How do you go about finding the right candidate for a job?

The most overrated part of headhunting is the search. It's not hard to come up with a collection of plausible candidates for a job, most of them wrong. The trick is to figure out what the position requires. A job is a solution to a problem, but we often don't take the time to understand the problem. We just look for someone who has the same credentials as the last person who had the job, or else the opposite credentials if we are still fighting the last war. I try to discipline myself and anyone who will listen by asking: "What constitutes success? How will you know you hired the right person after you have hired him or her?"

What kind of problems are you most interested in?

We are interested primarily in the problems facing mission-driven organizations. I use the words "mission-driven" and "civic" interchangeably. All successful organizations, perhaps with the exception of foundations, are disciplined by their missions and their markets. We are interested in civic institutions -- that is, institutions that are disciplined in the first instance by their missions and in the second instance by their markets. Most not-for-profits don't want to really admit that they have markets. They feel they are compromising their values if they have to acknowledge that money also drives them. Most market-driven organizations don't really want to discuss their missions. They feel they ought to be more hard-boiled than that.

We are principally interested in how civic institutions align their missions and their values. If the money and the ethics are all going in the same direction they will win. If they are going in opposite directions, they will lose their shirts. That is where the real leadership comes in.

The civic sector is essential to a durable, democratic, market-driven society. Civic institutions are the "glue" that binds us together. They are the voluntary settings, heavily subsidized by government, where we provide care for one another in times of travail, where we invent new knowledge, and where we use learning to reconcile our disparate visions of the future. Civic institutions are a flexible broad streak of glue; they allow us to adapt without the burden of government authority to new developments in the world. A rich collection of civic institutions allows a society to move faster.

What kind of people are you looking for?

Leaders. Leaders who have seen the client's problem before. They don't have to prove that they have seen every side of exactly the same problem, just that they have done analogous work -- analogous leadership work. We want to know that they have taken on hard work all through their career -- harder work than they needed to take on, work that went to fundamental values, that built market share and solid finances on high purposes. We want to see a great medical center, a leading research institute, a truthful, articulate advocacy organization, a first-class school or a great collection of motivated child welfare workers with a fabulous bottom line attached. When people can do that kind of work -- build or re-build essential civic institutions and make the money and the values both work -- then we believe in them and we want them.

Is there any one character type that meets this definition of leadership?

Not exactly. They come in all forms. They come from every personal history and every culture. They learn, these few characters, to put their very particular history to our common use. We are especially proud that we spot leadership across all the lines of race, class, and gender. We are driven to diversity because we believe in talent and we push ourselves to be open to talent, to seek it and find it, conventionally and unconventionally.

We are proud of the fact that we are the only large search firm in America with a statistically significant record of placing women and people of color in executive positions. We don't just put a few diversity candidates in a pool. We find leadership and our clients hire them.

The kind of leader we seek also depends on the search. We spend a large amount of time with our clients, getting to know them, identifying their needs. Our clients don't want just a warm body. They need to find someone who will show a real commitment to value that will strengthen their particular organization

It's not enough for us to submit a list of names. We have to go through the whole process, be thorough and quick-witted, find people who are not only appropriate but also extraordinary. In many cases, we must "think outside the box" or identify risks worth taking in order to provide our client with the best choices. All of this means we can't do a search by rote. We can't have one fixed procedure that serves all. Each search has to be unique, geared towards a client's specific needs.