The View from the Office. 

I met up with JJ Houldin, the co-founder and managing partner at Sift, an executive search firm, at the Hungry Ghost Coffee shop in Tribeca.

Sift is an upstart firm developed in partnership with 25madison, a venture and innovation platform. It provides executive search services to investor-backed businesses from private equity portfolio companies to early-stage businesses.

Previously, JJ was a principal at Acertitude where he specialized in leadership advisory and recruiting technology executives. Before that he was the director of talent at Juxtapose and spent over five years at Spencer Stuart.

JJ and I overlapped at Bloomberg a decade ago but didn’t work directly together. We connected online after he read some of my posts and reached out. I was excited for the conversation because I’ve long been obsessed with recruiting. 

The industry is ripe for disruption due to the combination of a) analysis from generative AI b) the availability of new personal performance data c) the growth of social media platforms to promote and discover talent. 

The industry remains dominated by the SHREKs. If you don’t know the acronym, it’s to executive search what FAANGS are to technology. SHREK stands for the top five firms: Spencer Stuart, Heidrick & Struggles, Russell Reynolds, Egon Zehnder, and Korn Ferry.

Those firms have built businesses based on long-standing relationships with executives they place and companies for whom they do recruiting. I agreed with JJ that the availability of new data and social media may combine to change the game. 

It reminds me a bit of what is happening in real estate in New York City. You have new firms gaining market share such as Compass, which has pioneered data analytics and Serhant, which has taken advantage of content creation to boost its visibility. 

We talked about how the personal performance analytics that now dominate sports (as highlighted in the Michael Lewis book Moneyball) will gradually become more available for executives. Given our backgrounds, it was natural to picture a Bloomberg terminal for executive talent with a wide array of data to make comparisons.

Imagine a world where CEOs, CFOs and the rest of the C-suite have AWS-style stats like quarterbacks. You could more easily compare performance via a wide array of metrics and non-traditional scenarios, such as how well they perform given varying team sizes. 

Data and technology has transformed the trading of securities, particularly at quantitative hedge funds such as Citadel that use complex factor models.

It seems inevitable we will see more analytics on the top talent companies recruit. 

You can reach JJ via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.