Case Studies

How to Recruit a Cabinet

Nonprofit Quarterly

by Ted Ford Webb

Finding the Perfect Match:  A Governor’s Guide to Executive Recruiting

Introduction

A strong management team doesn’t just happen.  Building an effective team requires a thoughtful process of recruitment, screening, and decision-making.  The challenge is particularly difficult for a new governor-elect who will be expected to make dozens of key appointments within a few weeks or months.  Experienced governors urge governors-elect to make key personnel decision a high priority and assign clear responsibility to a trusted senior staff member for developing and managing the recruitment process that will be use during the transition and through the early days of a new administration.

This management brief discusses one approach to the recruitment process that has proved successful in numerous administrations.  Unlike some approaches that begin by describing the ideal candidate, the approach first examines the agency, diagnoses its past flaws, and articulates its future promise, before starting a search.

A new start: Searching for the right match

You ran, and you won.  Now you have to figure out how to govern.  What you do with your time in office, and how you do it, will in large part be determined by the team you hire.  From your central office to your cabinet, your staff can make-or-break your term—so you want to choose wisely.

My philosophy of hiring emphasizes finding the right match over the finding the right credentials.  What constitutes the right credentials for any cabinet office varies according to needs and circumstances.  Finding the best candidate requires your administration to do the hard work of evaluating an agency’s real needs, without shirking away from the divisions, the politics, and the problems inherent in any organization.  The best search confronts these problems head on and uses them as the basis for finding the right candidate.  The worst hopes naively that the right candidate will solve all the agency’s problems.  You will find the best match by following what you probably already know intuitively: that the best results are driven by open communication.

The hiring process is the first—and probably the best—chance you get to set your priorities as governor.  Think of each person you hire as an opportunity to clarify your objectives—and to begin to define your legacy.

The basics: Five principles to guide your search

1)    The hiring process is an educational process.  It is as much about you—and determining what type of administration you want to run—as it is about the candidates.

2)    Be clinical.  This is a diagnostic process, one that benefits above all from objectivity.

3)    Engage stakeholders.  The dialogue among them, your team, and others who understand the circumstances of the agency will help you to determine that agency’s true needs.

4)    Expect contradiction.  The process will inevitably generate it—and it is far easier politically to unearth it now than down the line.

5)    Above all, be open with all participants in this process.  Direct communication now is the best strategy for generating the results you want later.

The game plan: Designing the hiring process

Before you recruit your star team, you will want to devote some time to thinking about the design of the hiring process itself.  Two basic questions you will need to answer are: how much control do you want to have over the process, and how public do you want it to be?

Most governors choose to delegate control over the hiring process to a trusted advisor.  It could be a chief-of-staff, a campaign manager, or even an old friend.  Some governors hire executive recruiters, but that is not absolutely necessary.  What is necessary is to place someone in charge of the process who can remain an objective third party.  That person must focus on presenting you with the best set of possible options—a set of options that you can use to help you determine the future direction of the agency.  Without good leadership in the hiring process, your choices may be narrowed in a way that does not serve your best interests.

Recognize that early on in your administration, and to a degree through your entire term, members of your core team will engage in power plays as they struggle to establish their domains.  Will policy be set in your office, or will it be driven by cabinet officers?  What type of access will your cabinet officers have to you, and to your chief-of-staff?  The person you place in charge of hiring should be ready to parse out these internal divisionsin a rational fashion—with you as the final arbitrator.  Otherwise, you risk each new hire reflecting the winner of that day’s power struggle. Ultimately you will delegate to your team responsibility for running day-to-day operations, but as you are hiring your cabinet you are also setting a precedent for how your team will support your governance throughout your term in office.

How much input the public—including interest groups, advocacy groups, and the general public—should have in the process is usually a matter of ideology.  For some administrations, control, and the efficiency that follows, is a hallmark of their particular management style.  For others, transparency and public input are worth the tradeoff in efficiency.  But custom can also play a role in the decision.  If every modern governor has consulted with the public employees union and small business association before appointing the state secretary of labor, you should take that into account as you begin your search.  You are not bound to follow those traditions, but breaking them should reflect a well-reasoned decision.

