CBA Recruitment 7200 The Quorum Oxford Business Park Oxford OX4 2JZ

Box-shifter to solution sales - IT

The client is one of the best-known brand names in IT.  Stop 50 people in the high street and 49 would recognise their name instantly.  They are major players in enterprise, SoHo and consumer markets alike.  HR is centre stage - when they say 'Our people are our most valuable resource,' they mean it.  People stay there a long time, and top jobs have for years been filled largely from within.

It came as a surprise, therefore, to be asked to find no fewer than four new general managers in one hit.  Didn't he understand the importance of succession planning?, we twitted the Group HR Director.  How could he possibly need to replace four people at such a senior level simultaneously?

He explained that a fundamental shift in marketing philosophy was behind the need for the new people.  Up to that point, they had been box-shifters.  People saw they needed something our client made, compared spec and reputation with other brands and, more often than not, decided in our client's favour. 

As 20th century moved into 21st, that was changing.  For most of the previous decade, the percentage of their kit sold to run on a network had been rising, and now it was a clear majority.  Increasingly, the hugely important SME marketplace was outsourcing the management of its networks - and, with it, the choice of which manufacturer's boxes were hung on the network.  If our client didn't get control of the network, they risked losing control of their customer base.

The outcome was a move away from simple box-shifting towards the more complex business of selling solutions to the customer's networking needs.  It wasn't long before a painful fact became obvious: some because of a lack of ability and some because they didn't want to, a significant percentage of the salesforce wasn't going to make the change.  Pretty soon now, the company was going to have to address the wholesale replacement of salespeople who either wouldn't or couldn't make the transition from box-shifter to solutions salesperson. 

Before they did that, however, they wanted to get in place four new general managers.  The reasoning was simple: with the right kind of boss, a lot of those salespeople who were good enough but who didn't see why they should change might be brought round to the new way of working.  Also, it needed a general manager steeped in the reality of solution selling to evaluate new candidate salespeople.

The general manager position was, in essence, akin to managing director of a reasonably autonomous subsidiary.  S/he would manage what amounted to a Finance Director, a Logistics Director and an HR Director as well as a marketing team.  S/he would have full P&L responsibility, able to source products and services externally even when they were obtainable from a group source, if the external procurement made better sense.  And s/he would have to manage a substantial salesforce through a number of sales managers.

It took a week to agree the detailed job and person specs with the client, but what we were looking for was seasoned general managers or managing directors with a solid background in companies that sold solutions rather than shifting product and a successful record of building a profitable business in a highly competitive marketplace.  An understanding of the sector would be useful but it became apparent very quickly that we would not be hiring from a direct competitor - all of them had made a worse job than our client of the box/solutions transition, so none of them would produce a candidate who could demonstrate the qualities we needed to see.

When looking for one person, we normally suggest that a shortlist of three candidates will suffice.  Given the rigour of our selection process, we are effectively saying to the client, 'You can take our word that each one of these candidates can do the job and (not always the same thing) will do the job in your company, in your marketplace, with your team.  That leaves you, the client, free to make the only decision you should be asked to make, which is: Which of these candidates do you feel most comfortable with?  With which one is the chemistry right?'  Clearly, for this to work, the three candidates have to be different from each other - three clones is not a choice.

However, three candidates obviously won't do when there are four jobs to fill and the client asked to see a shortlist of nine.

It took nine weeks to produce our shortlist (in contrast with many headhunters, we regard nine weeks as a long time - we see speed as one of the major benefits the well connected headhunter can confer).  We screened more than 700 candidates from eight different countries and interviewed more than sixty of them, together with eighteen internal candidates (for our views on handling internal candidates, see our article Internal Candidates on the News & Views page).  Our process includes personality profiling and we use a range of psychometric instruments depending on the specific assignment; in this case we used Savile & Holdsworth's OPQ at the HR Director's request, as this is the test the company uses internally.  They also have a requirement that candidates for senior management posts achieve a score of at least the 70th percentile in the S&H verbal reasoning test, as internal benchmarking suggests that this is a significant factor for them - the one thing that all their best performers at senior level have in common is that they achieve at least this level.  We therefore incorporated this requirement into the selection process.

As will probably be clear, the logistical and administrative demands of this assignment were probably as great as the technical ones.  Nevertheless, we ended with a very satisfied client and achieved both of what we believe to be the two hallmarks of a successful recruitment process.  The first was that the company said, 'If we'd had more jobs, we'd have taken more of your shortlisted candidates*.'  And the second is that, one year later, the client was still delighted with all four appointments.

*More often than not, an assignment calls for us to put forward three shortlisted candidates for one job. When the client says, 'If we had two jobs, we'd appoint two of these people,' we know we've done a good job. And if, for 'two' they substitute 'all three', we know we've reached perfection.