How to Make an Executive Hire with Jeff Markowitz | Greyscale

Hiring a senior executive is a long, delicate process that needs to be navigated with thoughtful planning. In this talk from Grayscale, an event hosted by Greylock Partners, talent partner Jeff Markowitz shares the best practices for managing the executive hiring process. For more podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com so, two things.

One, we're going to roll into Jeff's talk and we'll just take a break afterwards. Content's running long with great questions, so please keep them coming. So Dan just kind of talked about debugging. Core recruiting focus is mostly technical engineers, product folks. Executive recruiting is a whole different ball game altogether, I think. When I was at VMware, we used to say, well, I guess it's time to hire the gray hairs or the no hairs. Then one day you wake up and I'm having more and more gray hair. So I don't know what that means, but. So Jeff Markowitz is our executive talent partner. He runs the team that helps find VPs or C level executives in our portfolio companies. And before joining Greylock, Jeff did this at an exact talent firm. So he's probably the best guy in the business. I trust him with all my companies to help find the right team to make them successful. With that. Welcome, Jeff.

Right here. So imagine you need to hire a key executive or several key executives. You aren't sure how to start the process, but you know you need to do it. How do you start? Where do you look? There's so many things to consider. Will the person fit into the team? How will they fit into the team? Have you thought about compensation? What happens if you make a bad hire? Whether you've done it before or haven't done it before, it really doesn't matter. It's a tricky, cumbersome process to get right, and it takes a lot of time and rarely do they go smoothly. So right off the bat, show me using your fingers. What's everybody's tension level around hiring executives? Tension level around hiring executives? Zero. Being you're not at all comfortable with it, maybe you've done it before, maybe you haven't. It's just a daunting process. And 10, you're super comfortable with it. You've hired a lot of executives. It's no big deal. Where do people stand? Show fingers. All right, so some feel very comfortable and some not as comfortable, some in the middle. I have good news for you. My hope is after today, those that are less comfortable, you're going to start to feel even more comfortable with the process. Maybe get into the middle, maybe Higher. And those that feel really comfortable or maybe in the middle, you're going to feel even better. So I break the discussion down today into five key areas. The first is planning the process. Well, planning your process to hire executives. The second is working with candidates through the process. The third is reference checking. The fourth is compensation. And the fifth is the offer process. So I want to try something a little bit different. Take 20 seconds or so. Turn to the person sitting next to you. What are some considerations you believe are important when thinking about planning your process for hiring executives? Important considerations to think about when planning the process of hiring executives. Take 20 seconds or so. What did everybody come up with? How about over here? What are some ideas? Planning the process, understanding what the role.

Of that individual is going to be like. Actually understanding. Like if you're hiring for a head of sales, you have to understand who are you selling to. You have to understand what is it that, what is your market that you're going after before you can even identify.

Who'S going to be good at that?

Does everybody hear that? Understanding your market, understanding who you're going to be looking for. How about over here?

How that person is going to fit.

Into the existing team and how people.

Are physically move around that person fitting into the team. Great. I'll share some of the things that I thought of and we can talk about them in more length. The first is having a 12 to 18 month roadmap. And what I mean by that, it's not just thinking about the candidates, the executive positions you know you need, that's pretty easy. It's thinking about the roles that you think you might need. You have to plan for surprises. You may have somebody in a given executive role, you think that they're going to be able to get you the next 12 to 18 months, but they tap out. For whatever reason, they just hit a ceiling. And so you have to be prepared for that. People get recruited away and losing a key executive, it could set a company back. So really being prepared, meeting people early and often having an idea of all the key roles that you think you need, which is very different than the ones you know you need. And you're not going to be able to look for all of these roles at once. You have to prioritize. So going through the list of roles, you're not going to be able to put everything out to search. But being opportunistic, we have one company on the consumer side next door. Nirav Tolle is the CEO. Nirav is always wanting to meet great people Always, he doesn't care if he has a role open or not. He just always wants to see the best talent. And so he's very proactive about it, meeting people early and often. Everybody in the room, since it's an enterprise audience, probably knows Pure Storage, one of our portfolio companies. Scott Dietzen is the CEO of Pure. Two years ago, Scott, he knew that they were on a path to be public. He knew that he needed to hire a chief financial officer. He didn't need the person then. He actually didn't need to start thinking about really hiring the person for probably about six to 12 months from then. But he asked me to come in and we sat down and we mapped out a strategy of how he can get educated on what great CFOs look like. And so we sat down and we said, let's map out. Let's think about four to five great public company CFOs that you can meet in a very safe environment. These are people that aren't interviewing for a job. They don't want to be interviewed for a job. But let's highlight the best people out there. Let's find the best people out there. So Scott, we introduced him to, I think five CFOs, all public company CFOs, all with great reputations. He was not going to hire any of them. They weren't interested. Some of them were actually in our portfolio. So we definitely weren't going to hire. He wasn't going to hire them. And his goal was to inform his thinking, to learn what great looked like. And so what happened was he came away from that process of meeting four or five people. He didn't even start a search right away. He didn't start to formally look for, I think it was nine months from then. But what happened was at the time he started to look and he met with great CFOs. He was very articulate in terms of what he was looking for and why he was looking for it. And it showed. He was talking to the best of the best at the time that he was looking at. And he was very organized, he was very crisp. And he was able to pull that back to people he met and why he liked them and why he thought that their backgrounds were great. An interesting byproduct of the process of meeting people early is one of the people that Scott met was the CFO of Adobe, Mark Garrett. And they built such a strong relationship that Mark ultimately decided to join his board of directors as the audit committee chairman. So meeting people early in the process is so Important. Preparing to speak with candidates. Why is that so important? Dan touched on it a little bit as well. But just what are some ideas? Rifle shot, no right or wrong answer. Why so important?

