subjective evaluation of each recruiter. Sharing knowledge with
others for the benefit of clients is among the key criteria that are
included. In addition, each client is surveyed by an outside consul-
tant at the end of each assignment, and a key question on the
survey concerns whether the recruiter brought new knowledge to
the client.
- People are competitive and believe that their knowledge increases
their power.In a recruiting firm, that would be indicated by the exis-
tence of candidates and sources not added to the corporate data-
base. We require that every recruiter and researcher add every
person relevant to a search to the global corporate database.
Everyone must identify who these people are, how they are related
to the search, and why they are or are not relevant to the assign-
ment. In addition, the database is useful for both short-term project
management and long-term knowledge sharing. If it is up-to-date,
it can help recruiters manage their own work. In addition, if it is
complete, others can learn from it and get ideas to more success-
fully execute future assignments. - There is no vehicle for storing and categorizing knowledge, or the
existing vehicle is difficult to use.We find that if the technology is
even a little bit inconvenient, no one will use it. There is a very
fine line that demarcates payoff and the willingness to enter infor-
mation that may not seem to be immediately useful to the person.
Technology has to be easy to use, and it has to be perceived as
“good for me” to ensure that people will use it. - They don’t know anyone would be interested in what they know.
In professional services, tacit knowledge is a major issue. If knowl-
edge is not being shared, it may be merely because the first profes-
sional does not realize what he or she knows and is not aware that
others might need to know that too. This is the hardest challenge
for the manager. Such impediments can be overcome only in casual
meetings among professionals, when there is time around the
proverbial water cooler to exchange stories about getting the work
done for clients. Only in these casual conversations will the shar-
ing of tacit knowledge take place. The first person does not know
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