In Silicon Valley, the labor market is so tight, headhunter Hershey Keefer is breaking the rules.
How hard is it these days to find good people for your growing company? Well, consider the efforts of Sheena Rodgers, personnel director at the network software firm Nohital Systems.
Maybe, driving north on 101 through Mountain View last July, you saw her name on the billboard. "Let Me Please You. Call Sheena." Or maybe, taking in a movie at the Shoreline cineplex, you saw her name on one of the slides interspersed with those cinematic trivia questions before the previews. "I Want You. Call Sheena." Or maybe, opening one of the free newspaper racks on any street corner and thumbing through the full-page ads, you saw her name there. "For That Job of Your Dreams, Call Sheena." The 800 number again.
The kind of jobs Sheena wants you to call about aren't blow jobs or hand jobs - they are job jobs, starting pay US$65,000, plus full medical/dental, mileage reimbursement, profit sharing, and a salary review in 120 days. A total first-year compensation proposition of $78K. Oh, yeah, and options. Always options.
"I have two Stanford business school students working here as summer interns, and they expect options. Eight weeks they're going to work here!" said Sheena Rodgers. Though there was a chair behind her desk, she rarely sat down. Her voice was coughy in that just-got-punched-in-the-throat kind of way. Physically, she's reminiscent of Piglet - smaller at the shoulders than in the middle, but cute nonetheless. "It's gotten out of hand. In Silicon Valley, it's no longer a status symbol to drive a Porsche - it's only a status symbol if your secretary drives a Porsche."
Rodgers gives Nohital employees a one-thousand-buck bonus for any friend-or-family referral that leads to a hiring. Two years ago, she always screened candidates with drug tests and aptitude tests, but she doesn't have that luxury anymore. She puts up with the demands for window cubicles. She puts up with a COO demanding a chauffeur. She puts up with a programmer wanting to bring his 8-foot python to work. She has even been known to put up with a system-operator nudist who insisted that he be able to cruise the third floor - from midnight to 5 a.m. - with his clothes off.
Did I hear that right? A nudist at the office, in this age of knee-jerk sexual-harassment litigation? "You did," Rodgers said, shaking her head sadly. "System operators are in such demand. It was the only way to get someone to work the late-late shift. I'm under a lot of pressure from our counsel to replace him."
Getting new employees is only half the problem. Keeping the existing ones is even tougher. There's always a slightly better job for you in the Valley of Revolving Doors. Nohital's stock just took a third-quarter dip, so Rodgers's employees are listening when the headhunters call. And they always call. Rodgers recently threw out the org chart and told employees to make up their own titles, be creative. Why? Because when the marketing coordinator calls himself Resident Prophet, headhunters can't tell what he does. She removed the names of department contact people from the company Web site, which was operating as a dinner menu for the headhunters - here's who we've got, take your pick. And, of course, Rodgers has hired some of the big headhunting firms as a form of protection - as long as they're being paid to find her candidates, they're prevented from raiding Nohital.
Inciters of greed they may be, but headhunters do play by a few rules, called the hands-off rules: 1) If a company hires a headhunter to do a search, employees at that company are hands-off for a year; 2) if a company hires someone a headhunter found, that hire is hands-off as long as he remains with the company.
Or, at least, that's the way it's supposed to go. In June, though, Tiger Lindberg, an employee from Nohital's strategic-planning division, came into Rodgers's office and sat down in the chair across from her and announced his resignation. All employees rehearse their resignation speeches, for fear they will falter, but Sheena Rodgers recognized this speech as one canned by a headhunter. It was impersonal. The employee would not tell her where he would next be employed. And there was that telltale signature of a headhunter-induced resignation: the employee goes directly to the personnel director, rather than to an immediate supervisor, because the personnel director is less likely to get emotional and more likely to just process the paperwork. Which is what Rodgers did.
Two days later, she met for lunch with the personnel director at Adobe - they often brainstorm strategy. The Adobe PD mentioned that Tiger Lindberg was coming to work for him, and said he hoped Rodgers had no hard feelings. She took it in stride, but then she asked who the headhunter was that pried Tiger loose. He told her. She screamed.