Lets them know you care about that as well.

Lets them know you care. What else? Credibility. Credibility? Yeah. I see a lot of companies, and at the executive level, it's so important. If CEOs are not prepared to speak with candidates, it leads to a clunky process. And these executives are very busy a lot of the time, most of them aren't looking. And so if you don't come in well prepared to speak with them, it's going to show and it's going to hurt your chances to get them hooked. Let's talk a little bit about the candidate process. And the way I like to think about the candidate process is along a timeline from the very first time you meet a candidate all the way through the offer. And this goes, you might say, well, we only want to give one person an offer, and hopefully we do. But if you think about the candidate process along this continuum, this timeline, with every candidate, you're able to get to the right set of data on the person. And at the point in time where you ultimately want to make somebody an offer, you're well prepared to do that. And we'll talk about that in a bit. But I think there's certain points along the way and certain techniques, if you will, that you can think about employing through this process. Some happen at the beginning, some happen at the middle, some happen at the end, some happen all the way through. And the first is this concept of ball control. Everybody probably knows what ball control is. And ball control I like to establish from the very first meeting. And it goes all throughout the process. And when you think about ball control, who maintains it? Should the company maintain ball control or should the candidate? It's a trick question. The answer is both. The candidate wants to maintain ball control too. But for purposes of today, we're going to talk about the company side of it. And the first thing is this balance of buying and selling candidates. I see companies make mistakes where they come in, they meet a candidate, and all they want to do is buy. All they want to do is interview. And it's great because they get to learn about the candidate. But they don't get deep. They don't get really deep because the candidate's never hooked. And on the contrary, I see companies who all they do is they sell, sell, sell. They just sell the candidate. And these are busy executives, they're sophisticated. They actually want you to interview them, they want you to ask them questions, they want to have a dialogue. And so balancing this buying and selling is so critically important to establishing a hook with the candidate. What happens is once you establish that hook, they open themselves up to being interviewed in a much deeper way. And that goes throughout the entire process. The other thing I like to do at the very beginning of the process is from the very first meeting is you have to ask yourself this question, is the candidate closable? You're asking it all throughout the process, but from the very first meeting, does everybody understand or know the concept of pushes and pulls? Has anyone heard of that? Not okay. Pushes are the reasons why somebody would consider leaving where they currently are. The motivation, the dissatisfiers, why would they consider leaving where they are? Pulls are the attractors to your company. If you don't have both, it's very hard to get somebody over the line. You can sell them, you can get them very excited, but if there aren't real dissatisfiers from what they're currently doing, it's very hard to close them. And the pushes are the hardest to get to. And it's very hard to get to them at the beginning of the process. But if you establish it, if you ask them what are your dissatisfiers, what are the things that you would like to change about what you're currently doing, you get a much better understanding of it. And if they don't have any, you really have to ask your question about. Ask the question about how much time you want to invest with them. Because at the end of the day, if they don't have real pushes, it's going to be hard to ultimately close them. And the other thing which we'll talk about in another slide, is compensation. So people always ask the question, when do you bring up compensation? Very first meeting. Very first meeting you have with a candidate, you talk about compensation and what you're doing is you're not talking about compensation. From the standpoint of, hey, this is what I'm thinking about from an offer perspective. You're trying to understand what it would take to close the candidate. If a candidate is coming from some large company, they're getting paid a million dollars a year cash, you're building a startup, you're going to pay them 1000-001500-00200,000, whatever it is, that's a significant gap. And if the candidate hasn't internalized that gap and how they're going to bridge it, you're going to have A really hard time closing them at the end. So understanding that gap from the very first meeting, it's critically important. And that goes throughout the whole process. Just really trying to understand these pushes and pulls, understanding the compensation differential.

When you recognize that there's a gap early on in the process, do you wait to sell them on this a little bit further along before you bring that up, or do you bring that up early enough to say, is this something I can qualify and move on?

So oftentimes with executive searches, you have there's a search firm involved or there's some third party involved. I play this role a lot with our companies. As the hiring manager, you want to have a balance in terms of how much interaction you have with the candidate around compensation early because you want to get to know them. And so it's really just understanding what their needs are, understanding where they're coming from and understanding what's important to them. And sometimes having a third party involved to help with that discussion is important. The next thing is, and I like to talk about this in the middle of the process, but truthfully, it happens from the very beginning. But you really get to the meat of it in the middle of the process and it's reading the candidate and it's this technique, point A to point B. It's very simple. And to illustrate it, I'll give you an example from a few years ago. I was doing a CEO search for ServiceNow. This is before I was with Greylock and we had this candidate, Frank Slootman, who ultimately took the job. Frank was sought after. He was looking at multiple companies. Frank is a sophisticated executive. He was not going to show his hand. He showed us a little bit, but not a lot. And at some point in the process, which was kind of in the middle, I said to Frank, we are where we are today. We're at May 11th. It was actually about this time five years ago. What are the things that you need to see, hear and do to get you to a point where you're ready to say that ServiceNow is the company you want to join? Write them down, tell us what they are. And what it was was we were not focused so much on his other opportunities, of which he had a few. We were really trying to get him focused on ServiceNow and getting his questions answered. And it seems very simple, but people don't do it and asking that question all the time. Once you get the hooks set of what are the things you need to see and do and things will change, items will come off of the person's list. New items will come onto the list, but really getting them engaged on what are your open items? What are your open items? How are we going to get from where we are today to a point where you can tell us that were the company you want to join the mini board meeting. So I call it the mini board meeting, but we can call it anything we want. And this was something that I learned probably 15 years ago, very early in my career, and I was working on a CEO search for Aruba Networks. This was when Aruba Networks was tiny, tiny, tiny. They ultimately went public and we had this candidate. We were really excited about the candidate. He was excited about us. He was set up to meet with the board on a Tuesday. And the purpose was he was going to get the offer. We knew that he wanted the job. And he called me on Sunday. I had more hair, less gray, a lot younger then. And he said, jeff, I don't want you to be alarmed, but I am about to send an email to the board to let them know that I'm not ready for an offer. I want to have the meeting with them, but I'm not ready for an offer. And so I was surprised. I said, what changed? What did we miss? He said, nothing. Nothing was missed. But I've spent a lot of time with the company. I've spent a lot of time researching the market. I've had strategy sessions with the leadership team. And I want to come in and I want to do a mini board meeting. And I know that the way I'm going to approach this business is going to be different than what some of the board members want to do. And I want to see how we work through disagreements. I know we're going to disagree and I don't want them to tell me what I want to hear. I want to push on disagreements before I joined the company. And ultimately what happened was they did it. They had a very long discussion. It was basically a mini board meeting where he set out his plan for the business, had some disagreements and they didn't come out agreeing on everything. The idea was that they were going to go through this process of learning how to disagree with one another. And did it feel right or didn't it feel right? It's an element of the process that you just cannot learn through interviews and you can't learn it through reference checking. And a lot of people don't take that step. And it can be done for any position. You can call it whatever you want for any position. I always suggest that the company and the individual that they're considering, have some discussion in depth around how that person would approach the role. And sometimes the candidate doesn't want to do it. They don't want to invest the time. And that's a dangerous sign. You want the candidate to want to do it because they should be as concerned and interested in getting this right as anybody. All right, let's go back to the fingers. So referencing. Show me using your fingers on a scale of 0 to 10, your comfort level around the reference checking process. Zero. You're just not at all comfortable. You're not sure what questions to ask, you're not sure how to interpret the answers. You get 10, you're a pro, you've done it a thousand times. You know all the questions, you know how to interpret the answers. Where do people stand? Comfort level around reference checking. Okay, we have some very comfortable, some not as comfortable. Once again, very good. I think reference checking is singly the best predictor of a successful hire. Way more than interviewing. If you do it well, you're talking to bosses, peers, and direct reports of the last three or four jobs. And what happens is you're looking for patterns. Patterns develop. People don't change. And if you're digging deeply enough, you're going to see these patterns. And the way you do it, you have to find developmental areas. Unless you have found developmental areas, you haven't done a good reference. Developmental areas are really hard to pull out, but one of the easier ways to do it is you ask these open ended questions, what, how? And tell me more. And it doesn't matter whether it's references that the candidate gives you or back channel references, you should always be able to pull out developmental areas by asking these questions. What did they do? How did they do it? Tell me more about that. An example in our portfolio that just happened in the last year, giving all these CEO examples. But it's another CEO search where we had somebody, we were really excited about him. His reputation was great. He was an officer of a public company, interviewed exceptionally well. When we started the reference checking process, it was clear there were gaps. Not gaps in culture, not gaps in leadership, gaps in ability for this person to step up and be a CEO of a vast growing company. And the question that we had to ask ourselves after really understanding what these gaps were was as a board, do we want to manage this person? We know what the gaps are. We know we're very comfortable with that. We're not going to have, we shouldn't have surprises after the hire, but do we want to manage these Gaps, can we manage these gaps? And whether this is a CEO, whether it's a VP that you're hiring, going through the reference checking process, really digging into the developmental areas, knowing the strengths, asking yourself the question, do I want to manage this person? You'll never get a perfect reference, you'll never get a perfect candidate. So you have to find the gaps and you have to ask that question. I talked briefly about compensation at the beginning, so I'll go through it fairly quickly. And it's. Compensation is tricky and I'm always happy to talk to people about it because it's just. Every situation is unique. But under. Yeah, sorry, quick question.