While I cannot tell you how public to make your search, I will say that a more public approach can affect the level of candor and rigor that allows your administration to develop a clear understanding of its priorities.  A big process—which typically includes public input at the start and some type of public review of candidates at the end, on top of the internal reviews suggested by this memo—can be done, and has benefits.  But it can also become unwieldy and run long.

This note aims to help guide you through the search for a member of your cabinet.  While it describes a single search, this formula also applies to the larger task of organizing a new cabinet at the start of your administration.  A large transition simply requires a higher level of organizing and management, in which the transition director assigns a single recruiting team to each cabinet position, and that team then follows the approach described in this note.

When appointing your new cabinet, you will also find that there is a logical hierarchy to hiring.  Large agencies that are more closely scrutinized demand the most thoughtful review.  If you have already decided on certain appointments (or reappointments), moving on those early can relieve pressure on the transition team and can appease a hungry media.  But remember, too, that ‘big’ searches can also benefit smaller ones—your search for a secretary for human services, for instance, may help you to identify candidates for non-cabinet-level positions in public health, child welfare and other such agencies.

Before we move on, a quick stylistic note.  Throughout this essay, I will differentiate between “you,” the governor, and the “recruiter,” a term which I use to refer to the advisor you put in charge of the hiring process.  The same philosophy can be applied no matter who guides the hiring process, and no matter who you are trying to hire: use openness to get the best results.

Starting your search: The Rolodex fallacy

The best searches begin with internal diagnosis: what is going on in the agency now, and why?  A recruiter needs to know what circumstances the new leader will be asked to handle before s/he can figure out what type of candidate can handle them.  What was the previous head of the agency like?  Was s/he a strong manager?  What forces, internally and externally, prevented the achievement of critical goals?  Where are the fault lines within the organization?  A good search is an educational process—it allows the recruiter to learn the strengths and weaknesses of an agency, and to present them to you at the point in your tenure that you are best equipped to address those needs.

Do not allow your recruiter to commit the fatal mistake: what I call “the Rolodex fallacy.”  This is the belief that that some magical person exists whose qualifications will meet all your needs—if only your recruiter had a Rolodex thick enough to find him or her.  Many recruiters deal in “talent,” finding you the best match to a fixed set of criteria.  But a recruiter’s real value to you is as an objective party: one who can help you to diagnose an agency’s illness, and to use that diagnosis to find the candidate to cure it.

Using a set of fixed qualifications as a starting point rarely results in successful hires.  Instead, hiring should be a dynamic process that engages with an agency’s particular needs at a given point in time.  No fixed set of criteria will work.  A good recruiter will help you to find a person who can address those specific needs.

Finally, a legal (and political) caution.  A recruiter must know the statutory requirements related to the position for which s/he is hiring.  S/he must understand the enabling legislation for that agency, any legal requirements associated with the position, and the relevant statutory policies—and political considerations—related to equal opportunity hiring and community input.  I was once hired by a state’s personnel board to recruit the director of a major state agency.  But a quick read of the statutory requirements related to that agency revealed that the board had no authority over the position—it was a gubernatorial appointment.  Three directors had been appointed without anyone realizing the error.  Misinformation, even mythology, can build around these appointments.  Knowing the facts matters.

Diagnosis: The doctor is in

A recruiter’s first task on the job is to look behind the defining set of circumstances in an agency and name them.  The first thing I do when I start a search is to approach the agency’s various stakeholders, everyone from the senior management team to the office staff to the unions and advocacy groups who interact with the agency.  I make the same simple request of them: “I know nothing.  Fill me in.”  With that request, I want to understand the context the next agency head will be coming into.  What are the circumstances here?  What is the history?  What is the past performance of the agency?  What has led to this scandal?  To that missed opportunity?

The previous administration generally leaves a briefing book that reports on the state of the agency.  But these books only address the formal circumstances.  To get a real sense of what is going on, your recruiter must also listen to individuals, both employees of the agency and members of the outside groups that interact with it.  I stick to small conversations (generally one-on-one) in which people can feel certain that they will face no consequences for honesty.  This allows full disclosure, and helps your recruiter to learn about the real circumstances in the agency.