"That's the guy who placed him at Nohital just 10 months ago!" It pissed her off. All that she had bottled up in the past year - the indignity of having to accommodate so much selfishness, the daily witnessing of unchecked egos - finally exploded.
She began a campaign to spread the word about this headhunter. She called every personnel director in the Valley, warning them about using this headhunter, and they all put his name in that special section of the Rolodex saved for convicted hackers and sexual harassers.
That was how, when I started research into a story on the good & bad of headhunters, I kept being fed the name of Hershey Keefer.
In the 1960s, Walker's Wagon Wheel in Mountain View was a hangout for single engineers from Fairchild Semiconductor, which was just a few blocks south. Now the toxic Superfund sites in the neighborhood have been cleaned up, and this area at the corner of Whisman and Middlefield is known to local realtors as the Land of Netscape. But the Wagon Wheel looks much the same. Think Wild West saloon crossed with a Flintstones episode. Saguaro cactus and coconut palms grow in the corral-like parking lot. Lava pumice on the roof looks like it landed there from outer space. The wall behind the bar is decorated with pistols. Iron skillets hang from the crossbeams. Horseshoe booths are covered in brick Naugahyde. A ray of sunshine hasn't found its way in here for 50 years.
On Thursday and Friday evenings, at around eight o'clock, the cocktail waitresses all disappear for five minutes, and when they reappear, they're wearing skimpy lingerie. Teddies and G-strings and thigh-highs and mesh bustiers. For a moment - not a long moment, just enough of a moment to show gratitude - all the men around the four card tables and the two blackjack tables put down their cards and pick up their whiskeys and gawk the flesh. Then their heads go back down, and their eyebrows pinch, and they try to remember how many face cards they'd seen since the deck was last changed.
This is where Hershey Keefer suggested we meet. He was here because card rooms are a good place for headhunters to find burned-out executives who love risk and have money to burn - guys who, with a little schmoozing, could be coaxed back into the labor market.
Keefer is old enough to have outlived testosterone reflexes. Somehow he manages to morph his potato-sack torso, indefineable hairline, and lipless mouth into a handsome bearing. He has the kind of commanding presence that, were he to strut down University Avenue in a pink suit, all the clothiers - the next day - would be hawking pink suits in their display windows.
He also has keen eyes that betray no trace of defensiveness. He was surely not going to take any shit from me, but I had to try. I brought up the hands-off rule.
His answer came back fast as an Andre Agassi return. "The hands-off rule didn't apply! Tiger Lindberg - I didn't place him at Nohital. I placed him at a start-up. Six months ago, Nohital bought the start-up. I've never done business with Nohital, never met Sheena Rodgers. That woman! Two days ago, I'm sitting in my new office in Palo Alto - you heard I lost my job at the firm over this, right? - OK, well I'm unpacking boxes and there's a knock on the door. First customer? No. I got served with a complaint. Nohital's suing me! They want their 30 percent back from when I first placed Tiger Lindberg."
"But when Tiger said he wanted to move, shouldn't you have referred him to another headhunter?" I'd learned this was the customary ethical way to handle the situation. Keefer shook his head. "Think of it this way: On Cisco's job-listings Web site, by far the most hits come in between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. What does that tell you? Employees are hunting for new jobs on company time. They've got one foot out the door. How productive can they be? Tiger could have been doing that. He'd been unhappy ever since the buyout. I made him a more productive employee by letting him stick to his work. I gave him advice about how to take his concerns to his superiors. I tried to help him work within the system. Going to Adobe was the last option."
I asked Keefer about the fallout with the recruiting firm where he had worked until recently, Permanent Solutions.
He waved his hand dismissively, sending forth an incredulous guffaw. "I'm not missing anything. Let me explain how it works. The market is so hot right now - headhunters used to do most of their work full-commission-on-contingency, but now they can demand retainers. One-third up front, one-third in 45 days - whether they find the candidate or not! Permanent? Bastards! Permanent has a database of 27,000 prospective candidates. They cash your check, do a file search, turn up some prospects. What incentive do they have to really dig beyond their database for the right person? It's a scam."
