Understanding the nuances behind effective executive hires is crucial for any organization. Join Paul Swaney as he sits down with Jason Blonstein of Ex-Consultants Agency. Jason shares his unique journey from West Point graduate and military service to the world of executive recruitment. Discover the importance of stakeholder alignment, the challenges of transitioning executives from large corporations to smaller companies, and the benefits of looking outside your industry for top talent. Jason also provides valuable insights on how candidates can effectively network with executive recruiters and navigate the interview process. Get ready to transform your approach to executive talent acquisition!
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Inside The Private Equity Hiring Machine: The Playbook For Executive Hires With Jason Blonstein
Transitioning From Military To Executive Search Career
I’m sitting down with Jason Blonstein. He’s a Partner at an executive search firm that’s disrupting the search model. We’ll tell you a little bit about that. We met a few years back when I was at a private equity firm. Anyway, thanks for coming on the show, Jason. Great to sit down with you. Why don’t you just walk us through a little bit about your background, and then I’ll dive in and poke the bear a little bit?
I’d be happy to. Thanks for having me. I’ve watched a few of these and was excited to be on. I’m a Partner in an executive search firm, and I think a lot of people who get into executive search fall into it. I jokingly call it the island of misfit toys because there’s no standard background. A private equity person a lot of times they want to invest in a bank, it’s their typical career path a lot of times. Executive search is the opposite, and I’m no different.
I grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from West Point in 2001. When I was in my basic course, the towers came down, and I knew that I was going to have a busy time, and I did. I went armor, I was a tanker, and I was deployed to Kosovo and Iraq. After five years, I decided that was enough excitement for me and was ready to move on to my civilian life. The problem is, I think, like a lot of transitioning veterans, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I bounced around a lot. I went into ops. That’s what we’re good at. We know how to do operations.
I was good at it. It took me a while to figure out that I didn’t like it and then I fell into search. How I fell in was, I don’t know how much people know about Illinois politics, but there’s a reason that two of our governors are in jail right now. A lot of times, staff positions are given out almost like a form of nepotism to supporters. Illinois elected a Republican governor for the first time in a long time. His name was Bruce Rauner. Bruce Rauner was a billionaire business person. He wanted to put qualified people onto his staff, which in some ways was a little bit of a novelty for Illinois, but he needed help doing it.
He asked a friend of mine, with whom I used to work at Constellation Energy, to help staff the cabinet, and Bill said he needed a good project manager. He knew I was a good project manager, and he asked if I wanted to help. That’s how it started. I met a gentleman by the name of Brad Holden, who is the head of Holden Richardson, who’d been at Russell Reynolds and Korn Ferry. He said, “You’re good at this. Do you want to come work for me?” That was many years ago. Now, it’s been fun.
What’s it like on day one? You’ve gone from an ops role and ostensibly you come in as like, I don’t know, an associate or whatever you would call it, or like a junior recruiter, and you just got to start banging the phone. What’s that transition process like? How was a day in the life of? Did you get any buyer’s remorse at some point?
I liked it from the get-go, and everyone’s different. For me, it was a combination of a very people-oriented and project-oriented, but there’s also a degree of it that’s cerebral, and you really have to just sometimes put your head down and think and strategize. That appealed to me. Also, an average churn lasts three months. You’re constantly churning and doing new things and learning about new things, and I like that as well and have been able to keep my interest. The transition was always bumpy. They’re certainly interviewing is as much an art as it is a scientist. That’s certainly something that I had to learn. It wasn’t just natural. I think about my first few interviews, and I was very robotic. It’s almost like just reading this.
It was like banging out the list.
Now, I don’t even really have an agenda. I’ll have questions that I want to get to, but I’m just more likely to let it flow, and whatever word I get to them, it just makes sense. I try to make it more of a natural conversation than an interview.
It’s so funny. When we do interviews of clients and executives at McKinsey, I’d always have an interview guide, and I’d set one up, and I might hit three things on it. When I first ran a project, I handed a couple of new hires an interview guide. It came back with these long answers to everyone typed up in Word format, and apparently, it tortured executives in many cases because they went through absolutely like a robot, and the executive just isn’t getting them off track. He’s like, “I’ve been assigned a task. I’ve got to get through this list, or I’m going to get in trouble.”
