My Recruiting Years

I had a very enjoyable twenty-nine year career with Landmark Communications, a media company owned by Frank Batten Sr and his family. A portion of my career involved accounting and finance, my major at Virginia Tech, but one fine summer day in the mid 1970s Mr. Batten asked me to take the Corporate VP/Personnel position. After thinking about it for a day, I went back to see him and told him I was favorably disposed but I wanted to ask him two questions before committing.

First I asked him if he really thought I could do the "people" part of the job, or was he just looking for a personnel bookkeeper. He assured me he had great confidence in my people skills and he needed someone in the job with the mix of people and accounting skills due to some onerous federal legislation just passed.

This was at a time when there was great pressure on companies to increase the number of women and minorities employed, especially in management positions. I had observed a number of companies nationally who's CEOs gave lip service to the new staffing requirements, but the CEOs did not in fact support the personnel department in its efforts to hire women and minorities. This brought much frustration to the personnel people.

So I asked Frank if he was, in his heart of hearts, really supportive of this new hiring approach? He assured me he was, and I could tell he was very sincere it as we discussed it. I accepted the position and thus began some of the greatest work experiences.

Frank told me one of his highest priorities was to re-establish Landmark's recruiting program at the MBA schools. As he surveyed Landmark's pool of young people who might develop into promising managers, he felt we were at a low ebb.

After a suitable transition time from my Corporate Treasurer's position to VP/Personnel, I began to plan my approach to recruiting. Remember I had zero experience in recruiting and not a clue on what to do next. So I took a page from some Chicago bank robber's book. When they asked him why he robbed banks, he said "That's where the money is". So if I'm looking for students, cleverly I decided to schedule my first recruiting trip to the Harvard Business School to interview MBAs.

It was the month of September and I was so green I wasn't aware the big recruiting companies (Ford, General Motors, IBM, etc) had had their interview dates scheduled for at least a year. The people at Harvard must have felt sorry for me because they found room for me to make an appearance in late October. I naively didn't understand most of the good graduates would have gone through at least twenty high pressure interviews by then and many had already accepted jobs.

I should make it clear I was interviewing first year MBA students for summer positions between their two years at HBS.

The HBS interviews are spaced thirty minutes apart with no break until lunch time. By lunch time I felt like, as Tennessee Ernie said, "I'd been rode hard and put away wet". To say these students had their way with me is an understatement. I had a whole list of questions I had prepared to glean information and after I asked the first question I got to close out the interview 25 minutes later without getting much more than a head nod in.

The afternoon session went pretty much the same, and on the plane home I analyzed what had happened. These students had interviewed so many times with the big corporations, many of which conducted high pressure interviews, they had their line of "snappy patter" down and it was like my first question pushed the start button on an audio recording. They had complete control of the interview, and I could have saved myself a trip if they had mailed me their resumes.

Since it was so late in the recruiting season I only went to the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, a favorite school of Frank's. The results were pretty much the same.

I did manage to get one Harvard student, a lady named Gretchen, to visit us in Norfolk. She was outstanding and ended up working the next summer for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Landmark's home base. I spent a fair amount of time that summer picking Gretchen's formidable brain, with emphasis on how Landmark could appeal to some of the students at Harvard who didn't want to work for a big national company. She was really helpful, and my one regret is we couldn't talk her into coming to work for Landmark. She was in love with the publisher of the LA Times who, of course, had offered her employment. At least, that's the story I got.

Before leaving Harvard on my first trip I scheduled a more prime recruiting visit time for the following year, and developed a strategy of how to gain and keep control of the interviews. When I sent the job posting to HBS prior to showing up, I made it clear Landmark was a medium size company with high standards, good values, and a chance to get exposed to several different departments of the business in a fairly rapid time interval.

At 8 sharp the first student shows up, a sheaf of papers in his hand, and no doubt he had been prepped by some of people I had interviewed the year before, who left notes,etc. We shook hands, and after introductions, I immediately asked him "Why did you come to Harvard?" He look sort of stunned and must of thought "how dumb is that question?", but after a minute he said he came because of their reputation and to study (marketing, finance, production, etc). I used the pregnant pause and after a moment I said "That's not why you came to Harvard". I smiled at him and let that sink in for a few seconds. By then the elephant in the room was the obvious unasked question he had - "Why did I come to Harvard then?"

I leaned forward in my seat and locked onto his eyes and said, "You came to learn how to manage people". I let that sink in and then quickly asked a question. "How many hours have you taken to learn how to do that?" I had researched that and knew the students were only required to take six hours of Organizational Behavior in two years of MBA school. He wasn't sure what courses I would consider so I told him the answer was six. I went on to tell him if you are any where near your salt in a few months you could be responsible for a work group of six or more employees, none of whom had been to HBS and most of whom were not working out of some high ideals of corporate success, but working just to feed their family. "How are you going to motivate them?"

By now I had complete control of the interview and got answers I needed to figure out whether I wanted to invite them for a trip to Norfolk for further interviews. The sheaf of papers disappeared into his pocket about half way into the interview and I didn't have to listen to a pre-recorded monologue of "How Great I Art". Instead, if I had made up my mind to invite them down I spent the rest of the interview extolling the advantages of working for a smaller company - broader exposure to all departments in the business, better chance for faster upward mobility, living in a great community like Norfolk/Virginia Beach, etc.