On the previous slide, especially at the executive level, what's an example of.

It depends on the role. There's leadership, developmental areas. You're just looking for gaps. You're asking questions about what are the things that this person can improve upon, how should they improve upon them? If it's a CEO that you're considering, what are the best ways to manage the person? And when you ask those questions, what you're getting is. You're getting. You don't get perfect, you get questions and then you dig into them more. So it's hard to answer the question about what specific developmental areas. It just depends. So talking about compensation, understanding compensation as early in the process as possible, As I said before, and it's not just about having the conversation, it's asking the candidate if they have a spouse, what does their spouse think about it? They might be very excited about betting on the equity, but maybe they didn't have the conversation with their spouse. Maybe their spouse is less excited about that. So really digging in and asking these questions early, there's this concept of value versus percentage of ownership. And a lot of startups, they're focused on percentage of ownership and candidates are focused on percentage of ownership. We try to get a. Are companies and the candidates focused on value? What I mean by that is every value equates to a percentage of ownership anyway. So why is value so important? Well, 1% of one company does not necessarily equate to 1% of another company in terms of value. So I see candidates come in and they say, well, I think the number's 1 1/2% of a given company. And we say, well, the data shows, and what we see in our portfolio, it's really 1%. And we say, well, how did you come up with one and a half percent? And they say, well, we think it's the right number. We did our own due diligence and I said, well, you have to equate the value, you have to equate the 1% to a certain value ascribed to the company. And so because one company is offering 1.5% for the same role and you're offering 1%, they have to then look at the value, the business and say with the 1% that I would go get with your company, is that going to be more valuable in my opinion, than the 1.5% of another company? So once again it's an intricate topic, but I'm always happy to talk about it in more depth. And here's the last step. It's probably one of, it's an easy thing to think about making an offer. It's exciting, but it's probably one of the trickiest steps in the process. And I see a lot of companies get tripped up on, really should be, and Dan mentioned this, it should be the last step in the process. Only when you know it's going to be accepted, you have to make sure all non monetary concerns have been addressed. And so I see this, we're seeing it now with companies where candidates want to know what's the offer going to look like. And it's okay to talk at high levels. Once again you're making sure that the person's closable. But once you insert the offer into the discussion, that becomes the focal point for the candidate. And if there are other items that are on their mind, they almost take a back seat because they get very focused on the offer. So we try to basically separate the offer from the rest of the discussion and we'll hold the offer part of the conversation off to the very last step in the process. Another quick example, this was back in 2000. I was doing a senior vice president of corporate development search for Loudcloud, which was the predecessor to opsware. We had this candidate, he had a great reputation, he actually ran corporate development at Cisco. Everybody was excited about him. And we went through the whole process, we thought we did everything right, went through the timeline, thought we addressed all the non monetary concerns. And I said to the candidate, I said, are you ready for an offer? And he said yes, I'm ready for an offer. He was excited about getting an offer. And then I called actually one of the board members, Andy Ratcliffe from Benchmark. And I said to Andy, we have the candidate, he's ready for an offer. And there was silence on the phone for to me it seemed like 30 seconds, it was probably about two seconds. And he said, well did you ask him if he wants the job. Did he ask him if he's ready to join the company? And I said, no. And he said, well, that's the question you need to ask. Go back and ask that question. And so I went back to the candidate and I said, I know I asked you if you were ready for an offer, but let's assume we get there with the offer. Are you ready to join the company? And he wasn't. And he ultimately didn't join the company, but he was ready for an offer. Wasn't ready to say yes to joining the company, though. So it's a very subtle point, but asking that question, are you ready to join the company versus are you ready for an offer? Is really important. And you always do this in person, always looking somebody in the whites of their eyes and asking them if they're ready to join the company. They should be looking at you right back saying, absolutely, I'm ready to join. If they look away, if they stutter, if they look down, there's probably something else there. And in that case, you're not ready to discuss an offer. You have to work on what their questions are. You have to go right back to it and say, seems like you may have some other questions. Let's go through them. And then there's another thing that comes up too. It's actually less on the executive side, but I've actually seen it more and more where candidates are trying to collect multiple offers if they're looking and when they have multiple offers. What we try to coach our companies and the way we handle it is, look, you're not going to get an offer from our company until you tell us you're ready to join the company, assuming we get the offer right. And we already know that we're in the same ballpark on comp. So you have to tell us, what are the things that would prevent you from joining our company? Once again, reading the candidate before we're ready to give you an offer. And the conversation actually always goes smoothly. So it's just something to think about. So finally, just to recap, planning the process, working with candidates through the process, the reference checking process, dealing with compensation, and the offer process. Thanks.

