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Excerpts from Executive Search Review Interview with David Nosal
The November 2006 issue of the Hunt-Scanlon Advisors publication Executive Search Review featured an in-depth interview with David Nosal, Chairman and CEO of Nosal Partners. Following are excerpts from the article:
ESR: What led you to leaving a large executive search firm and creating your own?
Nosal: A key reason for leaving was the desire to create a model whereby the executive search firm can truly make use of its global resources for the betterment of a client organization through quality service and outstanding execution. Competition within the major search firms for clients and candidates alike has become fiercer than ever before. The resulting lack of true collaboration, coupled with the cultural single-mindedness about driving revenue, made it easy to decide to go out and build a better model for clients, candidates and employees.
ESR: During your time with Korn/Ferry were there any things in particular you felt were missing from the search process that you felt was important to provide clients?
Nosal: The days of allowing partners in search firms a platform to just sell business without putting any real teeth around their accountability to clients and to each other should be over. Unfortunately, this mentality is still quite prevalent in a number of firms. As I mentioned earlier, internal competition amongst consultants for candidates and clients, as well as relentless pressure to drive revenue, rather than to execute well on existing business, was a huge factor in my decision to leave Korn/Ferry. I was the company’s largest biller, and the vast majority of my business came from repeat clients, because my focus was then, and still is, on delivering world-class talent through a world-class process. This value has now been institutionalized at Nosal Partners, where the overwhelming majority of our projects come from repeat clients.
ESR: What are the advantages to organizations of using a smaller firm like Nosal Partners as opposed to a larger firm?
Nosal: There are significant advantages to utilizing a mid-sized global firm. The old school belief that bigger is better needs to be dispelled. The notion that an organization with 400-700 partners provides a better delivery system than one with 20-40 partners is a myth. The key to outstanding search work is having a culture of quality delivery built within your organization to propel and nurture a philosophy of true collaboration, teamwork, accessibility and delivery. If I can get all of my partners truly focused on clients and candidates – not only on their own assignments, but also on the company’s assignments – we will deliver an exponentially higher level of performance and satisfaction than those organizations that preach, but are challenged to deliver on, a global platform. In addition, as a mid-sized firm, we don’t struggle with the extensive off-limits issues around candidates and clients that hamper the larger firms. The industry needs to be shaken up in a way that holds all firms accountable for world-class results. If you don’t have this accountability built into your governance system as a company, you tend to more consistently provide mediocre results, versus world-class results.
ESR: Your firm describes its services as “Executive Leadership Solutions.” Can you explain what else this includes other than the typical executive search services generally offered by them?
Nosal: Our whole strategy around Executive Leadership Solutions is driven by our clients asking us repeatedly to help them sort out a wide variety of executive leadership issues. Our services include, of course, executive search, but it also has a lot to do with helping small, medium and large corporations deal with other issues through coaching, assimilation, executive team alignment and organizational alignment. Our strategy is to build true strategic partnerships with clients, as opposed to tactical one-off relationships. Nosal Partners’ board, CEO and other C-level clients depend upon our partners to support them with a much broader set of expertise and higher level of thought leadership than a traditional search firm would provide. Another key component to our offering is our recently-introduced integrated assimilation services for searches of a certain level. When you evaluate why many senior executives have historically failed, in many cases, it was not because of lack of technical competence, but rather, lack of a comprehensive assimilation strategy to support their onboarding experience. We believe strongly that this type of support not only ensures far greater chances of long-term success for the executive, but also promotes a higher level of overall performance for the company. As a result, a full-time Nosal Partners executive development partner works closely with the search partner, selected executives and appropriate management team members to develop a comprehensive assimilation/onboarding roadmap.
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Welcome to the Winter 2007 edition of Inside/Outside – a quarterly publication providing insights into human capital challenges experienced at the highest organizational levels, as well as news about our growing firm. The choice of name for our publication reflects Nosal Partners’ integrated approach to solving leadership challenges – Executive Leadership Solutions™ services and our multidisciplinary methodology which enables us to support clients both from the “inside” through executive development support, as well as from the “outside” through executive search and interim executive solutions.
