mutable law of market forces. Simply put, barring a nationwide financial crisis, the salary level of new graduates from business, law, architecture, and other professional schools is dictated by the market, and is not likely to decrease by any significant margin. Therefore, the concept of retention, while unseemly to many veterans, is here to stay. Firms ignore it at their own peril, because for the most part, young professionals always have a continuous market for their services.
Because professional staff salaries are high and competition for professionals is so intense, firms have had to institute retention policies to keep professionals in the firm once they are hired. This is distinct from many businesses for several reasons.
First, the “revolving door” that characterizes much of American business is even more pronounced in the services business. Thirty or 40 years ago, the expected career path of young professionals was to get a job with the best firm that they could find and, once hired, pay their dues with the ultimate goal of making partner, managing director, principal, or other appropriate level within their industry. Once you made partner, in the former reality, you
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had made it. And firms had a significant advantage over their associates in keeping them—firms by gentlemen’s agreements did not “raid” other firms for talent, and the stigma of being a “job hopper” was, for a young professional, potentially career-threatening.
Today, however, that world simply no longer exists. Professional recruiting firms are so widespread that many of them focus on a single industry: accounting, law, architecture, advertising, real-estate and so on. It is not uncommon for a lawyer in his or her first 10 years of practice to jump to as many as three or four firms before settling down for a longer period of time.
Also, the cache of being made partner is not the Holy Grail that it once was.
Issues of quality of life, family time, double-income families, and entrepre-neurship are now much more likely to dictate individuals’ employment decisions than the prospect of multi-decade employment with a single firm.
With the revolving door now a reality, firms must realize that their own business needs must take into account the damage that it can pose. Professional services firms, as stated earlier, rely on their work product and the institutional memory of their professionals to deliver their services. If a firm becomes too much of a revolving door for associates and partners, the consistency and quality of the work product suffers and the institutional memory of a client’s needs or eccentricities is almost nonexistent. Many managing partners often hear the following refrain from clients: “ Who is this John Smith? What happened to Mary Jones? She handled all of our matters before and she knew what she was doing. Now I have to teach this guy everything all over again.” The resulting extra billable hours (from loss of institutional memory) and inconsistency of work product can irrevocably damage the client relationship. In fact, the change-out of a critical professional can often cause a client to reexamine his or her entire relationship with the professional services firm and possibly result in the loss of that client.
The Four Types of Professionals in a
Professional Services Firm
Having discussed the importance of recruiting and the differences in recruiting for professional services firms versus other businesses, we now turn to the nitty-gritty—the processes of recruiting and retention. This forces us to break the inquiry into three parts. First, we identify whom the firm is looking for and who it is that works for the firm. Then, we identify how the target will be hired. Finally, we identify how that person will be retained once he or she is hired.
Each of the individual phases of recruiting and retention is examined more closely later. At the outset, however, we tackle a preliminary subject—
the identities of the recruits and employees.
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Attracting and Retaining the Best Professionals
Although we have listed four types of professionals that exist in any professional services organization, there are many more variations of the overall archetypes. Each reader of this chapter will doubtless recognize some of the persons listed. This list is a learning device for the professional to realize two concepts: (1) Many professionals, even within the same firm, can be very different, and the way in which they are to be recruited has to be congruent with their own specific personalities, and (2) the manner in which each person views himself or herself within the firm can go a very long way to determining a successful retention policy. For you to successfully recruit and retain the different categories, it is critical ahead of time to establish which type of personality you are seeking. As can be seen, these levels are also consistent with the “finders, minders, and grinders” described in Chapter 10.
The Rainmaker
This individual is often a grizzled veteran with an established book of business in the beginning of the last third of his or her career or an ambitious midcareer networker who is viewed as the future of the firm. The job of the rainmaker is self-explanatory—it is to make the rain by which the grass grows, that is, go get business on which the firm can execute. This person must have social and communication skills to impress clients but also a base of knowledge to convince clients to use his or her firm.
Many professionals like to think of themselves in this category, but in reality, the number is far fewer than most people realize. You can test this theory for yourself, even without access to the financial records of a firm. Simply go ask a random number of partners in any professional services firm the identity of the firm’s top rainmakers. Then ask the same question of the associates or managers. The partners’ answers will most often vary widely, but the associates and managers will nearly always name the same three or four persons (in addition to their own direct supervisor, who can be discounted from the survey). Three times out of four, the persons named by the vast majority of associates will be the rainmakers who are responsible for a significant percentage of the firm’s revenues.3
The Specialist
Often one of the most intelligent professionals in a firm, this person has a profoundly deep understanding of one specific area of the firm’s services.
Often the area is one that is so complex that no other professional can approach the level of expertise required: tax, employee benefits, financial derivatives, and so on. If the rainmaker is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, then the specialist is “a mile deep and an inch wide.”
Specialists can be rainmakers and often are, particularly if their specialty is arcane or their experience cannot be easily matched by other firms. For
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example, a securities trial lawyer who is a former SEC director of enforcement will bring in a significant amount of business no matter which firm has the benefit of his services. At the same time, specialists also have the advantage that at some point in time, all of the firm’s clients will eventually need their services. For example, in a larger firm, the tax partner always will have business regardless of his or her original orientation.
The Worker Bee
Ask any managing partner, and he or she will tell you that the worker bee is absolutely critical to the success of the organization. But a careful distinction needs to be made between the junior-level work that all professionals must perform early in their career and the organization and execution of all the moving parts of an operation that another professional, more senior, must perform to make sure the project gets executed. Both tasks encompass aspects of the worker bee, but the latter is far more important.
All professionals, at some point in their career, must play the role of the worker bee, whether they have any aptitude for it or not. This is known, in professional services and other industries, as “paying your dues.” For accountants, there must always be the manager who is willing and able to spend months on a used-car lot, counting the number of green sedans. For the lawyer, someone has to pour through thousands or even millions of documents in the arduous process of discovery, especially in a complex case. For investment bankers, someone has to run the numbers backwards and forwards, sideways and upside down, and pass that information up the food chain that informs the structure of a deal. The war stories that every attorney, accountant, or investment banker inevitably passes on to younger colleagues will more often than not have their basis in the “dues-paying” portion of that person’s career.
But these low-level dues-paying tasks are simply part of the learning process for any young professional. Everyone performs them, and, at some point, the young professional must make a choice to either continue performing them or move into the areas of rainmaker, specialist, misfit, or others. The larger issue is identifying the worker bee who loves the role, who does not necessarily want the spotlight, and has an incredible ability to perform the role. This is the partner or managing director who has the ability to execute on projects but not necessarily the skills or desire to perform the role of rainmaker or specialist. And these persons, perhaps above all others, are critical. They are the offensive linemen of a professional services firm, blocking and tackling even if they never see the end zone with the ball in their hands.