Over time, these conversations lead to hypotheses that a good recruiter will use to help focus future conversations.  I once recruited a state secretary of transportation.  The more people I talked to, the more it became clear that the previous leader had been brought in because of his political skills and was a poor manager who had lost control over his senior management team.  As a result, the agency had evolved into a nation of Balkan states with no strong central leader.  I used that hypothesis in future conversations to tighten my analysis.  I learned that the agency was also under the sway of an overpowering legislative leader, and that the staff members would defer to whomever was more threatening to them at the time, the cabinet official or the legislator.  That knowledge allowed me to address the tension over the agency’s leadership with the governor, and to be able to offer a comprehensive assessment of the real-life conditions a future agency head could expect to face.  Most importantly, it allowed me to recruit a candidate who was up to the agency’s specific challenges.

Knowing the problems an agency faces helps your recruiter to find a candidate who is best able to fix them, as I will discuss in the next section.  But it also plays a vital role in the dialogue your recruiter—and later you—are going to have with that candidate.  Diagnosing the problems up-front is the only way your candidate will be able to offer you targeted, real-world solutions.

This diagnosis should be brought to you before the search is launched.  It is a moment for you to hear about circumstances which may affect the search and to give your input and direction to the recruiter.  You may have explicit expectations to impose (‘it must be an MD; I want someone from within the state business community; it must be someone who agrees with my position on…’).  Alternatively, you may ask for more of an exploration (‘let’s consider the different schools of thought about prison expansion and alternatives to incarceration; let’s focus on finding a strong manager, but I am open to a visionary if they will work closely with a strong COO-type’).  Ultimately, this is an abstract conversation, but it provides a guide to your recruiter to serve your specific interests.  When you see your recruiter at the end of the search, he/she should be able to report about how these ideas played out in the marketplace for talent and the networks explored in the process.

Finding a candidate: Skip the game of cat-and-mouse

A recruiter’s next step is to bring in a group of candidates who personify the strategic and policy choices that the agency is facing.  In the case of that same transportation department, I knew that the governor was facing distinct choices.  Should I suggest a former politician who could serve as a political counterpoint to the overreaching legislative leader?  Address the situation with an unflappable manager who could ease away from the legislature without confrontation?  Propose a deal to share power with the legislator, and bring in someone whose technical qualifications set them apart?  I decided to bring in all three candidates, each of whom became a distinct choice for the governor in terms of management and policy direction.

How did we find each candidate?  The answer is networking.  As s/he begins the candidate search, your recruiter should, once again, avoid the Rolodex fallacy and abandon the idea that a good search results from a Rolodex full of contacts.  Even as a professional executive recruiter, I start every search from a zero point: I have no built in list of “talent” that I turn to.  Instead, I use existing professional networks to seek out candidates—and do something that surprises them.  Most recruiters work by naming a list of qualifications they seek.  I name the circumstances within the organization that a successful candidate will have to address.

Over the course of your recruiter’s conversations with individual stakeholders, s/he will have identified key organizations that now become good places to start the candidate search.  National membership organizations, advocacy groups, leaders in the field, and even well regarded academics generally comprise the first round of calls a recruiter makes.  For the transportation secretary search, for example, I started by calling the American Public Transit Association, a professional membership organization, but person-to-person networking soon led me to construction companies, highway safety advocacy groups, design firms, rail transit advocates, and federal bureaucrats.  I wanted to speak with a representative spectrum of the groups associated with the agency.  While each group has its own interests to promote, it can also lead a recruiter to some of the best contacts.

When I approached these groups, I informed them openly and honestly about the situation in the transportation agency: “In our state, the legislature has reached over the line, and we’re losing direction. We’re looking to address these and other critical circumstances.”  When people are treated with that kind of directness and integrity, they tend to respond in kind.  They are generally more than happy to suggest candidates or, if they can offer no recommendations themselves, to suggest someone who can.  Recognize, too, that most “news” about the real politics within the agency is no news at all.  People close to the agency already know this information, and it is only one degree removed from outsiders close to the agency.  For the referrer, the only surprise in the equation is that the recruiter shows a willingness to discuss these challenges.