That’s funny. It’s not surprising, though. Interviewing is a little harder than people think. It’s more than just answering or asking questions. Certainly, if you have a script or a template, that’s great, but sometimes you ask the question and are not getting the answer you were looking for. You have to redirect. You’ve got another way to get it out of someone. You’re asking a question for a reason. You’re trying to determine certain information about the candidate. It’s always, if you don’t get that information, if you move on, again, that’s something that you don’t know about that candidate, you have to figure out how to get it in a different way.
Using An Innovative Approach To Recruiting Models
You guys have a little bit of a different model. Could you walk me through that? How are you guys changing the model? A little bit of recruiting. I have a lot more experience. When I had to commission a search, I was always a problem. It’s like the court fairy, Russell Reynolds, Spencer Stewart, and we we call him with what we need. I was just like, “Get me a guy that isn’t going to mess this up.” It’s just like a very fulsome process. How are you guys doing it a little differently?
ECA stands for Ex-Consultants Agency. We were founded by a former consultant who saw the need in the marketplace to shake things up a bit. He is very process-oriented and looked at it like, “How are we doing these tasks? Who’s doing what?” You break it down. There’s the sourcing of the candidate. There’s the interviewing of candidates, and then there’s the presentation of candidates. Generally, at search firms, what happens at a Korn Ferry where I was, for example, is that I, as an associate, will be responsible for sourcing candidates as well as interviewing candidates.
Those are very different skills, and sourcing candidates is not necessarily difficult. It’s just very time-consuming. What we’ve got is like, “Why would we have someone doing both of these things? If we could offshore part of this and have people doing it at a much cheaper rate, we could reach out to a lot more candidates in a shorter amount of time because we freed up that interviewer’s time and that person can now conduct more interviews.” That’s pretty much how we changed it.
Not to say that other companies haven’t offshored what they call their research, but I think the way that we’ve done it and the fact that we’re founded by consultants. As I said, we’re very process-oriented and established good quality control measures and things like that. It’s been a recipe for success. I was skeptical. At first, I was like, “If someone reaches out to me from the Philippines, which is where our office is, am I going to think that spam? Is this response rate going to be too low?”
Our response rate wasn’t as high as when I was at Korn Ferry because when Korn Ferry calls, most people pick up, but it was higher than when I was at Holden Richardson. Part of that was maybe testing our messaging, things like that, but also just how professional the outreach is that people realize that this is a legit thing and not a scam. It worked. Our average search time, as I said, is below 90 days. That’s a lot shorter than most firms.
What part of the lag time did you compress? Candidly, I found out a lot of the lag time at a portfolio asset I worked with was an interview scheduling for board members. Some asked the guys, “If you have seven days to do this, if you would like him to give input.” I probably had to put a stick in the ground at some things. What are you doing to pull that off to just compress that time?
The biggest thing is just the identification of the candidates. Typically, we’ve identified the candidate that gets hired within the first 4 to 6 weeks. The remainder of that time is spent getting through the client’s process. That’s why the operational friction of scheduling is always a factor. I will tell clients from the get-go, “The more you can make this a priority and in your schedule, the faster this process will go.”
Shifting From Fortune 100 To Private Equity Roles
Stuff’s always easier if it’s a distressed asset. I did some work at a distressed asset, and I was like, “Guys, if you have to interview somebody, you’re perfectly available to get on a Zoom at 8:00 PM. That is a thing we can do.” It’s a message thing. You’ve seen both sides. You’ve seen the Fortune 100 and private equity. I have been seeing a lot of executives lately who are on the Fortune 100 side. We’ve got one of the situations where now that went from a very big, I’ll call it a general manager role to a much smaller private equity-backed company. I dinner with them and he’s like, “This was my shot until I take a meaningful swing.” He’s mid-40s. Are you seeing that, too? I just love market scams. What is that like for you?
A lot of private equity will be skeptical about bringing someone from a big Fortune 100 company and moving them into a middle-market company. There’s a perception that they have almost unlimited resources to build a whole team. When you’re moving into a PE-backed middle-market company, you’re operating very neatly. You have to wear full hats and you have to do all that thing. That’s the risk.
Interviewing is as much an art as it is a science. Share on XSometimes, it’s similar when we talk about a management consultant moving into a smaller company for the same reason. If you’re at McKinsey, you’re not working with a lot of $40 million revenue companies. The way that I always advise people to fight that or to position themselves in a way is to say, “Show them things that you did that were scrappier, that were more entrepreneurial.”
“Make sure those things are on your resume. Did you ever have to build a business from scratch? Did you ever have to do whatever you can put in there to make yourself look more scrappier? Give good examples of times that you had to do that. That’s the way to do it.” Instead of saying, “I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and do what it takes,” give them an example of a time you did that.
I think in the military, we always have great examples of those because it happens all the time where something didn’t get done, and you’re the officer, and you got to make sure it gets done, and it doesn’t matter if you’re there until 10:00 PM to midnight. In the corporate world, you don’t always see that. Being able to provide examples of that, I think, will alleviate people’s concerns about your ability to go downstream.
Mistakes In Hiring: Private Equity Leadership Challenges
What can we take from that? Do you see private equity teams hiring portfolio company leadership? What mistakes and what could they do better?
Number one, to shamelessly plug ourselves, is they over-index a search firm that has specific experience doing that specific search. The fact of the matter is that search is not that difficult. It’s not rocket science. It’s just time-consuming. You could say, “This person has a better network.” We all have the same network. We all have the same database. I can find anyone on LinkedIn. How many people who are not on LinkedIn are executives that you’d want to place at your company?
Zero, but less than a tenth of a percent, for sure.
On top of that, there aren’t a lot of jobs that are like, “There’s only six people in the world that can do this job.” Usually, there’s a lot of answers. I think it’s more important to look at how their process is. As I said, we like to talk to as many people as we can. We like to cast the net very wide. One, because it makes the search close faster, but two, it lets us see who’s out there and who the best people are for that role.
That’d be one thing that I see a lot of private equity firms do that I disagree with. I get it because you don’t want to get it wrong, and you’d rather have someone who’s had success before. Search firms that just rely on their network and don’t have a strong process for sourcing, which is, in some ways, the Shrek model. They value their relationships and their network, but it doesn’t always pan out. That’s why their searches tend to last a lot longer.
That would be one thing. The second thing I see people who don’t do well or can really disrupt a search’s success is not having stakeholder alignment. Part of that is my job, to try and get that, but at the same time, this person says we need a growth CEO, and this person says we need an operation-focused CEO. You have to figure out the compromise because there’s a problem that needs to be solved and identify what that problem is.
It’s interesting that this asset. We hired somebody with what I’ll call fungible experience in industrial services but wanted more structure and process of a big company. The feedback you get from people in some of the orgs is, “I need 30 years of industry experience.” I am sold. I believe, with the exception of really esoteric, like semi-conductors, I could go run a semi-conduct any manufacturer, but there might be some esoteric. Given that, is that how they get down to it? There are six people in the world that could do this job. What has been a frustrating part of my career is that people anchoring to industry experience. That just is not my opinion.
Everyone thinks their industry is unique.
You don’t understand this business. It’s very different.
It’s not usually. I think there are probably some industries that would have a longer runway to lean up on. Health care, the billing system, and everything else are so complex, including all the regulations around them. Most other industries aren’t like that. Even if there are some things that are unique about them, smart people are going to be able to figure it out. That’s what McKinsey does. That’s what these consultants do.
They come in and how many projects did you walk into and you didn’t diddly squat when you started about that industry or that function? People do, it’s the same thing. They over-index for a recruiter who has found that person. They also over-index on people that have that specific industry experience when a lot of times, people outside the industry have a fresh perspective.
Certain industries have better training than some, so it can always be good to be open to people outside your industry. It also makes your candidate pool a lot bigger. The thing that’s going to drive the difficulty of a search more than anything is the size of the candidate pool. One of the biggest ways you restrict that is through geography. Now you’re restricting it through geography and through industry and through specific skillsets and through seniority.
Not having stakeholder alignment disrupts the success of a search. Share on XMy pool is getting acceptable candidates is getting smaller and smaller as opposed to, like if you say, “We’re open to this person being a hundred percent remote.” My tool went even from a large area, like New York, to the entire country. Do you really want the best talent? Is that really what’s important to you? Are you just trying to get a seat in the body or a body?
Advice For Candidates Navigating Executive Recruiters
Let’s pivot over to the other side. I’ve got the readers for the podcast. It’s bi-modal. You’ve got like thirties, and then you’ve got this bucket. That’s like 22 to 25 to 26, and there’s a dip. I get this question a lot, and I always say, “Give me general advice.” What advice do you give to candidates who are working with an executive recruiter and how to approach you? There are two lenses, like they’re in a process with you and then people like, “I don’t know any recruiters.” How do I get to know the recruiters? What thoughts would you have on that?
To me, this is more just how do you network, and how you network with me, in my mind, is no different than how you should network with someone else. First off, you have to understand an executive recruiter. I don’t work for the candidate. You’re not paying. The client is. My job as a partner at the firm is to find new business. It’s not necessarily to talk to candidates. That being said, I’m a pretty helpful guy. It does help to have a good network of qualified candidates to turn to if you need it. I usually am willing to jump on calls with people and give them advice.
Probably the biggest thing is to help me help you. This is when you’re networking as well. If you want something from me, do your homework. Come to me and say, “I noticed that you are connected to Joe Smith. This company, I’ve been trying to get in there. It’d be great if you could give a recommendation or if you could give me a referral. By the way, I’ve already created an email template you can use. You can copy and paste it.”
That’s what I do when I ask for a referral. If someone does that for me, how much more likely am I to help them than if they’re just like, “I probably get 5 or 6 inbounds a day,” with people that are just like, “I’m in looking for my new job. Can you jump on a call?” “I can, but I only have so many hours in a day.” This call is not going to make me work. As selfish as that sounds, but that’s the reality of business.
Help me help you is probably the biggest advice I could say. When you are looking for an executive recruiter, most recruiters tend to focus on an industry or a function. Looking for people that are specific to that is the area that you are turning to a position in is probably going to be, you’re going to have a higher rate of success. Plus, those are the people that are going to have access to the jobs you want anyway. Do your research there, and then do your homework when you’re asking for help.
This is super interesting. The email template is highly tactical. I’ll take all most people. I bet I take less calls than you do. I have the most recruiters I know take it like their calendar is just packed.
That’s all I do all day. Whether it’s a candidate or a potential client or a client, that’s why it’s things that we ever get a cold.
Common Mistakes Candidates Make During The Hiring Process
You’re just white for a week. You’re caught by Friday at 3:00 PM, and you’re white, but somebody sent me a message on Twitter, and I’ll take a call. I’ll take a call with you. It might be 7:00 PM. That’s fine. It’s just like five minutes in. Nothing. I go over. I’m trying to talk words. I’m trying to pull stuff out of them, ask questions. We’re done in 22 minutes. I stretched it that. That’s a mistake. That’s moderately obvious. We’re not doing your homework. What other mistakes do you see candidates make when they’re in a process with you and like around networking?
They don’t follow up. Say thank you. Seems simple, but thank the person who just interviewed you about that. I don’t know. That’s table stakes, but you would be shocked how many people don’t do that. I bet I’ve only had a dozen people through my whole career send me a thank you after an interview.
A dozen?
Yeah. Maybe 20 or 30. I don’t know.
Let me back up with practice. You were doing a search. They just talked to your client and interviewed your client. You’ve had less than a dozen like sending you a note, “The meeting with the client went. Here’s some thoughts.”
No. After they interviewed me, sending me a note afterwards, thanking me for my time. They should also do that with clients. When you interview someone with a client, you send them a note. You say thank you. It’s noted. It just shows. If you can quickly summarize the things, you just say, “I thought it was an interesting opportunity, and because of that, YZ is very excited to join.” It just helps your candidacy.
Is that so rote to me? I was looking at taking a $200 million P&L years ago, and afterwards, I was at the call. I make notes on the call, and then you’re getting a PDF. “We talked a little bit about the manufacturing tear-down process to get some cost out. Here’s a case study. I did this.” It’s five slides and it’s off the shelf. To me, that should be standard, particularly for senior executives. I don’t know. That’s interesting. I’m going to ask. I’ve gotten a lot of follow-ups, but I would say 85% of them are just because somebody’s checking a box-ish. I’m supposed to do this.
That’s okay. I don’t know. After I have a business development call, I will frequently just send them, like we said, like a tear sheet or a couple of pages. You’re like, “Thanks for your time. Here are some recent searches that we’ve done that I think are relevant for what we talked about.” That type of thing. I think it’s just become acceptable. When I was transitioning out of the military, every person I interviewed with, I did a handwritten note too and I mailed it. I don’t do that anymore. At the same time, that was like how I was raised and how I grew up.
