Talent spotting via the internet creates monster

By Selwyn Parker

"Have thy tools ready," a sage once said. "God will find thee work." How times change. Next year it might be monster.com that gets you work.

Michael Squires is a chunky, executive search professional, the president of TMP Worldwide executive search that owns the globe's biggest job recruitment site - monster.com - and he's seen the future.

In fact, Squires saw it the other day when he posted on monster.com an advertisement for the $US350,000-plus ($680,000) position of chief financial officer of a Fortune 500 company. That was on a Friday. By close of business on the following Monday - that is, after just two working days, the advertisement had clocked up 170 responses, all of them via the Net.

"And six of those responses were absolutely spot on," marvels Squires. "With the Net, you just post it and it works for you, 24 hours a day. As a business, [executive search] is often criticised for being too slow and too expensive. This will totally alter things."

And as an employment tool, monster.com really is monstrous. The site routinely scores 2.45 million hits a month and looks like providing the ultimate tool in the pursuit of plum jobs around the globe.

Monster.com also neatly mirrors what's happening in careers today, because it provides the flexibility that today's talent wants. Click on, choose your job and preferred location, submit your CV through your talent agent, and wait for the phone call. After all, it's a seller's market right now and will remain so in the foreseeable future, barring a financial cataclysm.

And, boy, does the talent demand flexibility. "[The executive search industry] used to be driven by our corporate clients," explains Squires. "Now it's the other way around. We're becoming much more like talent agents."

And in a seller's market, companies all over the world are prepared to be only too accommodating to attract the talent. Their willingness goes far beyond the usual financial incentives. In fact, as Squires points out, "money's not the thing."

Nowadays it is less tangible factors that count in the new breed of highly personalised, complex salary/lifestyle packages.

Top companies will pay to quarantine your three Labradors, find your spouse an equivalent job to the one she has back home, transport your polo ponies, find private schools for the kids and give you six weeks off every summer to go back to post-graduate school in France.

Why are they so accommodating? Companies want to keep the talent if they can. And it's not just the Michael Jordans of the executive world we're talking about but managers at most levels.

"Our clients are not just looking for megastars but for talent quite a long way below chief executive level," elaborates Squires. "If you have got a good education and good experience, you are going to be able to play employers off against each other."

Still, even with all those blandishments in their packages, the talent probably won't stay more than a few years. This veteran executive research specialist cheerfully tolls the death-knell of the job for life.

You probably already knew that, but it's a fact of life widely observable in the world of employment - for example, in the rise of what might be called the brainy brats, bright young sparks with top qualifications who are in such a strong position in the seller's market that2 they really interview prospective employers rather than the other way around.

"Actually," says Squires, a 47-year-old member of London's Cavalry and Guards Club, "they get up my nose." Then there are the "elderpreneurs," former hotshots who have hit 50 and seek blessed relief from the rigours of corporate life.

In fact, by his own admission, he could be approaching that category himself. "Every one of the last five years I've promised myself I won't still be doing this job at the end of the year," he admits. "It's just that every year the job gets more interesting. But I can't see myself doing this past 50. I don't think I'm physically capable."

When Squires describes his schedule, you see what he means.

Though remarkably spruce and lively, he has just stepped off a flight from New York after a 26-hour journey, would be back in Britain within a few days, would leave again shortly afterwards for New York, and do it all again within a fortnight. Squires, who does not have an office, spends some 60 days a year in the air, visiting 40 offices in 22 countries.

The life of a global executive has its drawbacks and one of them is divorce. "Even in my industry a lot of marriages fail," laments Squires.

"Fortunately I have a very strong marriage." Squires is, of course, one of the much-travelled, much-travelling executives he describes. Son of a career diplomat who joined Cadbury Schweppes for life, the firm having sponsored him through business school, he spent the first eight years of his career in the Caribbean, Central America and in Asia, but then became an executive search consultant in 1982.

Now TMP Worldwide's executive search division, which he oversees, turns over more than $US160 million a year. Right now, most of that comes through conventional advertising for executives but, such is the growth of monster.com, you can bet it will be the other way around by the time Squires becomes an elderpreneur.

* Contributing writer Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz