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Vol.17 : Daniel Edwards (Heidrick & Struggles Japan)
June 20, 2007
Vocal shareholders gear up for showdowns at meetings
Beleaguered Abe ponders postponing poll
Wanted: 90,000 software engineers
Temp agencies scramble for staffers
Expanded coverage: Tokyo's Akihabara slated to become IT testing ground
highly qualified personnel：高い能力のある人材
with bell and whistle：非常に複雑な
redundant：不必要な
leveraged：支えられている
at one's fingertips：すぐに使えるようにしてある
（ D: Daniel, P: Peter ）
| P : |
Okay, this is Peter Barakan. Today I am talking to Daniel Edwards, who is the Office Managing Partner in the Tokyo office of Heidrick & Struggles. Excuse me sir, Heidrick & Struggles is a new name to me. Can you explain a little bit about what it is the company does, first? |
| D : |
Certainly. Heidrick & Struggles is an executive search firm and we focus on placing senior executives, generally at the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer or Board level, ideally into Fortune 500 or equivalent-size companies. |
| P : |
Okay, and the company is worldwide? |
| D : |
Yes, there are 55 offices spread across the globe and probably about 12 offices in Asia-Pacific, and we have been here in Japan for the past 15 years.
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| P : |
So you're finding highly qualified personnel - you're headhunters basically. |
| D : |
Yes, we like to disguise it, but we are in fact head hunters. |
| P : |
Are you finding Japanese people to work in foreign companies, foreign-owned companies or vice-versa or a combination of lots of different things: how does it work? |
| D : |
It's a good question, and I think our world is the full range of placements in dealing with domestic candidates and non-domestic candidates, domestic companies and non-domestic companies. The majority of our work has been finding Japanese candidates for multinational corporations operating here in Japan, but we would certainly like that to change. |
| P : |
In what way would you like it to change? |
| D : |
We would like to spend more and more time working with Japanese corporations, either finding them executives within Japan or helping them find executives for either their operations overseas or acquisitions they may have made overseas. |
| P : |
Okay. So let's take - let's try and take, I don't suppose you can give names, can you? |
| D : |
To a degree we can or situations where we might be helpful, it might be interesting to be helpful I think. I have noticed since I have been here that there is an increase in activity around Japanese firms buying assets overseas.
So Nippon Steel's acquisition of Pilkington Glass, a British company and or Japan Tobacco's acquisition of Gallagher... Our hope is that as the economy has strengthened here and acquisitions overseas increase, we may be able to talk to headquarters here in Japan about potentially finding them executives for some of those companies overseas. |
| P : |
I see, and typically how do you go about finding people?
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| D : |
That's a good question. The - I would have to say the expectation I think sometimes is that we have a joint database with bells and whistles on that spits out three or four names in every project we work on... |
| D : |
But, the reality of the situation is that today's workforce is so mobile that the database can become redundant very quickly. So honestly on every project we work on we take quite a fresh approach and spend a good deal of time working to identify the top, let's say, three or four individuals who may be appropriate for that situation and that's through a combination of telephone work and desk research.
It's not to say that those three of four individuals will be available or interested in the position that we are recruiting for, but it's our job to identify the top people and then trying to see if one of them is available. |
| P : |
Okay, and that sounds like a fairly intensive line of work? |
| D : |
It is labor intensive and obviously as in many jobs we work long hours here, but we are leveraged by a group of 100 to 150 people who are based in a knowledge management center with Heidrick & Struggles in New Delhi. |
| P : |
New Delhi, and they are what, coordinating information globally? |
| D : |
Some of that. It's proactive talent mapping as well so rather than waiting for a project to come along and going out to try to identify the top five CFOs in the healthcare sector, we might do that in advance and so the group there is proactively mapping out talent to identify. |
| P : |
So a client comes to you and you say, 'Ah yes we have just the person for you.' |
| P : |
Sort of at your fingertips. |
| D : |
Five of those in our shopping basket exactly, yeah. |
cultural affinity：文化の親和性
subset：小集団
MNCs：Multinational corporations
ad-hoc：その場その場の
succession planning：後継者育成
tenure：在職期間
（ D: Daniel, P: Peter ）
| P : |
Have you found any major differences between the way your business works here and the way it was when you were in New York?
