I began my headhunting days in 1998 and right before the onset of the internet craze so we didn't have all the great proprietary tools or sophisticated search engines as we do nowadays. A Researcher like me had minimal tools to work with and relied heavily on phone skills to get the information we needed. In Part 1, I'm going to share a true story that I encountered on building a competitor organizational chart. In Part 2 of this blog, I'm going to share standard techniques that I use today as my first story is rare (not one of my Research friends has ever had this occur to them), but I do encounter similar situations today though not quite as easy as this story in such a protected information world that we're in. Finally, Part 3 will outline how a CI professional handles situations versus a Social Engineer. I have traits of a Social Engineer and aware of these techniques, but I am a CI professional and practice CI methods.
Mission Background:One of our clients was struggling with revenue and getting their butt kicked by their top competitor and hired our firm to find a couple of top notch Sales Executives to turn around Sales. As a Researcher, my job was to create a target list of companies to start identifying executives in other companies that might make sense to call for headhunting. During this process, I started to see a trend in the direct competitor and went to my Partner and suggested that maybe the reason for the loss of revenue could be due to the way the competitor was structured as an organization.
Our client was aligned purely by geography and their competitor was aligned by product group, retail channel, etc. My Partner thought maybe I was on to something and asked me to go create a full blown Organizational chart for this competitor. This was a large company with several Directors and VP levels which I think was close to 70 or so at these levels. This is not as easy it sounds really and takes time - usually a few weeks to do, but I had one day to do this.
Information Gathering Phase:I started with the basics - pulled names/titles from our database (10 names), looked at the paid tools we used which was all of them at that time (OneSource is an example and only VP and EVP levels were listed), and their website (nothing except the EVP's were listed here). The challenge was that I needed to find out who all the Directors under the VP and EVP levels were, but I had at least a starting point and could tell this competitor was aligned as I stated above - by product group and retail channel. I had to begin making phone calls directly into the company.
Researchers in Retained search firms tend to be Library Science majors and dread the phone work. I have a different profile than most researchers back in those days (quite different today) and actually trained as a stock broker first before going into headhunting. Cold calling doesn't get any harder than being a stock broker and I actually liked this part of being a stock broker oddly enough as I found it exciting and challenging. Now, I must point out, that I worked for some prestigious retained search firms and had guidelines to follow with ethical practices. Though, some people didn't follow the guidelines, I did.
As an example, if you were asked who you were, what company you were calling from, etc. the ethical guideline was to tell the truth.Luck or Being Nice Really Pays Off?One tactic we have as Researchers and Headhunters like Sales teams is to find several different locations for a company so that we have different places to call into. If you call into the same person, they get suspicious. I had my list of different locations and started making the calls. The hardest skills to teach is how you plan for potential obstacles you encounter. I've trained many recruiters on this, but how to handle situations is the hardest to train or prepare for because you are dealing with the human factor and can never be prepared enough on what an individual will ask or how they react to you because you never know. Planning what you will initially ask is easy. How the other side of the phone reacts, well - you can't full proof this into a roadmap.
I started making random phone calls and simply asked "I'd like to speak with the Sales Director for Product X please." First phone call, "Sure, let me transfer you." Sales people are on the phone all the time so I got a v/m - splendid. I found out the name and this person left their direct line on their v/m. That was easy. Next phone call was to a different site, same question, but for a different product. Not so easy this time. "I'm sorry, but I can't tell you who it is." OK - "Can you transfer me to John Doe instead because John is the VP of the entire group." I knew this because I had obtained the VP's name already from preliminary research. Her response, "He is out of town so I guess its okay then since you know of him; I'll transfer you to the Director instead." That was easy too really.
Third phone call, similar request for a Director of Product X, but this time it was music to my ears as a Researcher. The nice person on the other end answered and told me she didn't have access to the internal directory because she was a temp admin that day as the receptionist was out for the week. At first, I was thinking that it was a dead end, but simply started talking to her about being a temp and how her day was. This particular location happened to be in Virginia where I grew up so we had that in common. Part 3 will explain this further. After a few minutes, Roxy (made up name) told me to hold on and she would go ask someone and she came back and told me the exact person's name and gave me the direct phone # - gold mine for me.
An hour later, I called Roxy back and let her know "I needed to now talk to another person that handled a specific Retail channel." Again, she put me on hold and went and asked, gave me the name and direct line again. I was making some serious headway, but had a long way to go though. I made a few more calls into other locations as to not overuse Roxy's kindness. After several phone calls during the day, I was able to have a decent puzzle put together, but clearly had many gaps in the Organizational Chart I was tasked to build out.
Organizational Charts are puzzles and you build them piece by piece - back end information that you have access to and then adding to the puzzle through supplemental phone conversations for information.
I called Roxy a 3rd time. We were pals by now. I let her know "I was appreciative of her help today and that I had a deadline to hit and needed to talk to a few more people, but was confused on whom this time. " I gave her some details on what I needed (gaps in my org chart puzzle). She put me on hold again, but this time, she went and retrieved an org chart for the entire sales team. OMG! Roxy started rattling off names and numbers left and right. At this point, I only had about half of the 70 folks still after a full day’s effort though. Yes, org charts take a lot of time.
Roxy then told me, "I have to put you on hold for an incoming phone call." She came back and asked me, "why don't you just give me your Fax # and I will send you the org chart." WHAT? Of course the Social Engineer in me thought immediately, I can't believe this and then put HER on hold. I went down the hall and asked an Associate I worked with if our FAX line was secure and if our FAX line disclosed who we were. It was secure - even back then. Headhunting firms are like that.
I got back on the phone with Roxy and said, "Okay, I have my FAX #."
At 4:00, I went to my Partner with the entire competitor org chart. She was blown away and couldn't believe I was able to deliver it. Her expectation was some information, but not all of it.
