The article explores the factors that make the adoption of service quality standards in executive search firms difficult. Two events provide special significance to this issue: first, CEO turnover amounted to 9.2% in 2001, marking a 53% increase since 1995 (Booz Allen Hamilton study, 2002). Many of the successor executives were placed by executive search firms. Search firms thus fulfill an increasingly important function in the economy. Second, quality concerns highlight one of the biggest challenges that the executive search industry is facing today. The issue is so grave that Russell S. Reynolds, founder of one of the largest and most prestigious executive search firms, recently declared that the executive search industry was "in crisis" and needed to establish its own standards.

This article is the product of a series of interviews that I conducted both face-to-face and on the phone with representatives of three executive search firms (two large global and a niche executive search firm). A typical interview lasted from one to two hours. I asked search consultants to describe a successful search that they have recently undertaken and then specific questions were asked about each step of the search process. The interviews uncovered that three aspects of executive search are responsible for the difficulty of standardization: the overwhelmingly tacit skills that underlie the search process, the high degree of customization and the large autonomy of search professionals.

Most of the steps in the search process, especially the steps concerning candidate assessment are innate, tacit, that is, the consultants cannot articulate how they are undertaking search tasks. The tacit element presents itself in every step of the search process. In the organization assessment phase tacit assessment skills help the consultant determine whether what the senior executives say about the organization complies with the reality. The need to use tacit skills also comes up in candidate assessment, during the phone interviews that assess a candidate unseen and in minutes and during the face-to-face interviews between the consultant and the candidates. The reliance on one's own personal experience is so pervasive that when search consultants were asked for abstract, not experience-based information (e.g. the definition of a concept such as "strategy" or "organizational culture"), they could not give a definition but answered with an actual example, providing their own personal experience. A search consultant's definition of "strategy" went as, "Strategy is: where does the company want to go?" Then he immediately provided an example: "I am looking for a VP of business development for a company that is a very focused organization, etc."

Owing to the tacit nature of search tasks, the required skills are hard to pick up from codified sources, such as textbooks or training materials. In the words of a search consultant, "It is really on-the-job experience. You pick up the phone one day and that is it. It is not something that can be taught. You either naturally gravitate towards it or you do not." There seems to be only one way for tacit assessment skills to become more reliable, through on-the-job experience. The following comment probably represents a consensus among search consultants: "… once you have interviewed somebody, then you'll get a statistically more accurate response. If you have been interviewing for many years, you can make pretty clear decisions and ask very careful questions." Owing to the innateness of the skills, behavior modeling, coaching and mentoring relationships are very important. Many search consultants learned the trade on-the-job, via learning-by-doing and watching others.

Second, executive search assignments are highly customized: they differ on the basis of the level of the position that is recruited for, on the industry and on the characteristics and preferences of clients. A search consultant commented that the nature of executive search changes by each search: "…there is no exact science to search. It is not there because it depends on who you are dealing with." To many of my questions in the interviews the answer given by search consultants was: "that depends." The level of the position for which the placement is made, for example, determines the size of the target list (the number of potentially qualified candidates targeted), the candidate pool being smaller for higher-level positions. Position also determines whether search consultants take part in the face-to-face interviews between the candidates and the client (a protocol that is typically not done in the case of the most senior level positions) and the amount of follow-up after the candidate has been placed. If the search was for a CEO position, then consultants typically undertake more follow-up in order to guarantee the quality of their placement and to maintain contact with the newly appointed CEO in the hope of future business. The high degree of customization calls for taking many contingencies into account and makes standards very hard to create and enforce across the organization.

What makes standards even harder to maintain is the highly individualistic professional workforce of executive search firms. Professionals' desire for autonomy has been extensively portrayed in previous literature: they were pictured as demanding the freedom to choose a project, to implement it on their own and to work without close supervision. Further, it was argued that they have a stronger loyalty to a profession, to a group or even to their clients than to the employing organization.

Executive search consultants are a special cast of autonomous professionals, a hybrid between free agents and regular employees: they generate their own business and they rely on their reputation inside and outside the executive search firm to do so. A search consultant described this process in the following way: "Something I enjoyed doing was getting new business which is the most fun thing about this industry. Just the client interaction, getting the client's confidence is fun, the ability then to make them feel confident that you can help them do their job, and then the repeat business." Because search consultants work independently and rely on external constituents such as the client organization rather than the employing one, managing them presents problems. The words of a professional who manages search consultants in a specialty are a great testimony for the autonomy of search professionals: "…in search you do not manage people, you coordinate their activities. We are all in this business because we do not want to be managed closely. If you try to manage a search person, you'll fall flat, because they are many entrepreneurs joined together. Each one grows their own business within the corporation."

It comes as no surprise, then, that multiple service standards co-exist not only across the executive search industry, but also within the same organization, and even within a single office. The interviews revealed that the differences in standards often reflect individual competencies and characteristics, such as the educational background and recent professional experience of a search consultant. To my question about the type of factors that search consultants assess about the organization, an ex-management consultant in the technology sector mentioned that the fit between the candidate and the business problem and the strategy that the organization follows are among the most important ones, while an I/O psychologist who worked in executive search for his entire career spent the longest time assessing the styles and personalities of the senior management team. Further, while there seems to be agreement on the type of standards (politeness, regular communication with the client, etc.) that executive search firms should conform to, the standards are interpreted rather differently. "Regular follow-up", for example, meant three occasions for some consultants after the first month that the placement was made, and seven occasions for others.

Widely varying service standards present numerous operating challenges for search firms. Obviously, the uneven quality of searches is hard to eliminate. Search firms have to redo a few searches each year because the placements fail to work out. One of my interviews explored a case when the search had to be redone because of the way a search consultant checked the placement's references: he did not contact enough referees and was ineffective in eliciting negative information about the candidate. As a result, the placement was dismissed within the first year for behavior that the references failed to uncover.

Second, executive firms function more as the collection of unrelated individual competencies (consultants) and weak organization-level competencies. Due to little effort to impose some standards on tasks, individual best practices are not codified and collected and do not spread across the organization. Although some consultants clearly do things in a way that should be adopted and modeled by others, their way of undertaking tasks is not institutionalized.

How could the problems that arise from a lack of standards be overcome? Attempts on the side of search firms include professional exams and certification as well as the enhancement of client awareness. The industry's problem of inconsistent, unreliable quality will be very hard to solve, however, due to the underlying features of the search task and of the industry.

Monika Hamori is a Ph.D. candidate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Currently she is working on her dissertation that addresses executive search and selection and the career success determinants of executives. She published articles on e-recruiting, executive search and compensation systems. She received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Budapest, Hungary. Prior to her studies at the Wharton School, she worked for the Hungarian Productivity Center in Budapest, a Japanese-Hungarian joint venture established to help Hungarian enterprises through providing consulting and training services.
She can be reached at hamori@wharton.upenn.edu