Iris Libby - Interview Transcript

Welcome to an Inside Recruiting Channel Podcast on Total Picture Radio, this is Peter Clayton reporting. Joining us today in New York City is Iris Libby, managing principle of Iris Libby Recruitment Consultants. Her company offers strategic customized talent acquisition services across multiple industries and sectors, including consumer, financial, technology, life science and healthcare, HR, and legal. ILRC is a new event sponsor of Total Picture Radio.

Peter: Iris, welcome.

Iris: Thank you, Peter.

Peter: In a previous lifetime, you were based in Seattle and worked with a company called ProCast that was ultimately acquired by Amazon.com. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Iris: Well, you know Peter, when most of us grow up, we never think what I want to do is become an executive recruiter. It's something that just more or less happens to us and in my case, it happened to me in a very good way.

I started out in the real estate industry and I was partners with Barbara Corcoran in Corcoran Group Marketing and I got recruited out to head a division of a conference company for their financial services area, and while I was there, I realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do, but I learned how to gather lists and to find out who the industry leaders were, what cutting edge new strategies were, and I built up, I went from no names at all to a huge war chest of names. I wanted to leave the company, and the head of the company said, "Stay please, why don't you run our sponsorship in exhibition area. You love sales." So I said okay. At the time, they just paid me commission only, and I was bringing in about $100,000 a week in sales. The owner of the company said, "Well you know what, you're making too much money," and I said, "If I'm making too much money, then you're making too much money," and I said give me my check, and as I was leaving, a head of another division hands me a name, and says, "I think you should call her," and I said, "What does she do?" She said, "She's an executive recruiter at or director of recruitment at Microsoft," and I said, "I don't want to go to Seattle, I don't need a recruiter to find a job, besides I don't have to work for a while," and she said, "No, you just remind me of each other."

Eight months later, I'm looking through my pocketbook, cleaning it out, I see this name. I called her, we talk on the phone for eight hours, we become very good friends, and she said, "You should try research," and I said, "What's research?" and she said, "You call into a company and you find out titles and functions of people, just like you did in the conference industry, and then we sell those names." She said, "Why don't you try it." So she gave me a small project for fun and games to try. I called her back 10 minutes later and I said, "Okay. I have all eight PR names." She said, "What?" She said, "Try this." So she kept upping the ante until she wanted me to get a 100 names in a technology team. It took me 10 hours, but I ended up getting all 100 software developer names.

We ended up becoming partners. We ended up landing the Amazon account together, and then Amazon acquired ProCast, which was the company that I was working for and me along with it, so I ended up moving to Seattle after all. I worked at Amazon for two years. They wanted to recruit me as director of campus at which point, I had to get back to New York for family reasons. So, Amazon let me stay till October, let me vest my stock, and then they essentially continue to use me today.

Peter: In the intro, I stated you offered strategic and customized talent acquisition services. Can you give us an overview of the services your firm provides to your clients.

Iris: What we've done at ILRC is we've unbundled retain search services. So basically, you buy what you need. You can buy research which is org charts or name generation. You can buy candidate sourcing where we call up and get passive candidates interested in your position, passive rather than active. If you're looking for active candidates, you'd go to Monster. If you're looking for passive candidates, you'd go to a company like mine.

We do candidate assessment. So once we get the candidate interested, we will assess them for you based on your criteria. We will manage the candidate through the process, and we will also manage your internal hiring manager. So you can pick one of those services or all of those services; basically you buy what you need.

We also have a retain search service which I call Quick Search, and you get four researchers and three senior search consultants all working at the same time on your search and within two weeks, we have three A-player passive candidates available for you.

We also do competitive intelligence. If you're a company looking to go into a new field and you want us to do research on what your competitors are doing, we give you real time research that you won't find on the internet, and then we also come up with alternative solutions. If you come to me and you have a recruitment issue, I will come up with the solution, and if I'm not the solution, I will refer you to where I think a company would best suit your needs.