Now, in this digital world, it’s just like you don’t have to. Your interaction becomes much more transactional, and it’s in an industry that, like mine and yours, built on building relationships. If you are transactional with how you interact with people and only interact with them when you want something or need something, people will notice that. You’re not going to get where you need to go.
I found this problem when I was at McKinsey, when I would tell people it’s like the associates that eventually grew into partners and the senior partners. They met all their core clients when they were like an early engagement manager, and their clients grew into senior executives. They would tend to be 2 to 3 years younger than their clients. They move without spread, and their clients, everybody at McKinsey, was in a sprint to get the next title book. It’s like marinating for three years as an engagement manager. Eventually, somebody will call you with a problem.
I don’t even know if I have a question, but it’s one of the things I’m observing with a younger generation is that people are becoming more transactional, I think now. It’s like, “What if I do this? What does that get?” It’s no, you’re going to have about 50 offline conversations with somebody that’s going to lead to nothing. Somebody is going to call you two years later and say I need a problem. I did a piss poor job of explaining that to early mid-career professionals. Super good. The question I will ask you is, how do you decide who to invest your time with? You can’t help everybody.
Number one, if it’s a veteran, I always jump on a call.
Fair enough. Me too.
We’re tribal by nature, but that’s my tribe. I just feel like we owe it to them. That’s number one. Two, I will probably jump on a call with someone who is a current or former management consultant just because that’s our niche. It’s always good to have that relationship. Outside of that, I’m going to look at what function or industry this person is in, and then I might help them or offer them to talk with one of my colleagues who’s more in line with them. That’s how I prioritize. Again, I’d love to jump on a call with everyone and help them. I don’t have that time.
Consulting Vs. Banking: Which Career Path Is Right For You?
That makes sense. A buddy of mine runs the global P practice at Hydric. “Can you get me on this person’s counter?” I’m like, “I’m not asking them to get you.” I’m just not going to ask him to give you 30 minutes. I’m not. He knew I knew him, and I’m just not. I’m sorry. That would be, I could see him. If I texted him, he’d roll his eyes. It’s like not. It’s not appropriate. I’m happy to introduce you to five other people. Not that one. I get the question all the time, banking or consulting? I went to consulting late. I was in the military, then a bunch of ops jobs and consult. What do you recommend younger people do? Banking or consulting if you had to pick one?
I think it really depends on what you want to do, where your end state is. If you do want to get into private equity, I do think of the safer route is banking. It’s harder to be a consultant and move into private equity. Even if you do, you’re probably going to move into portfolio operations, not necessarily on the deal side. Not to say that you can’t, it’s just not as common around.
It depends on what you want to do. If you don’t know what you want to do, I’d probably steer people towards consulting. At a lot of these firms, they very much try to expose you to lots of different types of industries and projects when you’re more junior to see what you like and what you want to do. In some ways, it’s like a business school, where you get exposed to a wide variety of business functions, some of which you might not know anything about.
It’s probably one of my bigger regrets that I didn’t go to business school right after I got out of the army because I think that would have been a better way for me to figure out what I wanted to do. Plus, I got my MBA later. I did it through the University of Illinois, and I learned a lot. To be frank, the network hasn’t been great. What’s critical about business school is what the network is giving to you. These are things to think about.
My two cents is if you’re going to go to business school, go full-time. They might accept if an engineer that needs an MBA to check a box to become a business, like a P&L leader, right at an oil and gas company, but notwithstanding that, I would go full-time. The thing I tell people about consulting, too, is that I do 6 to 24-week projects and then rotate rapidly. Your pace of learning goes up because nobody’s rotating you out of your job.
Six months in, when you just got there, do some work. I see a lot of like Steve Jobs. He’s like, you have to own something for 2 to 3 years. I agree with that when you’re 50. When you’re 40 or 50, that’s fine. When you’re 27, you’re not owning anything. You don’t own anything in a company when you’re 27, like not real.
Unless you started the company.
Fair enough.