Thanks, Jeff. So you gave a number of examples that you were in the middle, you know, dealing with the candidates towards the end of the offering process. This is probably a perennial question. What is the pros and the cons of recruiter delivering the offer versus the hiring manager delivering the offer? In those examples you gave, did you imply that you were the person who delivered the offer? The compensation Et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. So the question was who should give the offer? Should it be the company who gives the offer? The hiring manager versus the recruiter. 100% of the time it should be the hiring manager or the company. 100% of the time. The recruiter can actually help. So when we get involved with the offer process, I will basically socialize what an offer would look like. I would get to a point where we're pretty certain that if the offer comes in and around these ranges it's going to be accepted. But then the company needs to give the offer. And it's another way to learn about a candidate. The way a candidate goes through the offer process of the way they internalize it. Some candidates get an offer and they go silent. It says a lot about them. Some get an offer and they're just immediately on it. That says a lot about them too.

Some executive positions, it's easy for lots of people in an organization to have opinions about those positions. CEO and VP Eng in particular. How do you find that Goldilocks zone of enough people being involved in the process to have buy in and not too many so that it's overwhelming or too many voices in the decision process?

It's a good question. So how many people in the decision making process around hiring an executive? It's a fail point on searches sometimes because once you open it up to a lot of input, you open it up to a lot of input. And so it's very important at the beginning to say who are the key decision makers and then who else do you want input from? And to be very clear that if you're getting input from a broader group, you're getting feedback, but they don't necessarily have a vote and then controlling it. I think companies have to, they have to. They have their own culture of who they want to involve and who they don't want to involve in the process. But making sure that there's a clear way to make a decision. I've actually seen very good candidates lost because too many people have input. And the CEO or hiring manager, they don't know what to do because they've actually given the person a vote. And so really narrowing it down to whoever has the vote has the vote. And you can get input from others. And when you get input from others is very important. We have a question over here.

So thanks for the insights. A lot of the things you mentioned could apply equally well to non executive hiring. So I'm wondering if you have a summary of what would you consider the critical Differences. I mean, there's some obvious ones, but is there a summary for you?

The key difference tends to be around the sophistication of the individuals. And when you're hiring executives, there are some that don't have. They're in transition, so they're looking. They're actually actively looking. But a lot of times the best ones, not 100%. A lot of times the best ones are in big jobs and they're doing very well and you're trying to actively recruit them out and they're very busy. They have lots of responsibilities. So the way you stay on top of them, the way you run a process with them, you have to be on it with them from beginning to end. Prepping, debriefing, knowing, really understanding what their considerations are, what their pushes and pulls are, really the pushes. So I think that there's a lot of differences. There's some similarities as well. Is that helpful?