Defining the environment in an organization—rather than listing a specific set of qualifications a candidate must meet—is a very seductive way of recruiting.  “I’ve talked to you about the challenges facing our agency.  Do you know anyone you think might be able to meet those challenges?”  Asking this kind of open-ended question opens people’s minds in a way that asking them to track down qualifications on a resume does not.  It leads to very different kinds of candidates, candidates who tend to end up representing the universe of choice for an agency’s future—the political expert, the managerial expert, the engineer, and so on.

This approach to recruiting ultimately takes no more time or energy than conventional recruiting methods.  It is, in essence, person-to-person networking.  One group of people makes recommendations for who else to call, and the tree grows very quickly.  It takes 80 calls, not 150 or 1500.

Laying it bare: Naming without blaming

As we have seen above, a good search will bring out the tensions inherent in any organization.  The key is to be willing to name these tensions openly during the search process, rather than hiding them away in the hopes the candidate will be able to fix them after the fact.  Once your recruiter has identified a list of potential candidates for a position, it is crucial to bring the candidate into the discussion of the agency’s problems.

I was once hired to recruit the new president of a national family planning organization. The organization had started as a loose affiliation of independent affiliates, and had become much more centralized under the previous leader.  But during the search, it became clear that the organization was in the midst of a major identity crisis.  Some factions wanted to maintain the organization’s role as a national advocacy organization.  Others wanted to turn it into more of a women’s health practitioner.  Still others wanted to return to the original model, in which each of its affiliates acted autonomously.

Rather than hide these divisions, the hiring process became a discussion and growth process in which I encouraged the organization’s board to use the search to determine which path they wanted to follow.  When they found they could not determine that path on their own, it became the task of each candidate to show how s/he would manage these divisions.

Because we were clear about the challenges, we attracted candidates who sought to tackle the challenges from different perspectives—an activist who promoted a strong national advocacy organization, a health care expert who wanted to reposition the organization as a business devoted to women’s health, and a leader who encouraged a strategy of each affiliate on its own bottom.  This gave the board the opportunity to test out different strategies as well as different candidates.  What makes for the most successful search is one in which those things that cannot be resolved are named and talked about.  This is the type of conversation, and these are the types of choices, that you want to have at the end of this process.

Talking points: How to structure an interview

By the time your recruiter brings candidates in, the organization has already engaged in a lot of learning and discussion.  Each candidate becomes a choice to be considered, a different approach for the agency to take.  For the transportation department, we ended up considering a former elected official, an attorney who had led a large utility and had long-term experience in policy planning and project management, the head of a state highway system with an engineering background, and the head of a mass transit system.  We assembled a group of the most qualified candidates, but from a range of approaches.

Once your hiring team has chosen its candidates, it will have a limited amount of time to get to know each of them.  In that time, the team needs to get a real sense of what each candidate can do for your agency.  The best—and only—way to accomplish that is to provide the candidates who make it to this point in the process all possible access, to fill them up with information.  By the time the candidate walks into the interview, s/he should know what your team has learned over the course of its diagnosis of the agency.

Psychologists believe that the ideal size for a group exchange is between seven and nine people.  Ideally, the interview panel should include no more than that—generally the head recruiter plus your chief-of-staff, several other members of your core team (policy director, political advisor, budget director, etc.), and one or two trusted outside advisors.  If you are following a more public citizen approach, you will also want to invite one or two representatives from key stakeholder groups—on the condition that they take part in the direct and open exchange that this type of hiring process requires.

The recruiter should take time at the beginning of the interview to acknowledge the dynamics that are at play within the room.  S/he should be prepared to identify who comes from which faction—“he favors a strong manager, she is hoping for someone who can get the agency’s science in order,” and so on.  There should be no secrets as you go in; whatever is not acknowledged now will only come out, more uncomfortably, later.

An interview is not a game show.  A candidate should get few points for being able to answer things on the spot.  Instead, the interview should reflect the real challenges and opportunities awaiting the successful candidate and allow him or her to give real-world solutions to those challenges.

The Sequence

I always start by asking the candidate to speak about herself—her background, experience, and what interests her about the job.  This serves both as an icebreaker and a chance to get to know the candidate as an individual.

