Airport Business - 39

MANAGEMENT MATTERS
Above all, the client should have trust
and confidence in the person and the firm
performing the search. To that end, they
should also review the firm's success and
failure rates. When I performed executive
search, I always had a 100 percent success.

JON MATHIASEN
I believe having a public solicitation
process gives legitimacy to the selection.
I also believe that selection of the search
firm shouldn't be based solely on the
name of a firm. The key question is
to ask if they are hands-on or merely
outsourcing parts of the process? And
can the authenticity of the process be
challenged?
In selecting the f irm, you really
want a sense of the people that will
be handling the different disciplines
of the process. From the analytical,
psychological candidate review, those
principals should be knowledgeable and
know what to "look for" and "look
out for."

It's important to look at what the
firm's previous work has been along
with their success and failures. If they've
had a failed process and it's turned into a
public battle, legal or political, then it's
something to be cautious of. The firm
should have a high level of professionalism,
dedication and commitment to the
process and the candidates involved. You
need to make sure the applicants are not
just another number.

JOHN CLARK
I believe the industry should look for
companies with an incredibly solid
recruiting methodology which produces
the caliber of people the client seeks. The
company needs to demonstrate precisely
how they would go about mining for
candidates and be able to walk through
proven examples of its success.
As part of this process, a good
measure of success is to understand for
which airports the firm has recruited, the
corresponding positions and how long the

selected candidates have stayed in their
positions. If a firm has done a great job
at recruiting executives, the selected
executive should be in the position for a
while. And, if they leave early, then the
firm has not done a good job of recruiting.
If the hiring goals include a focus on
diversity, I would suggest the executive
search firm ensure it has a clearly defined
set of diversity expectations. For example,
my definition of diversity isn't just based
on race and sex. It's also ethnicity and
work experience.
My hope with this article was to
establish a baseline of differences and uses
of executive search for the readership and
the greater industry. Given that RPO
was born out of executive search and
is very popular, it's not the true highquality form of executive search that it's
often mistaken for. From the research and
interviews with industry leaders, it seems
be an alternative in need of refinement
if it's continued to be used for executivelevel positions. 

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Airport Business

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Airport Business
