right now. And that’s CEO candidate has never sat down with the founder or the executive team outside of Zoom. And it presents the challenge of how do you really get to know someone when it isn’t? You can’t create that informal get to know you context that we so often do, which is we’ll advise clients, you know, set up a meal, bring your partner and the candidate’s partner and have dinner together and really get to know each other in a more personal way. And we haven’t been able to do that. So it’s, it’s resulted in, in a new way of trying to establish those kinds of relationships. And we’ve done that by sending catered kind of pre boxed meals or wine pairings with charcuterie plates and setup Zooms and having people get together that way and trying to create that atmosphere that’s conducive to real authentic conversation that’s outside of an interview context. So I think that has been the real challenge for me personally. I normally will fly out to wherever the candidate is and meet them where I haven’t been able to do that. So I’m only able to meet them via Zoom. And how that’s changed. My process is instead of having my check ins with candidates on a phone call, it’s Zoom instead. So at least we get to see each other regularly, which builds a sense of familiarity.
Matt Alder [00:08:21]:
One of the other big issues that we’ve been talking about for a number of years is the inequality of female representation in the C Suite. Is that something that you’re seeing improving and what are the key issues around that at the moment?
Venesa Klein [00:08:37]:
Well, that’s a big hot button issue, Matt. And I would say absolutely. Almost every search that we’re working on across the firm, the mandate is to present women executives as part of that slate of candidates, without a doubt. And we have clients that have even said, you know, we, we want to hire a woman, we only want to see women candidates. So the emphasis I think has certainly improved. And we’ve seen across the, across companies that board members being recruited are women. That it’s, that’s huge right now, adding women to boards, not just the public companies, but of earlier stage companies and in the VC community, VC backed tech companies are all doing the same. But I think it’s a bigger issue, which is that oftentimes I’m mandated to, let’s say we’re hiring a CFO and the client will say I only want to see CFO candidates that are women, but they also only want to see candidates whom are sitting CFOs. So in other words, we’re being asked to recruit women who are already at the top of their career and recruit them into a new role. And frankly, I think, I don’t think that’s really improving the situation for women. I think what improves the situation for women is companies thoughtfully creating strategic recruiting plans from their most junior level roles where they’re recruiting women and creating a path internally for promotion. And I haven’t seen, or that hasn’t been what I’ve been hearing from HR leaders and CEOs that it’s very much let’s recruit a woman who’s currently a C level executive and bring her into our organization, which is great, but you’re not making more room at the top for women unless you’re building a pipeline of women candidates. And that means programs from recruiting women who have recently graduated from university and bringing them into your organization and putting them on a development track. That’s where I think the biggest need is. And that way you’re able to promote from within and grow women into these roles that you’re looking to fill.
Matt Alder [00:11:01]:
And a related question to that, what can companies do to be more inclusive?
Venesa Klein [00:11:08]:
Well, one of the, one of the challenges that I’ve seen pretty frequently is that a company will want to recruit a woman into their leadership team. And it may be that this is going to be the first woman on that leadership team. And one of the biggest challenges for, for a woman accepting a role is she wants to know that the effort she made to build the credibility that she has in her current role, that she will have that same level of credibility in her new role. And that it isn’t just that company B needs to have a woman on the leadership team, but that they really want that perspective, that they want that diversity of thought also. And so really thinking through how do we change the way we communicate with each other as an, as an all male team to make sure that we’re creating an environment where a woman is going to be comfortable making her contribution, that the communication styles may be very different and giving that some serious thought in terms of how do we make sure that she feels she can make an impact, how are we going to support her cross functionally? I think oftentimes companies aren’t thinking through that. They’re just thinking, I need to bring a woman onto my leadership team and that’s what we’re going to focus on. But not a Lot of thought into afterwards. Well, what does that mean to the dynamic of the team that historically had been all male? We have established communication styles and rhythms and ways that we do things. How do we inform her of what those things are? How do we operate from a cultural perspective and making sure that she has a soft landing, so to speak, that she gets in and she’s integrated into the company.
Matt Alder [00:13:00]:
We talked about how the pandemic had changed some of the way the type of recruiting that you do functions. But how’s it actually changed recruiting overall in terms of the types of roles.
Matt Alder [00:13:12]:
That people are recruiting for, for how.
Matt Alder [00:13:14]:
Much recruiting is being done? And what do you think might happen over the next 12 to 24 months?
Venesa Klein [00:13:22]:
Well, it’s. It’s hard to predict. But what I can say is as a firm, we were prepared for a kind of big slowdown. You know, we thought that positions would, would not be coming in, that searches would be put on hold or canceled, and that did not happen. In fact, we have continued to. I mean, if anything, maybe it’s 10% less projects than the previous year. But there is no sign that things are slowing down on our end. I can’t, I have really no prediction of what that’s going to look like. It seems like things change every day in terms of lockdowns and restrictions and businesses that are struggling. So that’s hard to say. But what I can say is that there seems to be an uptick in CFO searches. The finance function especially seems to be companies are either up leveling their current teams on the finance side or if companies had not had a cfo, they want one now. And marketing. And I think that we, we can safely say that anytime there is a down market that it is cheaper to launch marketing campaigns. And so now is the time for companies to really invest in marketing. And so we’re seeing additional marketing searches. So I think it depends on the function. And I can’t say what’s happening at the more junior levels because I only recruit at the VP and C level, but that those were continuing to be very busy. So there’s been no indication that that’s going to slow down.
Matt Alder [00:15:15]:
Generally speaking.
Matt Alder [00:15:16]:
Have you seen more companies hiring chros in the last couple of years?
Venesa Klein [00:15:22]:
In general, yes. And I think that started a few years ago. There was an increased emphasis on HR leadership and I think for a number of reasons. One similar to how marketing became much more of a valued function when technology emerged that could measure the success of your marketing function. There are now various technologies and tools that can measure the success of your people, function of your HR function. And so bringing a more quantitative approach has enabled marketer, sorry, chros and HR leaders to be more valued because boards, CEOs, the investors can see the value that they bring. So that’s one reason. And then the other reason is there was, you know, obviously quite a number of different scandals at various companies of various sizes around either behaving inappropriately, kind of all the softer sides of hr, where they realized that building the right culture and creating the culture throughout the organization from the top down is imperative. And so HR leaders became more valuable from that regard also. So there has been an upward trajectory on increasing HR searches. I thought that that would continue to increase during this time of COVID and at the beginning, for the first six months, there was, there was an uptick in HR searches. It seems, at least from my perspective, to leveled out a bit and kind of gone back to its, its normal slope where, where it’s still on a, on an incline. But it hasn’t had the uptick that it did five, six months ago.
Matt Alder [00:17:23]:
Venesa, thank you very much for talking to me.
Venesa Klein [00:17:25]:
It was a pleasure, Matt, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:17:28]:
My thanks to Venesa Klein. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
