Imagine that you're on the board of directors at a Fortune 500 company, and the CEO just told

you she's going to step down. You have to find an experienced, charismatic, and operationally

astute successor, preferably one who knows the industry, and you only have a few months to pull it off.

But you can't exactly reach out to your competitors to see if they're interested in sending over some of their executive talent.

So you might decide to get a little help from an outside consultant, a professional headhunter.

Maybe a better term for us is, you know, unicorn hunters.

That's Julian Ha. He's a partner at the executive recruiting firm Hydric and Struggles.

We're out there looking for the purple unicorn. And then they say, well, we want a

polka-dotted purple one. I said, well, we want a poca dotted purple one.

I said, well, we have striped ones and we have square ones, but the polka dot one's going to be tough.

CEOs might not be mythical creatures, but they're certainly a rare breed. There are only a few

people who have the right qualifications to lead a multinational

corporation. And finding them is only one part of Ha's job. The executive search 20, 20, 30 years

ago was probably more based on your black book, right? Who did you know? Who's in your Rolodex? These days,

there's Google, there's LinkedIn, there's all these ways to find people. The value that we try

to add as an industry is the search, the selection, the filtering, the assessment, the referencing,

and then guiding our clients to help them hire their next

leader. For an executive recruiter, there's a lot on the line. If you find the right candidate,

you could earn a substantial payday for yourself. But one bad placement, and your client's stock

could take a nosedive.

One of the things that you become aware of in this work is that you're impacting millions of lives, not figuratively, literally.

The stakes are high.

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