Since Nohital blackballed him, he hasn't been getting any business, but he insists that all he needs to get back in is one good candidate.
"If I show up at 3Com with a knockout candidate, you think they're going to slam the door in my face? Every time a start-up backs off from an IPO, disappointed employees there will take my call. Every time a new manager takes over an ongoing project, employees who are supposed to work under him won't get along with the new boss, and they'll take my call."
When they talk about what makes them successful, headhunters I interviewed talk about send-outs a month and send-out-to-placement ratio, or fee clearance. They talk about the right time to make backdoor reference checks. They talk about keeping their phone calls short to make more calls per day (one headhunter's phone handset created a pagerlike vibration when his phone call exceeded five minutes). But what no one would talk about except Hershey Keefer was the Close - getting a prospect to accept a client's offer. The secret to closing is simple: lay it on thick.
"You wanna demonstration?" he asked.
We were sitting at the bar. The World Cup Rodeo was on the television. Keefer slid off his stool and went over to the blackjack table, where he patted a guy on the back and invited him over.
The guy was maybe 45, but it was hard to tell because most of his head and face were smothered by wiry hair and his aviator glasses were tinted. All I had to make a read on him was his nose, which was chiseled sharp enough to cut wood.
Keefer was saying, "Man, you are going to be so good. I am going to have so many offers for you, you won't believe it. Think about it: Your talent. Your track record. Your dedication. Your insight. Your creativity. Oh, man, they'll be so wet for you. They are going to respect you. You are going to feel so appreciated."
Keefer had first found him sitting here a week ago. He wouldn't tell me his name, so I will call him, just for fun, the Yeti. The Yeti ran projects at Commodore, Apple, GO, and Silicon Graphics. Every one of his projects made it to market. Each time, he took his profits and cashed out. It's been two years since he's had an employee number. Keefer believes the Yeti would make some start-up a great chief technical officer - if he could only be convinced to get back in the game.
I asked the Yeti why he has a distaste for the labor market.
"Ethics."
Ethics?
"I ran a lot of development projects. I was a workhorse. Those companies owe me. But search my name on Nexis, and you'll turn up nothing. Did I ever get credit? It's unethical."
I reminded him that I couldn't search his name on Nexis because he wouldn't tell me his name.
"I hate reporters," he said. "I've learned to avoid you types."
In an attempt to defuse his hostility, I asked him how his luck was with the cards.
"Luck? Hah! I don't play by luck. When I'm lucky, it brings me no satisfaction. But a good system ... that's pride. Not betting systems. We used to call betting-system players 'martingales,' which is the word for those silly French trousers which - rather than zipping in the front - are buttoned up the rear. The only way to win at blackjack is a counting system."
He went on. "In the early '70s, I was maybe 16, I was in Newport Beach working for a stock analyst, developing a prediction model applying statistical mechanics. Then I got a call from this guy in Sunnyvale, Jerrod Lynch, and came to work for him. We made computers for card counters that were built into these Dingo boots. You counted with a toe-operated switch, and when the odds were good you got a little shock to the sole of your foot from the solenoid. Used the Z-80 processor. Ran off a C battery. I did all the programming. Total system cost about 10 grand.
"At first, we were so poor that when we telephoned computer firms long distance to order parts, we would call on the lunch hour so they would call back at their own expense. We made a lot of money for awhile, but that was typical of high tech in the '70s - we weren't in it for money, just for the mental challenge of beating the system. We reinvested every dollar inventing more advanced devices, so complicated we could never debug them. Typical of high tech, huh? Take your profits, that's been my motto since. Get in, cash out."
Somehow I didn't find it unusual that I would be lectured on ethics by an engineer who spent years cheating at cards. Nor did I find it unusual, in the twisted logic of the Valley of Revolving Doors, that an engineer, when he's complaining about his own lack of fame, would use the refrain of "ethics."
My next stop was a high-rise in downtown San Francisco, the 8th-floor home of Permanent Solutions. Theirs was the epitome of "office." It was so stereotypical that it sucked thoughts from my brain. It was the kind of upstanding place where people have to hide their Dilbert cartoons in out-of-sight places like the well of their desk drawers. Everyone wears wireless headsets, like the floor staff at Old Navy. Permanent has 31 professionals and that number again in support personnel.