Peter: For people who are job seekers, who really don't quite understand the whole way of retained or executive search works, you refer to your agency as an agency alternative. Can you explain to us what you mean by that?

Iris: The recent economic crisis has forced many recruitment leaders to scale back much more deeply than they would have liked. ILRC's on-demand services can deliver highly-skilled support without the hassle and commitment of finding your own interim resources. We are available on demand allowing you to concentrate in developing a longer term solution while you're still filling today's open reqs. We take the time to analyze the reasons potential customers have chosen to go external, and then develop solutions that address their specific challenges.

Our philosophy is to deliver services customized to meet your requirements. There is not one solution for every position that needs to be filled. Each engagement is individually tailored and offers our client access to the highest quality recruitment services, including national and international candidates.

Peter: To your point Iris, a lot of the recruiting industry – last year was a complete train wreck, so how has your organization weathered the recession and what are you projecting for 2010?

Iris: I can tell you that to date, we are up 19.5%. How have we weathered the recession? That's an interesting question. We, like all other companies, were affected by the downturn. However, our searches are very cost effective, so we have a market. We just filled a COO search with a passive candidate who was at an A-player company for a third of what it would have caused if they had in through retained search.

If a hiring manager is ready to hire and realistic, our services can run from 4% to about 12% of a year's compensation. So companies that are looking to cut budgets and really take advantage of our cost-effective services, and that's what happened during the downturn; we did less retained search and more of these research and development searches.

Peter: One thing I heard a lot last year, Iris, was that people who were the passive candidates who had good jobs, who felt fairly secure in their current roles were – to use the expression – cemented to their seats; it was almost impossible to get them to move. Are you seeing that starting to shift now? Is it easier for you to get these passive candidates on the phone and to consider new opportunities?

Iris: Well, it's very interesting. Yes, we are getting passive candidates to consider new opportunities, but you have to look at the value proposition of the company that you are representing. So, if you have a good value proposition, you're able to pull candidates out of A-player companies, but there's something else that's going on in the market.

Prior to October of 2008, a company might have six people performing a certain function and because of budget cuts, staff was reduced to three. So now you have three people performing the job of six, and then more cuts because corporations want to show profits and survive the downturn, so they lay off two people. So now you have one person doing the job of six.

So here we are, we call up that candidate who's doing the job of six, their income hasn't gone up because of price cuts, and we offer them the job of one for an increase in compensation, you bet they throw their hat in the ring.

Peter: That's a really interesting perspective. We're here at SourceCon in San Diego, and this is sort of the first of the recruiting and HR large conferences that kick off the year, what are some of the things that are being discussed out here? What are some of the things that are going on in the recruiting industry and what do you see is the challenges for 2010?

Iris: I think at SourceCon this year, social networking and recruiting, it was big last year, I think it's even going to be bigger this year because it's easier to find passive candidates using LinkedIn or Jigsaw online. So, I think if we're going to talk more about Twitter and Facebook and how you can use this. It's also how are we going to get creative with limited budgets. So across the board, budgets have been cut, especially in recruiting major layoffs have happened with recruitment staffs, so companies are deciding, do we hire a new team, do we hire contractors, do we outsource, and I think those are all going to be big topics.

Also, I think… and these topics don't really change, cost to recruit candidates, cycle time to fill reqs, volume and scalability. Before, you weren't getting enough volume, now you could place an ad and you could get 2000 resumes. What do we do with that kind of volume when you don't have the staff that you had before, and then as always, quality of candidates, how do you attract the A-player candidates?

Peter: To your point, the A-player candidates usually aren't sitting around on Monster surfing the job boards looking at opportunities.

Iris: Correct, they're not. They're sitting at their desk, they're working, and you have to present the right value proposition, especially to get candidates to move across the country.

Peter: A lot of the press reports regarding the recession keep referring to this as being a jobless recovery, and in search assignments you're conducting since the first of this year, are these primarily replacement jobs you're filling with an established position in contrast to filling positions due to an expansion? What are you seeing out there?