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| D : |
Absolutely. Even in a short period of time of 5 or 6 months there are some obvious differences to me. I think that executive search in Japan is harder in that finding candidates who are qualified to work in multinational corporations is a challenge, in that candidates will need to have some kind of cultural affinity with a multinational corporation in order to be effective and be comfortable communicating with numerous different parties overseas or across the rest of Asia.
And also be comfortable with perhaps a slightly different business environment from a traditional Japanese company. So almost by definition before you start a search, you are immediately dealing with a subset of the overall candidate pool, whereas you maybe dealing with the entire candidate pool in the search in the US or Europe.
That's one difference, but that being said, once you have come up with a shortlist of perhaps the three to five candidates for a position, we find that clients are able to make decisions much more quickly around who they might want to hire than in the US or Europe, and I put that down to the fact that clients understand that there is not a finite pool of talent to search from. A client in the US... |
| P : |
You mean there isn't an infinite? |
| D : |
Sorry, apologies, yes, non-infinite pool of talent to search from. |
| D : |
Clients in the US will be happy to carry on shopping for one of a better description, always convinced that the grass maybe greener somewhere else, and whereas here clients realize the difficulty of finding qualified people for multinational corporation situations.
From a candidate's standpoint, one of the things I have noticed is that loyalty to one's previous employer plays a more significant role in the close of a candidate. So it's harder here to extract a candidate from their previous company than it might be elsewhere. |
| P : |
Also, you were saying to identify whether the candidate is going to be suitable for working in a multinational or not? How do you go around making that decision or that judgment? |
| D : |
It's a combination...
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| P : |
You have to meet the person? |
| D : |
Absolutely, it's a combination of I think qualitative assessment and quantitative assessment. You know, on the quantitative side, you can rely on prior career and educational experience, if someone has worked in MNCs before and shown some success, if someone has been perhaps educated overseas, done an MBA before.
It's not an absolute measure, but that's an indicator that maybe a higher chance of success. And on the qualitative side is sitting with an individual and running him through an interview and gauging face-to-face how suited they might be. |
| P : |
Right.
So you find a candidate for a client. How long do you stay involved in that process once you've placed the person with the client? And if the deal goes through, is that the end of your participation? |
| D : |
This has evolved over the 5 or 6 years that I have been with Heidrick & Struggles. When I initially joined, we didn't have the capability to provide any kind of professional on-board surface or after-care as it were. And we would do it on an ad-hoc basis. If an individual consultant had formed a close relationship with a candidate, they would check with him regularly over the first couple of months that they might be at a new firm.
However, we have since branched into what we call leadership consulting, which ranges from working on organizational structure with boards and CEOs, succession planning, but also quite importantly as you pointed out, on-boarding as well, and we will have a leadership consulting consultant assigned to a placed candidate for the first maybe 3-6 months of their tenure. |
| P : |
You said that people warned you, you might have to have increased patience when you are in [Japan], and you find that wasn't the case. Have there been any other issues in Japan, which you weren't expecting, but have produced problems for example, or that you found challenging, let's say? |
| D : |
I think the most common question I receive from the people who I previously worked with in the US is, how can you do business in Japan if you don't speak Japanese?
And I would say that, you know, 90 odd percent of the individuals whom we interact with through our executive search work here, in all industry sectors quite frankly, whether it is the industrial sector, healthcare, consumer technology, speak very good English, and from that standpoint, while I'm spending a good deal of time trying to learn Japanese, it's not been as great an obstacle as one might have imagined. |
| P : |
If you don't speak or read Japanese, obviously to get your business information you rely on the English language media. Are you aware of the Nikkei Weekly? |
| D : |
I was more familiar with the Nikkei itself. However, in advance of this conversation, I've done some of my own research and started to read the Nikkei Weekly and, you know, I would now consider myself a reader.
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 David McCaughan / Executive Vice President
McCann Worldgroup 
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