2012-10-15 12:23:57
Richard Tuck, CEO of Inc. 500 company Lander International, has fostered a
happy, effective workforce by encouraging employees to integrate work with
their outside interests and hobbies.
CEO Richard Tuck doesn't have to try hard to keep his employees happy. He hires
people who know how to do that for themselves
Last year, mired in one of the periodic slumps that have characterized his
30-year career, Jon Westberg decided to seek advice from his boss. Westberg, an
executive recruiter at Lander International (#290), had just about run out of
ideas about how he might reverse his bad streak, which had dragged on for more
than two months. And the one obvious explanation wasn't one he was eager to act
on. Still, even as he made his way to Richard Tuck's office, he thought he
already knew what was standing in the way of his ability to make placements: he
was simply spending too much time on his art, sculpting furniture out of
salvaged wood and driftwood. He was spending close to 100 hours a week on both
pursuits. What he needed to do, he suspected, was to devote himself to hitting
the phones aggressively.
Sure enough, it didn't take long for Tuck--cofounder and CEO of Lander, which
is based in El Cerrito, Calif.--to raise the subject of Westberg's outside
interest. "I suggested that maybe he was spending too much time at work, that
he needed to devote more time to his art," Tuck says. Doing so, Tuck reasoned,
would help Westberg gain a deeper sense of fulfillment, which would in turn
energize him, helping him get back on track to making the commissions that
added up to his annual six-figure salary. Tuck's passionate argument was the
exact opposite of what most employees in that situation expect to hear. Not
that Tuck was motivated to say it just because of its shock value.
Or was he?
As befits a roller-coaster enthusiast, Tuck seems to delight in consistently
applying a kind of topsy-turvy logic to managing employees. While most CEOs
might tolerate workers who have outside commitments, Tuck actually seeks such
people out. Aside from the driftwood artisan, his employees include a former
concert bass trombonist, an ichthyologist (someone who studies fish biology), a
news photographer, and a Third World latrine builder. Several are refugees from
the corporate world, including a former American Express executive who designs
golf putting greens on the side. Having found what he's looking for in an
employee--bitter experience has taught him that his number one priority should
be to hire people he likes to be around--Tuck takes every opportunity to assure
that person that he's not remotely interested in keeping anyone chained to a
desk. Want to take six weeks' vacation in Asia? Why not take more? Fed up with
your job? Let's try a new one, see what happens. Want to work at home? Go
ahead. Tuck doesn't just think outside the box. There is no box to begin with.
Never will be. He hates rules. "I kept waiting for policies to be firmed up,
but he just wouldn't do it," says office manager Helen Winters.
If Lander sounds like some West Coast company too groovy for its own good,
consider the real-world results Tuck has achieved: between 1993 and 1997, the
company's revenues rose from $231,000 to more than $2.5 million, a growth rate
of 994%. Lander specializes in placing information-technology auditors,
high-tech workers who are certified to maintain the integrity of computer
networks. The Year 2000 bug, while a potential boon to Lander and companies
like it, has also brought waves of competitors into the field. "From the
standpoint of a recruiter, if Richard is working for a client, you are probably
not going to bother to compete against him, because you are going to lose,"
says Mary Ness, whose Minneapolis-based business, the Ness Group, operates in
the same niche as Lander but focuses solely on the Twin Cities area.
Ask Tuck about the company's growth and he'll attribute it to the "fun" people
he's managed to hire. But while his hiring methods may border on bizarre, he's
not nearly as impulsive as he likes to sound. Of course, he's not about to
deploy the same kinds of sophisticated screening techniques that other CEOs
use--from team interviewing to psychological testing to take-home projects--but
then he's not looking for the same traits that tend to interest many other
employers. (For examples, see "Screen Tests," below.) What the 28 employees at
Lander share is a quality that Tuck himself takes every opportunity to exude:
they know what makes them happy. They don't need Tuck or anyone else to figure
out their lives for them.