In the merger-happy world of headhunting firms, there is some advantage to being big, because the shared database of prospects means that many searches can be filled just by combing the database. Those are super-profitable searches. On the other hand, the more clients a firm has worked for, the more employees are hands-off - so start-up firms or solo operators are more free to raid a client's competitor.
One of the nuances rookie headhunters grapple with is how well a candidate has to fit the job before it's worth sending him out for an interview. Permanent practically invented the clown-suit theory of job placement. The clown-suit theory suggests that jobs may have distinguishing characteristics that make each job seem special (the way clown costumes may feature big red noses or padded buttocks or rainbow hair), but nevertheless, it's still just a clown suit - meaning it's not supposed to fit all that well.
The partner I sat down with wore gray slacks and a blue broadcloth button-down with such fine pinpoint stitching that there was a reflective glare coming off it.
I repeated Hershey Keefer's explanation that he hadn't violated the hands-off because Tiger Lindberg had been placed at a start-up bought by Nohital.
The partner responded by saying that tip-toeing the edge of the ethics rules wasn't the point. "It's about the appearance of impropriety. This is a service business. It's about our reputation, as perceived by clients and prospects. We've worked hard to self-enforce ethical practices so when we cold-call a prospect and introduce ourselves, he doesn't automatically think, 'Slime.' We want prospects to think, 'Hey, the headhunter's going to save me a lot of time here. The headhunter's going to prescreen, so I don't waste time going to dead-end interviews. The headhunter's going to prep me for the interview, to make sure I make a good impression.'"
That seemed reasonable to me. As long as I was there, I asked the partner about what job skill sets were particularly hot. He was filling Silicon Valley's network firms with old-fashioned time-share programmers who had been working in the basements of Midwest insurance companies. He was getting multimedia executives from the ranks of board-game brand managers. For Internet companies, marketing was hot and programming was not - building a brand name was much harder than writing a site's HTML code.
He couldn't help but add how good the situation is for headhunters these days. "Prospects take their calls far more than they used to. Even entrenched, loyal employees will have breakfast with headhunters, if for no other reason than that it keeps them feeling part of the deal flow - they read about all these mergers and start-ups, and they want to be close to the excitement. And once the itch gets scratched ..."
I asked him why he thinks Keefer didn't refer Tiger Lindberg to another headhunting firm.
"He wanted the revenue."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "Envy. Some of us do quite well. Hey - my secretary drives a Porsche."
I guessed he and Sheena Rodgers had been talking.
Claudia Gomez is what is known in the headhunting trade as a "ruser," meaning one who performs ruses, meaning one who uses surreptitious methods to trick receptionists into giving out names and job descriptions of employees at Silicon Valley companies. The 26-year-old is on contract with Hershey Keefer, and he provides her with an office. In exchange, he gets first look at prospects from her rusing. The names he doesn't want, she sells to research firms, which in turn sell them to headhunting firms. Gomez gets $30 for a salesperson, $60 for an engineer, $70 for an engineer who wears shoes, and $100 for a female engineer - every company wants to improve its diversity.
I caught up with her on the campus of Stanford University, stalking summer students at the "Yahoo!" Engineering Building. On the third floor, down a gray-walled corridor, test results from last week's Electrical Engineering exam were posted outside the professor's office, indexed by Social Security numbers, so it was for all practical purposes anonymous. That didn't stop Claudia Gomez.
She waited down the hall, pretending to copy a posted reading list into her notebook. Twenty minutes passed. We heard the bing! of an arriving elevator. Footsteps - the rubber-to-heel slap of dime-store flip-flops - then a petite Asian girl with her thumbs tucked under her knapsack straps came around the corner. Her lack of tentativeness suggested confidence. She stopped at the test scores. There were 210 students in the class; locating her Social Security number took a minute. Gomez watched her face, her gestures. This one popped up on her heels and tapped them to each other, then spun and skipped off, sort of like the Roadrunner after yet another Wile E. Coyote debacle. My guess is she aced the test. Gomez broke for the girl and caught her elevator.
