Alsmith, Reclutamiento y Selección de Ejecutivos

Ethics

What I learned from my father

My experience in the executive recruitment and selection field is the product of a long process of learning, of acquiring knowledge, of observing and analyzing economic and social phenomena, the successive changes registered in the world economy and, above all, of long years practicing this profession.

According to the etymological origin of the term, vocation is a call to practice a given activity. A certain mental chemistry is also needed in order to fully develop a service vocation. One only needs to nourish the chemistry properly for it to grow.

My particular case was one of growing up and developing professionally in the executive recruitment and selection environment. I owe a great deal of what I presently am to my father, John E. Smith Jr., one of the most prestigious headhunters in Mexico and the world over. Foremost among the things that he taught me were that our work involves one of the noblest assets in industrial activity: human talent. I also learned that only the highest of ethical principles can be involved in managing such an attribute, and that success is based on confidence, on clear rules and on the client/recruiter relationship.

Below are several of the foremost aspects of that relationship:

A search is an extremely personalized activity. The client's loyalty focuses more on the recruiter than on the organization per se.
There must be complete abidance by accepted ethical standards, such as the following:

Never recruit an executive from a client when we placed that executive with the client. Absolutely never.
Never threaten to recruit from a company if the company does not give us a search assignment.
In our fee policy, only the client makes payments, never the candidate.
Guaranteed replacement of any candidate who has to be dismissed or who resigns during his/her first year in the post, for whatever reason except causes attributable to acts of God.
An effective and honest policy of not recruiting from our customer during the year following placement of a candidate.
Any disbursement not included in the expense reserve will only be made with prior authorization from the customer and our substantiation thereof.
All information provided by clients and candidates is strictly confidential.

In practicing our profession, our relationship with our customers is based on absolute honesty. The points mentioned below are examples of our service vocation to the foregoing effect:

We do not compete against our customers

In our field, the goal is never to see who can find the best candidate in the shortest amount of time possible. We are not a sales force selling a product to our customers, rather an extension of our clients. It is consequently indispensable and vitally important that we work together as a team.

We happily welcome a customer's recommendation relative to a candidate

At times we evaluate and recommend a candidate introduced to us by one of our customers. This circumstance may occasionally lead a customer to question our retainer and request a discount. This is quite frankly unacceptable.

The placement of additional candidates generates payment of additional retainers.

On occasion the client decides that it is able to employ two or more of the candidates introduced, perhaps one of which will be for an originally unconsidered post. That second placement will result in an additional fee, as we do not provide two candidates for the price of one.

When both parties are acquainted with the same candidates, a conflict should not be the result.

The world of executives in Mexico is fairly small. And this is exactly why both the recruitment consultant and client may be acquainted with the same people, either from a past or present experience. What we do at ALSmith y Asociados in an attempt to offset this situation is to find out from the client, right from the beginning of the search, if it has a particular candidate in mind for us to recommend or exclude from the research and recruitment phase. In our opinion although the client may have known a candidate in the past or had contact with him/her, this is not a reason to question his/her candidacy as a potential executive presented by our firm. At times, our client has already met or heard of some of the candidates being recommended by the firm. Were we to exclude all such candidates for fear of not being able to charge our retainer, we might just as well no longer be in the market.

The nature of our business.

We offer consulting services specializing in executive recruitment and selection. Our clients pay us for our time and talent, for working albeit not necessarily making placements. In view of the nature of the field per se, our activities always require a great deal of effort and the best motivation we can possibly have is the confidence of our clients, never the threat of a customer's mistrust.