Rolodex, and a telephone, right? Perhaps in a one-person firm that
might be true, but in a global search firm, with multinational rela-
tionships, clients expect recruiters to identify and attract the best
candidates in the world for every senior-level position. To accom-
plish that, we require sophisticated resources. We also require a
healthy, open business culture that supports teamwork. In fact, with
international client service teams, our business requires that we
share knowledge about executives, industries, project progress, and
our clients’ companies across time and space. Our clients pay for
knowledge.
With more than 25 percent of our assignments involving con-
sultants in two or more offices, and all of our assignments including
at least two associates and an assistant, collaboration is critical.
That collaboration, supported by our culture and our technology,
enables us to get searches done, share best practices, function as a
team worldwide, mentor new associates, and always put the
best team and the accumulated knowledge of the firm at the client’s
disposal. We cannot rely onlyon an individual recruiter’s network
of personal contacts or even on the contacts known to the
recruiters in a particular office. We must bring the entire firm’s
knowledge to bear on each assignment so as best to serve the needs
of our clients. Therefore, each assignment represents a test of
our ability to identify, capture, and resynthesize the aggregate
knowledge of the whole firm, both current and accrued, for the
benefit of the client.
We believe that the challenges we encounter in identifying,
capturing, and resynthesizing that knowledge are similar to those
encountered in other professional service businesses. Thus we
believe that our experiences may be instructive for others, even if
their services differ from ours.
Trust and Knowledge SharingWhen organizations are small and their business cultures are
healthy, they do not encounter knowledge-sharing issues. When
everyone knows one another, trusts one another, and understands
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