Don't Say It

Near the beginning of my career as a headhunter, I worked for Cybersearch, a division of a Control Data Corporation. CDC was the mother ship of the computer industry in the 70's and early 80's. Our division was an in house search firm, supplying IT and engineering talent for the various divisions of the corporation. The head count was between 75 and 100,000 employees world wide.

I came on board in the summer of 1982 when internal hiring was pretty vigorous, but things began to decline in 1983. Fortunately, I was geared to going outside and finding new business and never had the chance to rely on the internal flow of job openings to meet my sales quota.

One observation about internal communication and politics of a huge organization is that they are cloudy and fear driven.

Because we were a sales organization with quotas, we needed to make placements in order to get paid and to justify our existence, so we needed to be very careful with our questions.

One question we were told never ask was "Is there a hiring freeze?" If you asked this question, the divisional recruiter would suspend his hiring as if he got a direct order from above. Sometimes this question would spread like wildfire across the divisions and create a corporate wide hiring slow down for a few weeks. That gets problematic when you have hiring managers who have project deadlines that they can't meet because they can't get an offer out the door. For us, all of our search efforts would be lost if we had candidates with multiple offers in hand. After one or two weeks, we would loose out to our competition, all this because a naive recruiter would ask the question to one of the division recruiters 'Are you having a hiring freeze?"