In five minutes Gomez was back, waiting for more prey. She had the girl's phone number and an appointment that evening for a phone call. "Hershey will want her for sure," she said.
"Is she close to graduating?"
Gomez gave me a hard stare. "That girl was 19. About to start her sophomore year."
"You're raiding the freshman class for talent?"
"The Silicon Valley job market has more ups and downs than Tyra Banks in a Wonderbra. By the time she graduates, who knows what the market will be like? Her parents are working two jobs apiece to pay her tuition. Stanford lets students take up to a year off without having to reapply. Why not do it? One year on the job, with options, she will earn enough to pay three years' tuition."
When she was done there, Gomez and I talked shop over a beer at the student union. Nothing about Gomez seemed borrowed - not the toss of her hair, not the way she crossed her legs on a barstool, not the joke she told about the headhunter, the venture capitalist, and the lawyer. I figured she sleeps well at night. She is recently from San Antonio, but she talks about local nightlife as if she's been taking in shows at the Cactus Club for years.
She came here for a sales job at Tandem Computers, but she didn't like it. She'd been slam-dunked by a recruiter, enticed by the high tech thrill, took the job sight unseen. Five months into it and unhappy, she sent her résumé to Hershey Keefer and booked a counseling session. Tandem was her fifth job in four years, and she felt she wasn't any closer to knowing what she was put on this Earth for.
In exploring her options, Hershey Keefer demonstrated a virtuosity around the career riddle that had been dogging her ever since she arrived as a freshman at Rice University and her roommate's first question was "What's your major?" Hershey Keefer knew careers. She decided then and there to be like him - a career counselor. She didn't want his job so much as she wanted his command of jobs in general. She wanted his mastery of the fear.
She seemed incredibly capable. I asked her why she's not yet a headhunter, still just a ruser.
"I can't close," she said.
I asked her to elucidate.
"For employees working in the Valley, it's always give and take - give soul, take money. Every now and then, an employee just wants to sit there and be stroked. All take. No give. Did you ever see that billboard beside 101, the Call Sheena ad? That company got it right. The metaphor for what people want is the blow job. Personnel directors are inside the company, they're in the midst of give-and-take, they can't do it. That's why they have to hire headhunters - to close. To go down on the candidate."
Claudia Gomez looked into her beer. "I don't know if it's in my personality to do that."
When they talk about what fulfills them, headhunters talk about helping people. Keefer said, "What makes prospects happy is often not obvious, not even to them. Eighty percent of my job is listening. Like picking a lock, listening for those tumblers to align. When there's a good fit, the deal closes itself."
Two months after Tiger Lindberg bagged on Nohital, Hershey Keefer convinced Sheena Rodgers to meet after work. She chose the Sportspage bar in Mountain View. It's a bar you're more likely to find on some beach in Jamaica: two plywood storage sheds frame a cracked-concrete courtyard and a sand volleyball court. While I sat with Rodgers before Keefer's arrival, the waitress knew to bring Rodgers a vodka-Collins without even asking. It turned out that Nohital's four-person coed volleyball squad had won the Wednesday night league three seasons running, and Rodgers's name was on trophies over the barback. But the streak was about to end.
"There's an Intel team this summer with a coupla ringers, a six-foot, four-inch outside hitter and this bump-setter girl who wears obnoxious bathing suits. I was curious whether the ringers really worked at Intel, because if not, that's against league rules. I hired a ruser to bribe a lady in the payroll department at Intel to search their database. The verdict? - they don't work there. Typical Intel move. They'll do anything to win. I mean, I've brought in ringers before, but I had the decency to add them to payroll, even if it's for just a token salary. But I can't turn Intel in to the league, because I'd have to explain how I found out."
As he talked, the courtyard quickly filled with dozens of young men and women, all looking incredibly self-conscious - the men straightening their belt buckles and the women smoothing down their skirts. Most were overdressed. They didn't seem to know their way around - the guys all wanted to check out the air hockey table and the pinball machines, and many women burst into the kitchen thinking it was the rest room. Then an organizing woman in a green neon sundress scurried around handing out sheets of white paper and yellow pencils. She handed some to Rodgers and me, thinking we were there with everyone else. The paper was a form for a free personal ad in San Jose's Metro, which wanted to move in on the Palo Alto Weekly's dating-game turf.