Hi. That was great. Thank you. I'm curious how you think about hiring executives effectively over vps as the company's scaling and whether or not what your sort of view is on involving the VPs in that process, involving those people and having a vote for their future boss effectively. And maybe they might be defensive about that, maybe they might not be.

So it's a good question. So how to involve a person who might be getting layered at the executive level. So there's actually a good example of it, and I think a lot of it depends on the tone that you want to set as a leader in the company. And do you want to keep the person that you're layering? Sometimes they're great performers, sometimes they're just not. And they're not going to stay in the company. And at that point, you probably don't want to involve them. But pure storage, once again, Scott Dietzen is. I saw this for the very first time with him. I was amazed. It was just before I was joining Greylock and he wanted to hire his president, his head of field operations. And I went. I came out, I was living on the east coast at the time, and I came out, I met with Scott to talk about this VP of Sales search, this president of Field ops search. And in the meeting was his VP of sales, just. It was the two of them. And he said, we're both going to make the decision. I want his input on making the decision. And this is the way it's going to be. And he's done that with the CFO search because his VP of finance stayed with the company. He's done it on the engineering side and his take is this person's going to be a critical part of the process and I want them bought in from the beginning. So I think it really depends on the tone. He delivered it in a very good way and he was able to calibrate that person's feedback. But it was ultimately going to be Scott's call. But he made that person feel like they would be able to give input.

Just quick question. On the compensation side and in particular on the equity front, how transparent are you with potential candidates around what's going on within the company, how much they've raised, what's the current value, what the percentage is and then what do you recommend that portfolio companies do around that? Transparency. And then is that transparency different for executives versus folks who are kind of lower in the organization?

So I could speak probably better just to the executives and my answer to that is just full transparency. They're going to find out these are busy people that you want to try to recruit. So just be open with them. If they ask questions, anticipate the questions too. Be proactive with it. Explain to them what the valuation is and not at the very first meeting. I mean, you want to make sure that you're getting the candidate to a point where you're excited about them, they're excited about you before you give too much. But at the point in time where you're starting to think about offer we give them everything, they should have full transparency. It makes you look better. As a hiring manager.

You have a question when sourcing candidates, right? So in your experience, do you see that it's better to hire from look for candidates within your industry? Is industry more important or is role more important? Like would you hire like a director level person as a VP for example, or would you want to find because they're in the same industry or do you want to actually find someone who's played that VP role before?

It depends once again on the where you are in your development and what you need in a given role. My feeling in terms of up and comers versus people that have been there and done it before, the people that have been there and done it before aren't always the best candidates. Sometimes they are, but sometimes because they've been there and done it before, they don't have the same motivation, they don't have the same hunger. And it's really important for startups like you want somebody that really has the fire in the belly to go do it and if they've done it before, you want to make sure. And test that they're ready to do it again. And what we try to say is like, we want our companies looking for great. You can have a great up and comer. And the way to figure that out is you interview them, you reference them, but have they been working with great people? So in a VP of engineering, sometimes there's a VP of engineering that is great, but they don't want to do a VP of engineering role again. Who are the key people on that person's team that are ready to step up? Because if they've worked with that great leader for a long period of time, the bet is just through watching that person, they've gotten the right experience, they've gotten the right traits, especially around sales. It's really interesting around sales leaders because sales leaders, sometimes they like the energy level that it took to execute within an organization and scale in an organization from a sales perspective, they just don't have it the second time around. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. So we always look and say, well, who are the people that reported into that sales leader who learned from that sales leader, who are ready to step up? Jeff, what should you expect from a retained executive recruiter and how do you.

Find a really great one?

Funny you should ask. Michael and I are working on a project together right now. The challenge right now is a lot of the really good executive recruiters are busy and so what they've become, how they've become sorcerers. So the value add that they used to bring in terms of advice, in terms of really getting to know the candidate, it's not there. There are some that are good at it, but there are some where it's just all they want to do is get the search filled. They want to get candidates in and they're working on so many things. They just don't have time to invest in the candidate and in the process. The expectation is that you have a search firm that has the time, they're not overextended and you're paying for advice and value. They need to know the candidate better than anybody. They need to know what the candidate's looking at. They need to understand the pushes, they need to understand the pulls, and they need to advise you on how you should be thinking about. They should have a point of view. And I think a lot don't right now. Okay, thanks.