What Tuck has figured out, though, is how to identify such people. He does it
by opening up his life to them right from the start--or at least seeming to. He
acts utterly himself, making no secret of his five-week trips to visit roller
coasters in faraway lands (he says he's ridden every one in the United States)
and rarely missing a chance to throw others off balance. His anything-goes
atmosphere loosens people up so that they feel more comfortable just being
themselves. "I left there with a mixture of feeling fascinated but also not
having the first clue about what this company did," says recruiter Derek Duval,
recalling his interview for a job at Lander. "But I knew I had met someone I
wanted to know more about."
Then again, there are times when Tuck's approach can be absolutely
overwhelming. When recruiter Jason Schulterbrandt was interviewed for a job,
the meeting took place in Tuck's "fun house" basement. "I come from New York,
and I've seen a lot of things. But when I went downstairs, I was absolutely
catatonic," he recalls. "I couldn't speak for 15 minutes." Recruiter Gregg
Eiler--who sports hair down to his shoulders, favors shorts and a T-shirt, and
parks a mountain bike in his office--puts it this way: "As soon as you see
Richard's world, you know anything you come up with is going to be just fine."
Answer a vaguely worded ad for a job at Lander--probably under a heading like
"Juggler Extraordinaire"--and you'll get a voice-mail message from Tuck that
ends like this: "Go ahead and tell us about yourself now. Let me know your
fondest dreams, or your ambitions, or a funny story about yourself, something
so that I get a sense of your personality. Based on what you leave on the
message, it will determine which people we call in first for interviews. So, at
the sound of the tone, go ahead: lights, camera, action, it's your turn now."
Beep.
At this point, you won't even know what Lander does, or what the job entails.
Some people hang up, compose an answer, and call back. Others just go for it.
"I boiled down my life from kindergarten to the time of that phone call in a
two-minute synopsis," says Duval, who needed a job after building latrines in
Angola and attending graduate school.
If you're an experienced recruiter, no matter how good, that's a strike against
you. Too predictable. Too much to unlearn. (Westberg appears to be the
exception. But remember, there are no rules.) On the other hand, if you've done
something unusual, passionate, or intense, Tuck will pick up on that right
away. He calls back people who sound, as he puts it, "a bit spunky." If the
person still holds his interest after a brief phone conversation, he might
suggest he or she drop everything and come over. "I told him, 'I'm sitting here
in cutoffs, combat boots, a T-shirt, and an old hat,' and he said, 'Sounds like
you're dressed for an interview for my office," says Duval. "And I was like,
'Oh God, unbelievable."
Because of his goal in the interview--to find out how well you know
yourself--Tuck never tells you what job you're applying for. "The main part of
the conversation was about my interests, teasing out my outlook on life," Duval
says. "I remember one question he asked me was 'How much of a chameleon are
you?" Not surprisingly, Tuck prefers asking questions to which there are no
right answers.
Still, he's very straightforward about who's in control of the situation. When
recruiter Todd Weinman showed up at Tuck's house for his first interview, he
was surprised to find himself beside another candidate interviewing for the
same job. At one point, Tuck asked each one what he or she thought about the
other. "You can trash the other person or take the high road, but if you take
the high road, you don't want to make them look too good," Weinman reasons. "So
I said I thought she was good." He got the job. Two days after he was hired,
Weinman was left in charge of the office when Tuck flew off for a three-week
vacation. Weinman knew he didn't want to be an office manager permanently, so
Tuck gave him another task while he was away: "Think about what you want to do
when I return." Weinman decided to start training to become a recruiter. He
reacted, in other words, exactly as Tuck had expected.
Just as Tuck doesn't want the responsibility of figuring out how to make anyone
else happy, he's not likely to preach to employees about balancing their work
with their other interests. By his own example, he makes it clear that while
others may concern themselves with balancing their work and personal lives, his
goal is to integrate work and home as seamlessly as possible. His home features
his collection of 18,000 movies, which he can watch on a large-screen TV or on
one of 13 smaller sets. And there's a kitchen closet filled with soda-fountain
syrup, 43 flavors in all. But 5 of his 9 phone lines (he has 19 phones) are
reserved for business. (The lines are also used by Tim Sauer, Lander's
cofounder, who shares Tuck's home, and by another friend and housemate.) And
he's even negotiated recruiting deals from pay phones at amusement parks.
