what she knows or why someone else would be interested. The sec-
ond person may not know what he needs to know or how to learn
it. In these cases, only a chance meeting or a casual conversation
has any chance of unlocking what the first person knows for the
benefit of the second person. As Larry Prusak (former head of the
IBM Institute for Knowledge Management and author of Working
Knowledge and In Good Company) has told us repeatedly, we need
to make time and space available for “water cooler conversations.”
- They don’t share knowledge because they are not aware of what
they know.During the course of a search, recruiters call people and
ask their advice. These people are called “sources.” They may have
some third-party relationship to the target position, such as
bankers, if we are seeking a chief financial officer (CFO). The
banker may have worked with many CFOs and may have opinions
about which ones would have the skills being sought by our client.
Or the source may have once worked with a person we are inter-
ested in learning about. During the forty or fifty or more phone calls
made in the initial stages of a search, a recruiter will learn a great
deal about the client company’s image in the marketplace and its
relative competitive position. The recruiter will also learn a great
deal about various leaders in the industry. All this information is
probably very interesting to the client. However, by interviewing
clients, we discovered that recruiters sometimes forget to share this
information with them. This oversight was caused by a miscon-
ception on the part of the recruiter that what he or she had learned
was not special. The recruiter actually took it for granted that the
client already knew what he or she had learned during the sourc-
ing calls. We now encourage all recruiters to meet regularly with
clients throughout the course of a search to relate as much as pos-
sible of what they have learned in the marketplace.
We also came to realize that we have skills and knowledge that
could be put to work beyond the search process. We also now con-
duct executive assessment projects for our clients, evaluating the
executives already on their team. This relatively new service has
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