Iris: I would say that 60% of the positions we're filling right now are for further expansion, 40% are either someone's been promoted or someone's left the company.

Peter: That brings up another interesting point, it seems that in this recession with all of these really highly qualified people who are out there looking for jobs, a lot of, especially the smaller or midsize companies have been using this as an opportunity to really upgrade the level of people who are working for them. They are able to go out and attract really senior people where they weren't able to get those people two years ago.

Iris: Exactly, and they're using that opportunity.

Peter: When you're brought in to do a full-blown retain search, what is the general salary for these days, is it like $300,000? Where is it?

Iris: Well that's a really interesting question because at ILRC, we are not snobs; so sometimes you have this really hard to fill positions that are 110,000, so we get them in as low as 110, and they could go up to 500,000, 600,000, 700,000 depending upon the position, but I would say it's typically a hard to fill position, maybe there's only 15 people in the country, or in the western hemisphere that are doing what a company wants, and typically for the lower end range, that's when we do those types of searches.

Peter: Iris, another thing of that I heard repeatedly last year from recruiters particularly is that it was taking companies a really long time to pull this trigger, to send out that offer letter. Is there less hesitation now than there was a year ago?

Iris: Most definitely. And you're right, it would take them say a month or two maybe to decide on whether or not to pull the trigger. Now, if companies are seeing candidates they like, it's a much faster process.

Peter: What advice would you give executives in transition who are trying to connect with recruiters such as yourself, what's the best way to get on your radar to screen, Iris?

Iris: Well, I wouldn't necessarily talk about my radar screen, but how to attract a position. I think you need to look at it like that because we can help, but you really need to look at what you want to do with your future.

First of all, I'd say if you're out there looking for a job, you need to distinguish yourself from everyone else who's doing the same thing that you are doing, and what do I mean by that? Separate yourself from the pack. Market yourself as if you were a company or product. The more volatile a market, the more crucial distinguishing yourself comes. You need to turn from the old-fashioned concept of marketing to more finely tuned concepts like personal positioning, personal branding, or building a unique professional or creative identity depending upon what field you're in.

So first what you need to do is decide what do you want to accomplish. If it's a new job you want, you need to come up with what is unique about what you do, and once you've done that, then you could start the distinguishing process. Remember, it's an ongoing process. You need to have a resume that's current, and what I call it is, first you have a master resume, and then each time you apply for a job, you would tweak your resume a bit to point out what you've done that is in the position profile or the job description that you're looking at.

The same is true with cover letters, you want to have a basic cover letter, but then in your cover letter, you want to point out how this job is correct for you, and also a bio. I would always… I recommend everyone has a master bio, you'll never know when you want to use it.

Next, you need to social network. You need to get on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, you need to think about contributing or writing an article on a topic. If you can get an article published somewhere or speak somewhere, people will start looking at you as an expert, and you probably are an expert somewhere in your field. I would say do volunteer work, meet people within your community, be creative, make yourself a web page, start blogging, start blogging about what you do. I think that with those types of – I'm not going to call it marketing but distinguishing yourself from the pack, you will be able to attract the job you seek.

Peter: One of the often heard phrases I've heard over the last several years is it's not who you know, it's who knows you.

Iris: Exactly.

Peter: Back to your company, you're part of what's called the ASHER Talent Alliance, what is that and who's involved in that?

Iris: The ASHER Talent Alliance is your one-stop source for the best in class talent acquisition and HR management services. ASHER stands for Attract Source Higher Engage Retain. I actually can't take credit for ASHER, it was the brain child of Jeremy Eskenazi.

We had all worked together for years, I worked with him at Amazon, and he came up with this idea and put together four firms. His firm, which is called Riviera Advisors that does talent acquisition consulting and training, my firm which does candidate development and research and retain search, employee branding and communication is done by the J Morrison Group, and resume mining and screening is done by Velocity Resource Group. So we're really one-stop shopping for all recruitment services and HR talent services.

Peter: It was really nice talking to you and I look forward to seeing all of the developments here in San Diego at SourceCon.