Business and pleasure, friends and colleagues, all seem to blur into a unified
whole--for Tuck, anyway.
Others at Lander seem to have to work harder at blending the two. Weinman,
whose personal passion is playing trombone with classical-music groups, admits
that he hasn't yet found the right mix in both pursuits. But that doesn't mean
that he, or anyone else, is ungrateful for having the choice. Navigating
alternatives is what Lander is all about. "Everyone's always in flux around
here," office manager Winters says. "Everyone's always redefining jobs."
Winters certainly has. A single mother, she worked as a recruiter for six
months last year and was getting deeply frustrated by the amount of time she
was spending away from her kids. Ill from the stress, she resolved to quit. She
met with Tuck. "She said she really didn't like the job," Tuck recalls. "And I
said, 'OK, but why does that mean you have to quit? Maybe we can figure out
something else for you to do." Tuck called up then office manager JoAnn Peters,
who he thought would do well as a recruiter, and asked if she would like to
swap jobs with Winters. Peters agreed, and both women seem to have taken to
their new jobs.
Last June, Tuck even redefined his own job as CEO at the behest of one of his
most recent hires, a researcher whose efforts didn't produce the job leads that
Tuck had envisioned. When Tuck asked Jeff Kost what he wanted to do instead,
Kost told him he wanted to be trained as a recruiter--by Tuck himself. Doing
that meant Tuck would have to shuffle his responsibilities and return to
recruiting for the first time in four years. So he thought about it over a
weekend before he agreed. Now, in addition to his role as CEO, Tuck also covers
the Pacific Northwest region, with Kost as his assistant.
Tuck, who is 50, is a large man whose relaxed physique belies his personal
intensity. On the sunny day I went to meet him, he greeted me in his living
room, which has a stunning picture-window view of San Francisco Bay. He was
wearing a sweatshirt crawling with Disney characters. He spent the first 30
minutes posing a steady stream of questions in a very relaxed manner. Within
the first 15 minutes, I somehow found myself talking about my parents and my
Brooklyn upbringing.
Perhaps because of the surroundings--the house is overflowing with curiosities,
and I hadn't yet seen the portion that rendered Schulterbrandt mute--Tuck
conveys the impression of sweeping away all formalities. Intimacy is the
currency of our exchange. The dynamic isn't that different from what the
company's customers experience. "Richard does an extremely thorough job of
scoping the skill set, of interviewing people, and I know because I was an
intelligence officer," says the Ness Group's Mary Ness. Joan McBride, who has
used Lander three times since 1989 to find a job, first met Tuck when she was
on her own, cold-calling companies for openings. "One of the first things
Richard asked me was about the people I had talked to and the corporate
cultures I had seen," she says. "He was really interested in how I viewed these
cultures and what I liked, instead of what I wanted out of a job." Over the
years, job placement evolved into career counseling and then into a friendship.
Recruiters at Lander insist that they'll walk away from a deal if it doesn't
seem right. "I wouldn't place anyone in a company I wouldn't want to work for,"
Peters says. The recruiters, many of whom are in their twenties and thirties,
often make more than $100,000 a year after a couple of years and can take in as
much as $175,000.
There are also gratifying moments, like the time last year when Peters got
Frank Cordima a job after nearly a yearlong search. Cordima, 47, had worked as
an information-systems auditor for the state of Massachusetts for 24 years and
carried the stigma of a 9-to-5 government worker despite the fact that he had
continually upgraded his skills. With two young kids, he was making $36,000 a
year and knew he was underpaid. Peters coached him through interviews,
channeled him to several prospects, and then landed him an offer at Staples
Inc. in Framingham, Mass. His package included a 66% raise, a year-end bonus,
and stock options. "When she told me I got the job, my wife ended up crying,"
Cordima says. "I feel like I'm in a good situation, with my pride and integrity
back to where it should be."