If you're transactional with how you interact with people, people will notice that. You will not get where you need to go. Share on XYou don’t know what you’re going to like. I found that I liked finance after I had gone to business school. I never would have guessed that that’s something that I would have enjoyed. At that point, I was older and already in my career, but it wasn’t hard to pivot at that point. If I had just done that straight out of business school, it might have been like, I liked finance. I might’ve gone into investment banking. I definitely encourage younger people, if you have the opportunity, to get out there and experience new things because you never know what you’re going to like. I tell my four-year-old when I’m trying to get them to eat something.
You never do know. I always think the Doge trains are going through. I always thought that a high school guidance counselor was the most useless job. Honestly, when I joined the Navy, I ran out of high school. I remember the goal. You have to figure out what you want to do with your life. I just couldn’t conceptualize. Deciding at eighteen what I was going to do for the rest of my life. My thing is like, you’re not going to know what you want to do until you do it, and like it. It’s so lost.
I was like we just push the college guidance counselor stuff over the overseas. You have the Philippines, who would do a very good job at doing that. Why do you need $100,000 and 80,000 employees at every single high school? I know it always seemed like a waste to me, but I have some guidance counselors who aggressively attacked me now, but it seemed like low-hanging fruit.
I hear what you’re saying. It’s so hard to make. How many people at eighteen decided what they were going to do and that’s what they wound up doing? Very few. One of the things I also tell people is like, “Look, if you don’t like your job, you got to figure out, is it the job or what I’m doing or is it the company that I’m in?”
That’s a good point.
If you and the company like what you’re doing in the actual job, that’s pretty easy to fix. You just have to find a culture that’s more in line with what you want. If it’s the job that you just don’t like, then you have to figure out what it is that you do enjoy. We spend the majority of our life working and with our coworkers. I probably spend more time with some of my coworkers than I do with my family. That’s the reality of it. If you don’t enjoy the people you’re working with and you don’t enjoy what you’re doing like that’s a crappy life.
I agree with you.
My secret to happiness is to try to find that. Once you do, one, the money will come. It’s much more important than money. It’s much more important to your happiness than what your base salary is.
I get these questions. I get these anonymous questions on Twitter, and one of them I got from a kid who was like, “My base salary is $150,000.” I’m assuming he was 25 or 27. “My base salary was $150,000, $175,000. Total cops around $250,000. I feel like I’m leaving money on the table, sitting with my peers, and I posted up.”
I said, “Do you like your boss? How’s the work environment? Are you learning a lot?” I have another question. He didn’t want to even know what he was. “Follow up. My boss is great. He supports me in every single thing that I do. My development opportunities could not be better. It could not be better. He gives me like all the stretch assignments.” I popped up the top.
War Stories From The Recruiting World
I’m like, “Would you really go across the street for $50,000, $35,000, $10,000? It’s a risk. It goes back to a little bit of transactional thinking there. One of the things I’ve gotten some feedback on for the show is, can you tell me a war story about how a time that a search went terrible or like it was like a total catastrophe, or like the client was tough or just something interesting? If you struggle, victory, too, because those are good stories.
How about I tell you the worst interview I ever had?
I would love to hear the worst interview you’ve had.
This is before I went to a recruiter, but it still sticks in my mind.
If you have the opportunity, get out there and experience new things because you never know what you'll like. Share on XWhen were you interviewing, or were you interviewing?
I was interviewing. I was interviewing a candidate. I was the hiring, and I was interviewing, and we were basically looking for a supply clerk. I was working for a company that built commercial satellites, and we had a big parts room, and we just needed someone to come in and help organize and manage it better. This guy comes in, and he looks like Milton from Office Space. I’m not judging. He’s a little overweight, whatever. He had the glasses, he had all this stuff.
I just knew he wasn’t going to be a fit. My manager, who was working with me, knew that when I said, “Do you have any other questions? Do you have any questions for us,” I wanted to wrap up the interview. This guy asked, “Do you have a cafeteria with a sandwich bar?” That was his question to me. Do you have a cafeteria that has a sandwich bar?
That’s hilarious.
The funny thing is we did, and it took every ounce of my discipline not to say to this guy, “We do. You’re never going to see it.” I said, “Yeah.” My boss’s office was right next to me. After we left Canada out, the walls were very thin. He came over, and he was like, “Did he ask if we have a sandwich bar?” “Yes, he did.” There were some other things during that interview that were a little shocking. When he was talking to me about, he asked if we had a lot of Asian people working at my company. We did because we were in the Bay Area, and a lot of my boys were Vietnamese there. I’m like, “Yeah, we do.” He started talking about the intricacies of the Asian mind and how they can do. I’m like, “You’re in an interview.” Even if you believe that stuff, that was one of my more.