When Keefer arrived, he didn't seem to pick up on the scene. He went right to the point. "Where are we on this Tiger Lindberg thing?"
Rodgers didn't give an inch. "I think the way we left it was, you owe us 24 grand plus legal fees, the sum of which goes up at the rate of $350 an hour."
"Have you replaced him?"
Rodgers didn't answer. She'd replaced Tiger Lindberg pretty easily - every marketing manager with five years under their belt wants to be a strategy guy.
Keefer then said, "I hear you have a walking lawsuit on the third floor you can't replace."
Nohital's in-house counsel had been coming down real hard on Rodgers for letting a nudist take over the third floor. It was an unstable situation. Rodgers took a slug from her drink. Her eyes narrowed, then she looked at me accusingly - had I been the one who told Keefer about the nudist?
I shook my head.
"What about it?" she said.
Hershey Keefer opened his briefcase on the table and passed Sheena Rodgers a résumé. At the top, the name and address were blocked out.
"Who's this?"
"Your new sys op. She's willing to work the late-late shift."
Rodgers looked again at the résumé. "My god, she's only 19."
Keefer gave me that same got-this-one-in-the-bag wry smile I saw at the Wagon Wheel, then turned to Rodgers. "You can have her for 13 months, then she'll go back for her sophomore year."
"You want me to raid the freshman class? If she were a junior, OK, that I understand - but this girl's just started her education. Pro football doesn't even allow this."
The Metro organizing lady interrupted Rodgers as she stared at the paper in front of her.
"Oh, honey, don't think about it too hard. And use the codes, save letters." She shifted her sunglasses. "I'll give you a tip: everyone thinks they have to write something cryptic, but the girls with the simplest ads get the most responses. Don't worry about your weight, honey, just say there's 'more of me to love.'"
Rodgers's face was red. "I AM NOT - I am not filling out your stupid form," she stammered.
"Oh, honey, don't be that way. It's always scary the first time."
"This is a résumé!" Straining not to yell, Rodgers shook the paper in the air so violently that one couldn't tell what she had in her hand.
The organizing lady was unfazed. "Well, honey, if you want to go résumé style, that's fine, I'm just saying don't make a crossword puzzle out of it."
Finally the Metro lady walked away, and Rodgers sighed with exasperation. Her head wouldn't stay in one place. "I'm at my wit's end. People have no idea about the pressure I feel." She looked back down at the freshman woman's résumé. It took her a while to focus. "Why is she willing to work the late shift? How do I know that in three months she won't quit for a day job?"
Keefer leaned in closer. "Her boyfriend just left for the Stanford campus in Osaka, Japan, for the semester. She's lovesick. She can't sleep. She can't afford the phone calls. But if she works for you, she calls him on Nohital's dime, and during the late-late shift she'll be awake here during the evening in Japan, when he's not in class."
"Is their relationship stable? How long have they been going out?"
"Since the first week of their freshman year."
Rodgers murmured in an approving way. "And we make the Tiger Lindberg suit -"
"Go away."
Nothing was said for awhile. Sheena Rodgers kept staring at the résumé. She wasn't saying no. Hershey waved over a small Asian girl from the next table, the same girl I'd seen in the hallway at Stanford. I had to admire Keefer's timing, the crucial element of surprise. He was beaming.
"Sheena, I'd like you to meet Joan."
Rodgers looked up and there was this tidy, together, confident girl with her hand thrust forward for a shake. Rodgers's face was pained. She was forgetting to breathe. Weak with guilt, finally she let out a dying exhale, turned to Joan, took her hand and said, "Can I buy you a drink?"
Joan giggled. "Oh, those boys over there already bought me several." Joan pointed toward another table and waved. In Joan's hand was one of the personal ad forms, completely filled out.
The smile vanished from Keefer's face. He sprang to action, wanting this deal closed as soon as possible.
"You two are going to be so happy together. I just have a good feeling about this. This is the right move for both of you."
