The New York Times of the Executive Search World

It was 1997 and it was a newspaper then. Actual newsprint, folded, sitting on the low table in the reception area at Isaacson, Miller, where candidates waited and where the rest of us walked past it forty times a day without looking.

I had just started there. I picked it up and stood in the lobby reading it, because that is what you do when you are new and do not yet know what matters and what does not.

Arnie Miller walked past and saw me reading it. He looked at what was in my hands and said:

"That's the New York Times of the executive search world."

Six words, in passing, and I have repeated them a million times since. It is still how I explain Hunt Scanlon to anyone outside this business who asks who they are.

What he meant

He did not mean it was large. He meant it was the record. In a business that runs on relationships and discretion, where most of what happens never gets written down, Hunt Scanlon was where the industry went to find out what was actually going on. Who had moved. Which firm had won what. Who was rising.

They have been doing it for decades. Every year they publish the guide to America's top executive search firms, and every year the industry reads it to find out where it stands. They went to the web early, before most of the profession had decided the web was for them.

If you do not work in executive search, the name means nothing to you. Inside it, you do not need the name explained.

This morning

Hunt Scanlon wrote about GRC Careers.

Not a listing. Not a press release we paid to place. A reported piece, bylined by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor in Chief, and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor, about a job board we launched three months ago for a field that did not exist five years ago.

They wrote about the numbers: 134,499 organic impressions in twenty eight days, with no advertising. They wrote about the one mandatory cookie and nothing else running unless you switch it on. They wrote about the fact that every listing is opened and read by a person before it posts.

And they quoted the thing I most wanted quoted, which is this:

The candidates using the free study material this month are the shortlist in eighteen months. That is the whole thesis, and it is why none of it sits behind a paywall.

The part I keep thinking about

I have spent twenty nine years in this business. I started at Isaacson, Miller, sitting next to Arnie Miller. ExecSearches has been placing nonprofit leadership since 1999.

I call my time at Isaacson, Miller a second master’s degree, and I mean it literally, because I already had one. That is a longer story and I have written it separately: A Second Master’s Degree: What Isaacson, Miller Taught Me.

None of that is why the piece exists. The piece exists because we built something new for a field that is hiring faster than it can train people, and we built it the way we thought it should be built: reviewed by humans, free where it matters, and honest about what it collects.

But I would be lying if I said the byline did not land differently because of where I first saw that masthead.

In 1997 Arnie Miller told a brand new recruiter standing in a lobby holding a newspaper that this was the paper of record. Twenty nine years later the paper of record wrote about what that recruiter built.

Arnie died as this board was going live. He said it in passing and would never have thought of it again. I never got to tell him I had carried it for twenty nine years.

Read the Hunt Scanlon piece