When a company wants to hire an executive, sometimes it needs a hired gun to reach out and find the right people. That’s where Stephen E. Judge and his colleagues come in.
They work at Management Search Inc.’s Providence office, which specializes in recruiting executives and managers for client companies. The company also has a smaller office in West Springfield, Mass. Judge, president of the Providence office, has been in the so-called “headhunting” game since the industry took off in the 1980s.
Sometimes a client may want to recruit someone from a competitor. It’s not that common, Judge said, but it happens. Then, discretion is a must. More commonly, however, the job involves finding candidates who may or may not work for a company in the same industry, then narrowing them down to a small group of finalists for the client to interview.
As Judge describes it, there are two kinds of staffing agencies: Those that work on retainers, such as his, and those that don’t. Those other agencies work on contingency, meaning they send candidates to a client and only get paid when its candidate is hired. Judge calls it “a free-for-all” because a client could hire several contingency firms to fill a position, but only the one who finds the winner would be paid.
Usually when a company wants to hire someone who will be especially important to the organization, they turn to a retainer-based agency, such as Management Search. The firm typically charges a client 30% of what the winning candidate negotiates for his or her first year’s salary. The client pays one-third of that amount – or about 10% of what it expects to pay for first year’s salary – upfront as a retainer for the firm’s services.
“We work with companies all over the U.S.,” Judge said. His office’s regional clients include Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, the state’s largest health insurance company; International Game Technology PLC, a multinational maker of slot machines and other gaming products with a large presence in Providence; and golf equipment and apparel giant Titleist’s operation in Fairhaven, Mass.
Generally, the jobs that Judge and his colleagues help fill pay between $100,000 to $300,000 a year. He said the biggest job they filled was the CEO of a Midwestern gun powder manufacturer – a position that paid about $700,000 a year.
When a company hires Management Search, he explained, it gets the full service. That includes consulting with company leaders to determine what it wants to achieve with a big hire, crafting that into a job description, then setting out to find people who not only have the right qualifications, but who will be a good fit into the company’s culture. Clients rely on the firm to screen candidates down to several finalists, so clients don’t have to waste time with too many interviews.
If nobody is hired among the finalists, the firm must go through the whole process again without getting paid for the extra work, so the incentive is to get it right the first time, which also is what clients want.
Judge compared it to a matchmaking service.
“We’re setting up the dating process between the two,” he added.
OWNER: Stephen E. Judge (majority)
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Executive/management recruiting
LOCATION: 1 State Street, Providence
EMPLOYEES: 12
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1986
ANNUAL SALES: WND
Scott Blake is a PBN staff writer. Contact him at Blake@PBN.com.
