Looking for change boss?
The Hindu :
How does a company find a new CEO? The top guys aren’t going to have their profiles up on jobsites like we lesser mortals do.
You’re probably not going to attract the cream of the crop with a classifieds ad either.
Where do you begin to find a person you can entrust an entire company to? “In today’s scenario, most CEO hunts are done through executive search firms like ours,” says S. Krishna Prakash, managing partner of EMA Partners International, a multinational company operating in 35 countries.
A company like EMA does very niche work — they do searches only at the board level (managing directors, directors) or of CEOs and functional heads (CFOs, CIOs, CHMOs). “Most of the mandates we handle are one crore plus,” he says. Translation: that’s the kind of money the people their clients are searching make.
Which means it’s all about discretion. “Often, our clients can’t even be seen to be ‘looking’,” says Prakash. “Confidentiality is valued above all else.” In fact, he says, their employee contracts come with a clause saying that they can’t even talk about negotiations with their spouses.
Tight lipped
“An executive search company depends on their credibility for survival,” agrees Hastha Krishnan, CEO of Ma Foi Global Search Services. “Indiscretion on our part can mar careers and we’ll never live that down.”
There are other unique challenges in this business. For one, they operate within a limited universe — at that level, the list of people who fit the bill is going to be necessarily short.
“We generally have a wish-list of three or four people who can do the…More
