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Bankers are notoriously disloyal. They can only really be counted on to stay in their jobs up until they get paid their annual bonuses. Once the cheque is in the bank, it’s time for the annual game of musical chairs when bankers all get up and change banks.
As this time approaches the banking headhunters begin moving in, looking for candidates and upcoming roles. Headhunters prey on bankers the way bankers prey on corporations. Our job is to find funding needs and fill them and their job is to find staffing needs and fill them. Like us, they generally only get paid on success, and so also like us they are highly motivated to close deals.
And this it is for this reason that my friend Shirley the headhunter calls me this morning.
“Alan, there’s a role opening up at one of the top regional banks early next year that I think would be great for you.”
Although I have worked with Shirley for a while and know that she is generally trustworthy, I still have to ask her the obligatory question, to be sure that she is not just fishing for information:
“Do you have the mandate to fill the role?”
“Yes I do, but it is at a very early stage and I wanted to call you first, because we’ve already identified you as high priority candidate for this position.” This is the kind of flattery that headhunters always convince me with. Whether it’s ever true I don’t know and it wouldn’t surprise me if they said this to everybody, but it always gets me to the meeting.
I know that all of my staff are probably speaking to headhunters, and my boss must expect that I am too, but going to a meeting with one still produces the guilty feeling of visiting a secret mistress or cutting school. So I tell my secretary a lie about going to see a client and shamefully walk out of the office with sweaty palms.
When I sit down with Shirley later that day she is late and looking stressed. I have plenty of time to chat and so I ask her how her day has been.
“You wouldn’t believe this,” she says, obviously glad to vent her frustrations, “but I’ve just interviewed a candidate with an impeccable CV, copies of his Harvard MBA, letters of recommendation from a top US bank, and he was completely hopeless.” This is not yet incredible, I can’t count the number of times I have interviewed people who looked great on paper and then turned out to be complete drips.
“So we decide to do some background checking, “ she continues, “and it turns out he’s never been to Harvard, never worked for the bank he has letters from, and probably never even read the CV he sent us. The whole thing was fake, from the career history to the documents themselves.”
Turns out that it is quite easy to buy relatively genuine looking MBAs, university degrees, letters, or just about anything else you could want in order to create a good looking CV.
“My job is getting harder and harder” she laments.
I agree. I can’t imagine having her job and having to spend the day dealing with self-centred greedy bankers, all of whom live in huge apartments, earn loads more than you do, and who still moan about how dissatisfied they are with their compensation packages. Why anyone would choose this to begin with is beyond me, let alone if detecting counterfeits becomes part of the job.
Turns out the role she is recruiting for is in Singapore and although I am getting more and more frustrated at fighting my way through the thickening Hong Kong smog each morning, I am just too lazy too move countries. So I pass on that opportunity and go back to the office to have a look at my CV and perhaps tone down some of the embellishments.
I’m slightly disappointed that the role wasn’t suitable, in some part because I actually enjoy the interview process. When else do I get to have an hour-long conversation about me? There is no other context where that is appropriate or even likely.
But the real reason for my disappointment is that I am generally happier about my current job when I know that I could be going somewhere else. Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t see the annual game of musical chairs as the best means to gradually increase in the size of my CV and my pay-packet, but I do like to know that if one day I get asked to do something really distasteful that I can tell my boss goodbye. Not being currently pursued by a headhunter or in the process of interviewing for another bank creates the unnerving sensation of being trapped.
Then again, every banker knows that there is always an alternative career path out there if things aren’t going their way. Where do you think all the headhunters come from?
Watching musical chairs is fun even if I don’t play
Sunday, January 13, 2008