Tuck himself knows what it's like to work for a boss you don't like, in a
company that feels stifling. He felt the same way not so many years ago--except
that he owned the company. Founded in 1979, Paramount Personnel was the first
incarnation of Lander; he changed the company's name in order to hire a woman
who didn't want to work in a "placement" firm. (Her mother's maiden name was
Lander.) To grow the business, he hired the kind of employees it made sense to
hire at the time: experienced recruiters. Even so, the company barely squeaked
through the recession of the early 1980s. "My accountant told me I should close
down. But I thought Mickey [Rooney] and Judy [Garland] wouldn't have done that.
So we hung on," Tuck says.
The company survived, but Tuck grew increasingly despondent over the business.
"I was getting burned out, working with experienced recruiters who were like
salespeople," he says. "This was like a business. I wasn't having fun." So in
1985 he hired a manager and took off to Europe for four weeks. Upon his return,
he started working out of the house and was soon billing more than everyone
else combined. So he let the manager go, and the staff gradually trickled away.
With just two support people left, Tuck moved the company to El Cerrito, down
the hill from his home.
But by 1993 Tuck still wasn't happy--and his personal obligations were
mounting. In April, overwhelmed by debt, he found himself filing for Chapter 7
bankruptcy--an act he regrets and even now has difficulty explaining. "I was
really shaken up," he says. He became depressed and went into therapy. During
those sessions he finally realized what made him happy--not only in his work
but also in what he wanted out of life. One morning, looking out his
living-room window, he saw the entire bay and lowlands covered in clouds. But
in his inner world, the clouds parted. "All of a sudden, everything became
clear," he says. "Who I was, what I had to do, why I was here."
Knowing himself that much better, he resolved to build a company in which the
culture made sense to him. Then he began to fill it with like-minded people.
After my last day of interviews, Tuck invited me up to the house for dinner.
Sauer prepared an Asian stir-fry. Once dinner was out of the way, Tuck offered
me a tour of the house. Finally. Wait till you see it, everyone had said,
referring to the "fun house." Hundreds of visitors take the tour every year.
We entered a room devoted to Hollywood, lined with a wall of film books and
filled with movie posters. A second room was dedicated to Broadway plays. Then
we headed to the basement, which is crowded with pictures and objects. An
entire wall was lined with painted-plaster characters from Charles Dickens
novels, and a bathroom was plastered wall to wall with postcards of roller
coasters, including a small mechanical replica on a counter. Beyond, there was
a room with four pinball machines fixed so that the player usually wins. We
continued touring the basement, but there was so much covering the walls and
ceilings, I couldn't take it all in. There was the screening room and, behind
that, a stage for presenting magic shows. In a small, darkened anteroom, two
large chairs faced a three-level display--a faithful replica of a Victorian
English village, painstakingly created with miniature houses, each one lit from
the inside.
In a far wing of the house, we entered a bedroom, which was also overflowing
with objects. A miniature Christmas display contained several trees and
fiber-optic strands that resembled fireworks when they lit up. Beyond a sliding
glass door was a wooden deck, overlooking a garden below, with San Francisco in
the distance. On the other side of the bedroom was another picture window
looking into darkness. With the faint sound of a foghorn in the background, the
window slowly brightened to reveal an entire New England village, with
miniature lobster boats, docks, houses, shops, a church, and a market.
A friend of Tuck's who suffers from AIDS planned to die in this room. The
Christmas scene, the New England village, the view of San Francisco--all are
images the man told Tuck he wanted to see from his deathbed. Tuck first met him
when a group of AIDS patients toured the house, and the man was intrigued
enough to come back and help Tuck conduct tours. After a hospitalization, he
asked Tuck if he might move in to recuperate. Tuck and Sauer talked it over and
agreed. In the months that followed, their newfound friend designed his own
room and created the wildly elaborate displays. Now, with his health returning,
he hardly talks about dying anymore.
With some help from Tuck, he even has a job, which would hardly have seemed
possible when Tuck first met him a couple of years ago. Back then, the friend
had to be coaxed to do anything. Finally fed up, Tuck asked him if he was going
to die soon. The man admitted he wasn't. "So why are you dying now?" Tuck
pleaded. "All of us are going to die. Why not live to the fullest until you
die?"
