Forget What You’ve Heard Come Work for Us

Imagine having to recruit a job candidate for a company that had to change its name in an effort to crawl out from under a reputation trashed by an $11 billion accounting scandal, the largest bookkeeping fraud in history. If that’s not bad enough, imagine having to try to convince that person that he or she has a bright future at an outfit that not too long ago had to lay off 20,000 employees, and that until April was still mired in bankruptcy. Imagine having to repeat that sales pitch successfully 36,000 times.

    In other words, imagine that you’re Mike Randels, vice president of worldwide staffing for MCI Inc., the Ashburn, Virginia-based corporate survivor of defunct telecommunications giant WorldCom. “Common sense might tell you that a situation like we’ve been through would derail our recruiting,” he says. “How would we convince someone to come and join a company like us?”

A “$25 billion start-up”
    Randels and MCI have faced the daunting task confronted by numerous other companies–Tyco, Computer Associates, Putnam and the like–whose reputations recently have been battered in the headlines, the stock market and in some cases the courts. These tarnished brands must overcome their reputations and recruit the new talent they need to regain their former market preeminence.

    As Randels and other workforce-management professionals with experience in crisis recruiting explain, the job is difficult, but not impossible. A company with a viable vision for its future can bring new people on board if recruiters confront the reputation problem head-on and turn candor into a selling point. For some candidates, the stress and risk of a corporate turnaround seems like an opportunity rather than a deterrent.

    MCI is an example of the results that a skillfully crafted crisis recruiting strategy can achieve. In the past year, even as it was shedding its besmirched former name and emerging from bankruptcy, the company managed to hire 36,000 new employees–33,000 at its 15 call centers across the nation, and another 3,000 in various other positions. In addition to overhauling its senior management under turnaround chief executive Michael D. Capellas, MCI has rebuilt its finance department virtually from the ground up. Randels says that MCI has recruited new hires at basically the same rate that its corporate predecessor did in its pre-scandal boom times, and at the same cost  Equally important, he says, the reborn company has attracted scores of new employees who see change as an opportunity rather than a threat. The key, he says, is getting out the right message in recruiting.

    “We’re taking on the reality of what we were, and turning it from a negative into a positive,” Randels says. The message to candidates: “Okay, this is what we were, but we’re going in a different direction now, and we’re not going back.

    “We’ve been able to get people to see the new MCI as a start-up company. When you think about it that way–well, there aren’t too many $25 billion start-up companies around, so it starts looking pretty attractive.”

    Umesh Ramakrishnan is managing director of the New York-based executive search firm Christian & Timbers. “MCI has done a tremendous job of rebuilding their brand–from a recruiting standpoint,” he says. “The scandal really has been left behind.”

    Ramakrishnan, who works out of Cleveland, and other experienced crisis recruiters say the process must start with a clear vision of the company’s future–not just how it will survive in the short term, but also how the business will regain its market position. At MCI, for example, Capellas unveiled a strategy for leveraging the company’s existing Internet infrastructure to become a leader in IP telephony and wireless communication. Capellas also has sought to reinvent MCI’s business culture, making it more aggressive and faster-moving. The workforce-management leadership’s job is to turn that vision into a blueprint for personnel moves.

Full disclosure: the only approach
    Though it’s tempting for a management team to simply clean house, experts say the best approach is a carefully targeted effort to acquire and upgrade talent. Peter Drummond-Hay, co-director of the executive assessment practice for Russell Reynolds Associates, says a post-crisis company should evaluate its existing workers as carefully as it would look at job candidates. He recommends an in-depth interview process, designed to analyze employees’ work style, motivation and other workplace behavioral characteristics. “The key is to evaluate people not just on past performance, but on their potential under the new management,” he explains.

    Specifically, a company should be looking to spot employees with a high degree of “change orientation”–that is, the ability to function successfully during the inevitably stressful and chaotic process of remaking the business. A company then may want to re-recruit those workers, offering them increased compensation or promotions to ensure that they’ll stick around. “The good people are going to want some guarantees,” says Richard Gast, a Lake Forest, California-based executive recruiter who has worked for corporate clients in the midst of comebacks. “To keep the senior people, you may have to negotiate a parachute for them in case things don’t work out.” While a company is trying to figure out whom to keep, Drummond-Hay says, it should also identify the positions for which it needs to hire people better suited for change.

    Before going out to find that new talent, however, the company’s recruiters should prepare to talk about the company’s tarnished reputation. Ramakrishnan says that full, detailed disclosure is the only approach that projects credibility–particularly when a company is trying to hire experienced middle managers, who will have the sophistication to ask tough questions.

    “When your company’s dirty laundry already has been aired in the Wall Street Journal, there’s not much point in being evasive,” he says. “To the contrary, the recruiter needs to know all the details and be ready to talk about them. If you can’t do that, you may not get past the initial contact, because when you’re a company that is trying to get out from under a cloud, you’re not going to get a second chance to make a better impression.” Ideally, Ramakrishnan says, recruiters should provide enough information to ensure that they–rather than newspaper investigations or gossip on Internet discussion boards–are the ones shaping the narrative that candidates develop in their minds.

Not about fitting in
    Once those uncomfortable questions have been dealt with, Ramakrishnan says, recruiters must be able to guide the discussion from past woes to where the business is going, and what sort of opportunities the candidate might find in the transition. “I always tell candidates that the company you go to work for shouldn’t necessarily be the one that looks great now,” Gast says. “You should go to the one that you’ll be proud of when you leave six or seven years from now to take an even better opportunity.”

    Recruiters shouldn’t paint too pretty a picture. “You’ve got to lay it out for them–here’s our vision and the opportunities, but there’s going to be a lot of noise and growing pains that they’ve got to be able to deal with,” Ramakrishnan says. “I’d say that about 60 percent of the potential hires out there are too risk-averse to handle working at a company on the rebound, and you’ve got to weed them out. You don’t want people who are going to be shaken up when the person in the next cubicle doesn’t come back tomorrow.”

    For that reason, he says, the best candidates usually are found not at stable, mature companies but at high-growth firms that tend to attract risk-takers. “It’s like the NFL draft,” explains Tom Wamberg, chairman and chief executive of Clark Consulting. “You’re looking for impact players, the ones who are going to make plays, not just fit in.”

    Randels agrees. “We interviewed some people who were put off by the situation, didn’t have that desire to be a bit of a pioneer,” he says. “We didn’t keep going after those people because, frankly, they wouldn’t have done well in our new culture anyway.”