How long did you survive at the interview? Was it twenty minutes, or did you have to go 40?
After he made those comments about Asian people, I think that was probably like fifteen minutes in, and I was like, “All right.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“What questions do you have for us?”
When I was with McKinsey, once you’ve been there a year or so, they put you into the hiring process. It’s like for the script, there’s a phone screen, so there’s a case, and then there’s a first person and a second person. The first in person, and somehow, I figure it’s like American Idol, like somehow, someone that had no business being there snuck through the cracks with a super awkward. That’s a consultant.
The airplane test on the phone. Somehow, this guy has snuck through the cracks. He smashed my case, like absolutely smashed my case. You have to give him a case. It’s like an interview and then the case at the end. He smashed my case at the end, but I already knew there was no chance at the beginning. I had to go through the process of a case. I’m thinking that’s how he got through. Man, was he awkward? It’s trying to give an example. It’s been 15 years or 10 years, but to the point, I just wanted to leave.
How To Handle Short Job Stints
I was like, “Tell me about a time that you had to have a tough disagreement with a team member and how did it work?” He’s like, “I bulldozed my way through that one.” It’s super funny. I crowd-sourced a couple of rapid fires a couple of days ago. If you go to a company and you’re there six months and you realize you make it, made a mistake, what’s the best way to manage that? If you’ve got a one-year on your resume, I’m making this up, how do you manage presenting that if you need to change jobs again three years later?
There’s not necessarily a right answer. What I would say first is why you do not like it there. Is it something that can be changed, something that you could address, or is it just a cultural fit and just knowing that this isn’t right for you? I think everyone can have 1 or 2 of those in their career. I don’t think it’s like the end of the world if you just explain it.
I had one of those. I was in Korn Ferry for four months. I just was like, “This place is not, this is not my jam.” I just say that it just wasn’t a cultural fit, and you don’t need to denigrate anyone or anything like that and talk poorly about the situation. That always looks good or bad. Never talk negatively about a prior company or a prior boss. You can always frame it in a way that gets your point across without being negative.
The question is, if you do that a lot, have you had a lot of those? The problem might not be the company. That’s what you have to look at yourself and say like, “Is this my problem or is this bad luck?” I have a series of it. It’s probably not at that point. If you’ve had a few of those at one point, you’re just like, might just have to stick it out. Otherwise, you’re going to be unhireable.
Never talk negatively about a prior company or a prior boss. You can always frame it in a way that gets your point across without being negative. Share on XI made a higher mistake a couple of years ago. When I looked at this person’s resume, I saw that it just showed so much trajectory. I was like, this is a resume. I met this person, and they were very inspirational. I liked them immediately and pounded the table for more money for them. It was a train wreck. This was a new one for me. I figured out this person never stayed at a company more than two and a half years and not in the entire career.
Negotiating Compensation: Expert Advice On When To Push
Everything was parlayed into an upmove, though it wasn’t like one, one, one. It was like barely enough time to not make some impact and then rotate out. The person was a huge opportunist, and they were very complaining and they all thought everybody was out to get them for everything. I hesitate to say we’re paranoid, but we’re pushing that boundary. It was a new one for me to get. Negotiating for compensation packages. What is your advice? When should you negotiate? When should you push? When should you not? What’s your take on that?
As a candidate, my advice is to be transparent and upfront with what you need. The reason I say that is because most roles they have a budget, and the job’s going to pay what it’s going to pay. There’s probably a range. If you’re way outside that range, they’re probably going to be able to do it. Why are you wasting everyone’s time? If you’re upfront and honest with them from the get-go, say, “I need this if I’m going to take a new job.”
You’ve already established that. Once you get to the offer stage, if they’re not giving you that, you just say, “I told you I need this.” More things could come to light about the position, and things could change. You might say, “I didn’t realize I was going to have to travel 75% of the time.” Something like that. In general, I feel like if you’re upfront from the get-go, it’s beneficial for everyone. I train my team to do that.
Get it out of them first, so there’s not a problem.
