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Sophisticated clients select executive search firms before negotiating fees, Barrett notes
“The clients that we like to work with, and it's, I'd say it's 90% of the time, it's not price at all. I'd say that, you know, the sophisticated and appropriate users of search, they will pick a firm, and then they'll negotiate the price.”
Cultural fit accounts for 75% of a CIO search's success
“Well, I think the first thing is, because 75% of this is cultural fit.”
The most successful CIOs actively leverage their investment committees
“The most successful CIOs are leveraging their investment committees.”
Calibrating how a candidate thinks as an investor is uniquely difficult
“They know as much about the, in many cases, they'll, they'll have, especially in terms of unique insights, potentially into the, how that person thinks as an investor, which is the hardest thing for us to really calibrate.”
Successful institutional searches require a tight committee of three or four
“Well, a successful search, you get all those other constituencies, you get all their input up front, so they feel included. And then you have a really tight search committee of three, maybe four people, and they tightly control the process.”
Evaluating true endowment CIO investment performance requires at least five years
“So, I think you take your, really your first breath on the, and the calibration point, maybe at three years, but it's, I think, five years for me is the proof of the pudding.”
Technology will never compress senior executive search into a six-week process
“The length of time to complete searches has not shortened. Because it is a people business, it is, it's based on personal relationships, meeting people in person, building trust, establishing credibility, both with the search firm and the candidate, and then t…”
Performance transparency and media narratives created an unfortunate CIO arms race
“The reason you've seen so much So many changing seats over the last several years is that because of the increased transparency around performance, and then the, so then they get the relative comparisons where, you know, through, you know, the press has turned…”
Committees wanting broad pools hire proven sitting CIOs 80% of the time
“80% of the time, the search committee will say, we want to, like, broad brush. We want to see everybody in all the different buckets. You get down to the finish line, oh, we got a sitting CIO who's going to, done this for five years, proven track record, and I…”
Stanford's outperforming peer endowments all had CIOs with ten-year tenures
“When we were doing the Stanford CEO search, Seven or eight institutions that they compared themselves to that were ahead of them on a ten-year basis, on their, in terms of their ten-year number, all those CIOs had been in place for 10 years.”
Harvard Management Company's 2.5-month CIO search was Barrett's shortest ever
“Harvard was the shortest search we ever did. It was two and a half months. I mean, and typically these take four or five, six months.”
Executive search's commission structure encourages selfish recruiters over client focus
“In the search business, it's really hard to live by it, which is, don't hire assholes, because there's a lot of people in search that are, it's all about them, you know, there's, it's, you know, it's a professional services, and it's a revenue business. So to …”