Then I head right into the nitty gritty: How will she do this job?  Because the candidate already understands the agency’s dynamics, this is not an abstract question.  It is an open-book test that gives her the opportunity to start sizing up the organization.  Your recruiter should make it clear that the candidate is expected to confront the organization’s problems head on.

During the interview, I always offer the candidate the option of asking any questions she still has about the agency, and about the points of view represented at the table.  The fewer constraints a candidate faces, the easier it is for a very candid exchange to take place—one that allows the candidate to make the case directly for what she plans to do with the position.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

An effective interview takes time, and it takes strategy.  Forget gut reactions and snap judgments.  Interviewers tend to form their opinions of a candidate in the first half of a discussion, and then turn off.The result is that they waste the second half of the interview entirely—and realize as soon as they emerge the questions they should have asked.  They then take it upon themselves to answer those questions as they believe the candidate would have responded.

The second half of the interview should be used as a reaction to the questions and the negatives that emerge in the first half.  Rather than holding fast to an initial judgment—the engineer under consideration, for instance, does not seem like she will be a persuasive public speaker—the interviewers should acknowledge that judgment and give the candidate a chance to address their concerns.  Be blunt.  It is not about disrespect—it is about insisting on a truthful exchange.  This is how you will want to work with your team in the future, and it matters to set that standard during the hiring process.

The interview team should also be prepared to discuss the potential need for future hires who will supplement—and complement—the candidate.  The greatest visionary may still need a good deputy manager to execute that vision; the long-time politico with little executive experience may need strong deputies on both the strategic and managerial ends to be able to put his political expertise to work.  A part of an open exchange with a candidate is to challenge them as to how they will compensate for their weaknesses.  Everyone has them, and better to wrestle with them now in the interview room than three months later in the press.

The interview team should never couch things in vague language.  It should express its questions and concerns up front.  This allows your team to know what the candidate’s responses are to those concerns rather than having to guess at them.  Every candidate you will meet has some strengths and some weaknesses.  In the end, a big part of what you are looking for is the quality of self-understanding that will allow someone to be effective in spite of those weaknesses.

Finally, one generally accepted rule of interviewing is that the interviews have to be consistent.  But that does not necessarily mean following an identical structure.  The interview team should create a similar platform for each candidate, but each person will, inevitably, address the same problems differently.  The team should explore what those differences are, not hide from them for the sake of perfect consistency.  In doing so, they are trying to match the candidate with your expectations of what the job requires, which address the spirit of that standard.

The Friends-and-Family Dilemma

It is not uncommon to have a devoted political loyalist, or even a personal friend, in the candidate pool.  In that situation, loyalty and familiarity do have real value, especially over a pool of candidates whom you do not know personally.  This process allows you to give weight to those qualities, but also to tailor the questioning to that person’s potential weaknesses.  For example, in the case of a longtime ally and prominent environmentalist, your interview team might ask how he would mediate his position as an environmental advocate with the administration’s obligation to create (sometimes less-than-environmentally-friendly) business growth and community development.  How will he deal with his former allies when this happens?  What will his loyalty be to the administration—and what decisions would bring about a break with your administration and a resignation?  Raise the issues that will likely confront that person in the job, and recognize that some of those issues are particular to that individual.  Your environmental advocate friend is likely to find different challenges than a lifelong bureaucrat.  Each will be tested differently.  It is better to test their ability to handle those issues now.

The Payoff

Out of this process arises a set of candidates who fit into the range of organizational directions you are considering.  There are, for instance, candidates who will comfortably conform to a policy and budget agenda controlled by your staff.  Others will only join your team if they drive that agenda, but promise big payoffs in return.  You benefit from a process that offers you those choices, and that also helps you to clarify how you want your administration to run.

The additional payoff comes in the form of the education you and your interview team have just received.  In the course of the interview process, you have heard from five or six different experts about the different strategies they would use to deal with an agency’s particular challenges.  By bringing into this debate real flesh and blood, real choices, you have made possible a set of governance and policy choices that also reflect the character and abilities of the person you choose, and that acknowledge the complexities of the relationships within the organization.

