MANAGERIAL MATCHMAKER
Daily Breeze - Torrance, Calif.
Author: Muhammed El-Hasan STAFF WRITER
Date: May 8, 2007
Listening to a radio news program while driving on the road two years ago, Kelly Watson heard a story that would send her in a new direction.
The independent marketing consultant listened to a report of two women who shared a single executive position. Neither one wanted to commit to the job full time because of family duties.
"So I said how do we bottle this?" the mother of three recalled.
Watson, who was working on her MBA at Loyola Marymount University at the time, was inspired to write a business plan for a company to match part-time executives for shared corporate positions.
Watson completed her MBA in May 2006, and officially launched her new company, Career Partners, in August.
Watson, 37, works out of her El Segundo home office, where she helps her client firms find mostly women professionals willing and able to share an executive position.
Earlier in her career, Watson worked at Merisel when it was an El Segundo-based computer wholesaler. She started in sales and worked her way up into a high position in marketing. She later took a position as vice president of marketing for Telecom New Zealand, which hired her at the company's Pasadena office.
Watson began consulting to spend more time with her family.
What does your job entail?
I'm running the company. So it's everything.
Who are your target clients?
Mostly forward-looking companies like in the IT space or in the financial industry who have felt the employment crunch.
Where are your clients located?
Right now, my client base is in Los Angeles. But I get people from New York, Atlanta and Chicago contacting me every day saying, "When are you coming here?"
How do you find job candidates?
We have been in a lot of alumni magazines for business schools. We go through professional societies. We go through moms clubs. We've bought Google terms like "work flexibility." We're blogging on Web sites.
How do you gauge the job-sharing candidates?
They fill out a 40-minute profile on our Web site. They tell us their preferences. We do a personality analysis. We narrow down, based on their skills and personality fit, who is a candidate for a job. And we put their personalities through a logarithm and find who matches well with them.
Do you meet the candidates?
We meet the candidates to bring them together and see how they interact. When we put two people in the role, now we have this opportunity where this star player may be deficient, and we can find someone else who can fill that deficiency. For example, one may be gregarious and energetic and the other mature and thorough.
What important traits must candidates have?
It's important that people have a particular propensity for leadership, but also the ability to share. They have to be able to suppress the ego a bit. Moms tend to have the ability to share. But we have had the people who were a little too independent.
How do you introduce the executive pair to your clients?
We present to the client a package where we reiterate the client's needs and we present a joint resume of the candidates and their skills and personality traits. Usually, we present more than one candidate team to a client.
What do you see as the perfect team?
There's too many variations. They're collaborating, communicating and they're better than 1-plus-1.
What's the hardest part of matching two people?
It's the logistics. You may find two people who are perfect together, but they both want mornings off because they have a mom- and-me class.
Is it just for women?
It's not just for women. My business plan out of the gate was we're going to go after women. That's the low-hanging fruit. But there's this massive retiring baby boomer generation that has the skills and experience, but they want to step out.
What kind of executive positions do you work with?
We only do positions that are $100,000 and above.
What's the best part of your job?
This is a mission more than a company. We can change something significant if we are successful.
What's the worst part?
That everything takes twice as long as it needs to. There are not enough hours in a day.
Who would be your perfect team partner?
My husband. My husband and I worked in the same companies in the past. He was in finance and I was in marketing. We tag-teamed. We played on each other's strengths. He's the quiet listener. I'm more the people person.
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