“I had benefited from dinner table discussions consumed with talk of manufacturing and control of costs.”Daniel Solomons said in a recent interview. His father owned an Electroplating business in England and his grandparents had a food processing company that made pickled herring and other products.
Mr. Solomons, who got into the personnel business after earning degrees in political science and business administration from the University of California at Riverside, co-founded Hyrian a decade ago as a conventional executive recruiter for large companies willing to pay high fees to hire upper-echelon managers. (Hyrian is the Old English word meaning “to hire.”) Typically, such fees are one-third of the first year’s salary and bonus of the job candidate — or about $83,000 for a chief financial officer, say, who is hired at $250,000 a year.
But while Hyrian, based in Los Angeles, did well, with large clients like United Healthcare, the medical insurance giant that serves 4,500 hospitals nationwide, Mr. Solomons said he was frustrated at the limitations of high-fee recruiting. “I would have clients where we would get a pinhole. The clients would have 50 positions open but we would be called on only for the hardest jobs to fill — the ones they were willing to pay for.”
Executive recruiting is a crowded field, with thousands of search firms competing to serve a somewhat limited market. There are just over 1 million business establishments with more than 500 employees in the United States, according to the Census Bureau. There are 5.2 million companies with 100 or fewer employees, however, and those companies have needs as acute as larger firms to hire good people. But they generally lack the budgets and human resource departments to do it.