Soliciting referrals: (Once again) honesty is the best policy

References are a necessary part of making a final selection.  But many people are hesitant to provide a truthful assessment of a candidate’s past performance.  While there is no exact formula to getting a helpful reference, as with everything in this process, directness and openness at the outset will help your recruiter get the information you will need on the other side.

The recruiter should include the candidate in the discussion from the start of the referral process.  People who run a cabinet agency need to be able to deal with criticism and opposition.  If they have held previous leadership positions, critics of their performance should exist.  They key is to gauge the nature of the criticism—is it about poor performance, or about making the best of difficult choices?  Candidates need to accept this review, and participate in it even when it is uncomfortable.  Once again, any criticism that comes up now will come up again if they are hired—so it is better to wrest with it now.

The recruiter should follow the same candidness mandate that s/he followed in the interviews, and speak openly with the candidate about the questions s/he wants to ask referrers.  For a candidate whose treatment of co-workers is in doubt, s/he might ask: “We want to talk to people who can comment on your creativity and brilliance.  We also want to talk to people who have worked under you, and we’re going to ask how you treated them.  Are you okay with that?  What do you think we’re going to hear?”

The recruiter should use the same directness when speaking to the referrer.  The key is to corner him or her through honesty.  Rather than asking whether the candidate gets along well with co-workers, be direct.  “We have an impression that he might not treat co-workers well when he’s under pressure.  Can you comment on that?”  With such a direct question, even a non-answer (“I don’t want to talk about it”) helps give you the answer you need.  Your recruiter may strike out five times out of ten, but people will often be responsive.

Making your decision: Finding the pattern

When you make your final choice, you are choosing among different strategies for the agency.  None of them is going to meet every exact need.  But the advantage of the learning process the recruiter has led you through is that you have already fully considered the implications of the tradeoffs you are making.

In the end, your search team should present you with a pattern.  You want to know the nature of this person’s approach, to have this person marked and defined.  Ideally, the candidate knows how they have been marked and defined as well.  At this stage, you as governor should have a good sense of who this person is and how they are going to do their job.  And you should be able to use this information as you narrow down your candidates and prepare for the final interview.

That final interview will generally take place in your presence, and present you with a few, well-defined leadership options.  The interview should be used to deepen your understanding of the final candidates’ plans for the office—but you are well advised to stick to the same direct, reactive format as earlier interviews.

Investing in future harmony

This is a process that in a sense is not sophisticated—it takes on very few airs.  Instead, it is built on frankness and humility, on the recognition that this is a process of discovery.  It is, ultimately, a way to fill in those parts that a new administration does not know, and needs to know, about itself.

You will figure out the same things about your organization using the more conventional approach to recruiting—but you will figure them out farther down the line, in a far more brutal, and less controlled, fashion. Dealing with the loss of efficiency, internal battles, and even scandal that can result from not hiring the right person is far more costly than the initial time investment at the beginning.

But the best payoffs from this process are the positive ones.  I once worked to hire the head of a human services system for a Western governor.  The previous leader had been an efficiency expert, to mixed results: He had cut costs, but morale in the organization was low.  When we started our search, we acknowledged the fragility of the agency and found two very different candidates to fill the role.  One was an effective manager, more balanced than the last, who would provide stability for the agency.  The other was more of a visionary, who wanted to point the organization to big new ideas, but who would use up more of the governor’s precious political capital in doing so.  Both demonstrated the ability to move the agency forward, but in ways that suggested very different demands on resources.  The question came down to the governor’s vision for his administration.  As a recruiter, all I could do was present him with a set of clearly defined options.  In the end, he chose vision over stability.

That decision paid off.  When I returned to his statehouse, years after he left office, I stumbled upon a small bronze plaque that hung under his portrait.  Out of all his myriad accomplishments, the plaque recognized, above all, the work he had done to reform human services.  With clear choices in front of him, the governor was able to make the decision that became his legacy.

Ted Ford Webb is the founder of Ford Webb Associates, Inc., a leading nonprofit executive search firm. He has recruited cabinet officers for 47 governors and over 200 CEOs for nonprofit organizations, Fortune 500 companies, professional service firms, universities, national membership organizations, and many others.