Samuel Fromartz is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
Screen tests
There may be no surefire method for hiring the right people, but--as these Inc.
500 CEOs will attest--it helps to know what you're looking for
By Ilan Mochari
Sure, Richard Tuck's hiring methods may be unorthodox, but there's no question
about one thing: the CEO of Lander International knows what he's looking for in
a potential hire. Herewith, some other Inc. 500 CEOs who screen candidates for
very specific traits:
1. Team Spirit
"On a Monday, if the Packers lose, it is extremely somber around here,"
explains Scott Spencer, vice-president of Laser Pros International (#163),
which supplies and repairs printer parts. Rhinelander, the Wisconsin town where
Laser Pros is based, may be two hours away from Green Bay's Lambeau Field, but
the office atmosphere can resemble a parking-lot tailgate party--as Spencer
explains to anyone seeking a job at the company. "Talking about the Pack is
just a big part of the culture," he says. Currently, only one confessed nonfan
(out of 109 employees) works for the $11-million company. Spencer has an
explanation, though. "We must not have known him around the fall," he says. Not
that there weren't clues: on his first day of work, the Chicago native actually
arrived in a sports-utility vehicle with a Chicago Bears wheel cover on it. "He
told me he was a transplant," says Spencer. "That's acceptable."
2. Mayberry Factor
Heck, all Travis TeSelle is after are folks who know what it means to put in a
hard day's work. The CEO of Tensor Information Systems (#176), a systems
integrator based in Fort Worth, has made a conscious effort in recent years to
hire employees who hail from the rural Midwest. "People from small towns are
generally people who want to do the right thing," he claims. "They're extremely
honest." TeSelle himself was bred in Tekamah, Nebr., where the townfolk total
1,853.
3. Life Support
When he was leaving graduate school to become a professor at the U.S. Air Force
Academy, Paul Shirley set down in writing both his short-term and his long-term
goals. He found the exercise so challenging and helpful that he had his two
founding partners at SVS (#122) do the same thing at the company's inception.
"It's a way to force the personal issues to the front," says Shirley, who
serves as chairman and CEO of the aerospace- and defense-engineering firm. Many
of SVS's hires come from large aerospace companies and government agencies;
having them write life plans--of whatever length they want--has been Shirley's
way of determining how his growing company fits into their big picture. "You
are opening yourself up to much more than a business relationship," he says.
"Can you really address their needs in your environment? If not, maybe it's not
the best fit."
4. Peer Pressure
Apply to work at Active Control Experts (#79), and you may begin to feel that
you are under suspicion for a criminal offense. The questioning--from a wide
array of interrogators--feels endless. The first time around, says Ken Lazarus,
president and CEO of the manufacturer of vibration-control devices, from six to
eight people will lob queries at the applicant. Aside from Lazarus, those
interviewers include the recruitment manager, the candidate's would-be
department head, and potential coworkers. If the recruit doesn't emerge with a
unanimous thumbs-up, he or she is asked back for another round. Then, as many
as six additional interviewers may sit down with a candidate, focusing their
questions on potential weaknesses that turned up earlier. Each interviewer
covers a specific aspect of the candidate's skill set. One, for example, may
subject mechanical-engineer recruits to a brainteaser that requires
diagramming. Why the rigor? Lazarus wants to see how a recruit reacts to the
kind of pressure that's akin to working at a fast-growing company. "Candidates
say it's grueling at times, but they understand why we do it," he says.
5. Sinking Feeling
From the start, Sean McEwen, chairman and CEO of TriTech Software Systems (#
344), never put much stock in writing samples when he was hiring technical
writers. Each candidate, he knew, would simply bring one or two best efforts.
That's why he came up with an assignment for those who want a job writing
manuals at the software developer: go home tonight, he tells recruits, and
write me a manual about hand washing. "It's something so basic; it's something
we all know how to do," explains McEwen. "And we're all experts on judging the
quality of the manual. I could give it to the person who answers the phones,
and she'd have a valid opinion of it."