Probably pretty far, right sparky?
I know – and it’s OK because you’re human. As it turns out, I’ve had a 3 million dollar annual retainer at play right here in Birmingham. More on the 3 Million Dollar retainer in play at the Birmingham-based Regions bank from the Wall Street Journal:
“An executive-recruitment firm that works for Regions Financial Corp. said it paid the tab for
Regions officials at a number of getaways to luxury golf resorts, a practice that has come under the scrutiny of federal bank regulators.
The search firm, Fiderion Group, entertained Regions executives on golf vacations annually from 2002 to 2008, Fiderion Chief Executive James B. Norton III said in an interview. Three former Fiderion employees familiar with the matter said the firm spent an aggregate of more than $100,000 on Regions officials at the outings.
Federal law prohibits bank employees from accepting anything of value intended to influence business decisions. The law makes exceptions for things like “reasonable” business lunches and gifts “based on obvious family or personal relationships.”
In an email to a Fiderion employee in August 2006, Mr. Norton said his firm had done all retained job searches for the bank and its predecessor bank, AmSouth, for at least 10 years. Retained search means the recruiting firm is paid a retainer fee for its work rather than on a per-hire basis.
Mr. Norton’s email said that since Fiderion had opened in 2002, it had done more than $2 million a year in business with Regions and AmSouth. Former Fiderion employees said the amount billed to Regions in recent years exceeded $3 million annually. They said Regions was Fiderion’s biggest customer, and turned to the firm for its high-level executive searches.”
That, my friends, is what’s known as a whale client delivered by being on the inside. Cold-calling isn’t likely to get you that one – you’ll need a former colleague or placement you delivered to bring you in and provide you the Fortune 500 exclusive that delivers 3 million large.
Good work if you can get it. Funny thing is, Birmingham has long been a banking center (before waves of consolidation started rolling up the industry), meaning that many of the executives they could have been recruiting on the retainer would have already been located in Birmingham. Now that I think about it, I’m sure they had an office in downtown Birmingham and by eating lunch with someone every day (remember – never eat alone), they would have likely filled up a meaningful target list.
The 3 million dollar retainer. Your new measure of success. Good luck out there!
Banks have notoriously relied on third party to execute recruiting for them because their recruiting and HR teams have been notoriously bad!
Having worked in the banking industry I can tell you that making changes to the recruiting engine to actually get it running on all cylinders and getting results is very difficult because no where, and I mean no where, is the status quo “we have always done it that way” mentality so culturally imbedded.
That said, it is fertile ground for real recruiting revolution. Moving the recruiting performance dial to the positive, even just a little, in a bank can mean enormous ROI and savings. Something bankers lover to hear! The problem is the people in HR and recruiting and banks feel paralyzed and/or are not innovative and daring enough to execute.
That leaves the door wide open to executive recruiters, headhunters if you will, to make millions off of the recruiting ineptitude in the banking industry.