By law, I cannot ask you what you’re making. I get why that law is in place, but in fairness, it wasn’t really designed for executives. At the same time, I support that law. What I can ask you is what you want to make. Where do you need to be in your next role? I do that for the same reason. One, I want to anchor them to that number and make sure that number is within my client’s budget. Two, I want to keep chugging in with them throughout the process to make sure that it’s good.
I want to make sure that I can tell my client that it’s good so that when we come to the offer, there’s no surprise. To me, that just makes the process smoother. As a candidate, a lot of people want to hold their cards closed and be like, “I just put just pay them in what’s market.” “I can tell you what the market is for this role. I probably know better than you do because I recruit for it, but that doesn’t mean that that’s going to make you leave.” It doesn’t have to be the secret of negotiation. It can be a collaborative effort.
I was very comfortable sending my compensation packages to the recruiter. They’re probably migrating somewhere. I’ve had to redact a couple of things for some proprietary stuff and say, “Look, if the number is 30% more than this.” I was very comfortable doing that.
There’s a little bit of a taboo about it in our culture about talking about what you make. It’s not like that in other cultures, for sure, which is probably why they don’t. Other places don’t have as much discrepancy in their salaries. That’s part of what HR does. If you’re applying to a large corporation, I’m telling you, they’re going to have comp bands that are standardized.
They’re not much wiggle room.
If you’re not in that, either they’re going to have to up the title for you, and then you might not meet the years of experience, which can also be somewhat limiting. It’s me. It’s silly to play that game of hiding what you’re making or what you want to be. You’re just wasting everyone’s time. The job is going to pay what the job.
Fair enough.
I very rarely see people reach and be like, “We like this person. We’re going to pay $1,000 more than we budgeted.”
By exception, I’ve seen a CFO that could grow to a CEO. That negotiation went, he’s guys like this and up. Ironically, it was a down move for this person in comp. Even with, do you know what I mean? I wanted to get the person, and there was more than one ship. If you’re like a ten percent bonus and a base, there’s not much room. Also, like, “If I go there, you’re going to be okay. Fine. I need 50K more, and my equity needs to go up 25%.”
There are more levers to pull.
The Most Impactful Book In Jason Blonstein’s Life
The last question I ask everybody is, what book have you read that was most impactful on your life?
How to Win Friends & Influence People? That book is old. I think it’s the best book out there about leadership. I love the way he tells the stories. It makes it weird. To the people who don’t know, this is Dale Carnegie. I think it came out before World War I or something.
I thought it was the ‘30s, but yeah, it might be the ‘10s.
Maybe. Some of this stuff is dated, and they might use terms that aren’t politically correct. You’ve got to take that with a grain of salt, but there are just lessons in there that I have taken to heart. I try to teach my children. One of them is that no one thinks they’re bad. Everyone is thinking they’re acting in a way that they’d somehow have justified in their mind and that’s okay. Whether that person is a murderer or an unethical businessman, that’s just how people are. You have to realize that when you’re talking to people, no one thinks they’re the bad guy. You’re the hero of every story.
Everyone thinks they’re competent. Honestly, I think everybody thinks they’re highly competent. Let’s go with the factory. I’ve never met a maintenance tech who didn’t think they were the best maintenance tech in the world. “You don’t understand. I keep this thing running.” I went, “Bro, you’re not very good. You’ve caused a lot of accidents.” Super good sitting down with you, Jason. Where can we get in touch with you? I do want to pre-apologize if you get 150,000 new LinkedIn notifications when this comes out.
I’d like to. There’s a lot of snow on the ground here. It’s frigging cold.
It’s a cold day for us at 60. It’s sunny and 60 degrees. Where can we get in touch with you? I do want to pre-apologize if you get 150,000 new LinkedIn notifications when this comes out.
You can find me on LinkedIn. As far as I know, there are only two Jason Blonsteins in the country. One of them is a professor at NYU. He’s a lot smarter than me. That’s not me. That’s probably the easiest way. Our website is www.ECA-Partners.com. You can find my contact information there too.
It’s really good to sit down with that, but we’d have to do it again. Hopefully, when the deal market picks back up next year, fingers crossed.
I’m optimistic.
I am more optimistic than I’ve been in the last few years. We’ll see. Anyway, good talking to you. Talk to you soon.
Thank you.
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