When the kid left, I 'bout broke my arm patting myself on the back. The country boy had come to the big ole Ivy league school and had a modicum of success. The rest of the day went well.

For several years I also recruited MBAs at Virginia, Stanford, University of North Carolina, Cornell and Virginia Tech. We succeeded in hiring students from all those schools except Stanford, and I am proud to say retained a very high percentage of them. Several of them attained high executive positions with various divisions.

My most memorable recruiting effort resulted in a continuing friendship with a young man name Lem Lewis. Lem was one of the first African-Americans to get an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, and later an MBA from Virginia's Darden school of business. He was working for Wachovia Bank in New York and wanted to change companies. One of his professors at the Darden School, Bob Vandel, was on Landmark's Board of Directors, and during a break in a board meeting Bob told me I should get in touch with Lem to see if he would be interested in working for Landmark.

Lem agreed to come to Norfolk for an interview and one Sunday night I met him at the airport. (I did this for all candidates flying in, despite some criticism about pampering untried candidates. I told the critics if I thought enough of a candidate to invite them to Norfolk, I would treat them just like a basketball coach would treat a seven foot recruit for his team. Besides that, I thought it was in keeping with the culture of Landmark to treat people well.)

This was in the 1970s when it wasn't as easy for African-Americans to be absorbed seamlessly in the workplace, and also I wanted Lem to know we just didn't invite him down because of the color of his skin. We sat down at dinner, and the first thing I said to him was, "Look - you are black and I am white and that makes no difference to me or anyone in Landmark. We invited you because of your excellent education and your work experience and to find out if we have a match between your skills and our needs".

I could sense the tension leaving our table and we had a great dinner together. We compared our backgrounds and they were so similar that about the only difference was our skin color. Both of us grew up in meager economic family situations, he in Lynchburg and I in Roanoke. Our high schools were arch-rivals. We both had leverage our unexpected educations (Virginia and Virginia Tech) to some reasonable success early in our careers. We both recognized what our dads had to do to raise a family with not much formal education. Lem's dad was a foundry worker and my dad was a mill worker, and I think we both felt we had a chance to make them proud of us.

Lem came to work for Landmark and after a while on the Corporate Staff he found his niche in television. Landmark owned KLAS-TV in Las Vegas and Lem had huge success in running the sales department. Later Landmark bought a TV station in Nashville which was the fifth station in the market, and Lem was sent there to bring the station intoa competitive mode. He did just that, bringing it to the #1 station in the market. Lew eventually ended up as the Chief Financial Officer for Corporate Landmark and has been retired a number of years.

We still stay in contact and although we have had some financial success, when we talk it' still the same two guys who haven't forgotten their humble roots. His friendship is a blessing to this day.

In a few years, the quality of students I selected for visits resulted in giving me some credibility, and the Corporate Executive Editor (CEE) approached me one day about doing some recruiting at undergraduate schools for beginning reporters. I readily agreed, knowing the pressure was on newsrooms to hire minorities and women. There were 1,750 daily papers in the country and about that many minority reporters, so to say they were scarce is an understatement.

I was a closet writer and had hung out in the newsrooms of our papers in Roanoke and Norfolk to develop some knowledge about how they operated. I asked the CEE what characteristics he looked for in successful beginning reporters, and his answer was brief and simple. "They should be friends with the English language and like to peer around corners."

The newsroom editors weren't all that excited about me recruiting reporters because historically they had done it all themselves with no help from Personnel. They started giving me instructions to go to certain schools with primarily black students. But having learned my lesson from my first trip to Harvard, I knew I had to develop my own plan.

When I told them I had scheduled trips to the "Little Three" - Wesleyan, Amherst and Williams - they left muttering to themselves. But I had good reasons. First, the students at these three schools, even though none had a journalism program, were getting one of the finest liberal arts education in the country. Each school also had its own daily paper and other writing opportunities.

Second, I had seen what had happened to some of the newsroom hires from the so-called "black schools". Not only did they lack the quality of education the students from the Little Three received, but they had another significant problem. Every new employee, whether white or black, reports to a new job with a significant learning curve. But in addition to that the black students had an significant additional challenge, that is, in school they were surrounded by students of their own color whereas in the newsroom they were surrounded by white employees. It was culture shock for many of them and some couldn't cope with it. I felt the black students I recruited at the Little Three would have already dealt with that problem due to the ethnic makeup of those schools. So the recruits would be one step ahead.

So how did I come out? We ended up hiring a minority male and a female, both from Wesleyan, as beginning reporters, and a minority male from Williams as a beginning reporter. They were good, so good in fact, the Phoenix, Arizona paper hired the Wesleyan grad and the Washington Post hired the Williams grad - both after they had been with us about a year. The female, who was a delightful person, stayed long enough to be named First Year Reporter of the Year before the Philadelphia Inquirer hired her away. Last I heard she is currently Editor of the Inquirer's editorial page. But that was the name of the game in those days. You got good people, developed them and knew one of the larger papers would hired them away, so you start all over. We felt at least we were helping our newspaper industry begin to right some ethnic wrongs by giving these young people an opportunity.

I can truly say I enjoyed recruiting and helping develop young people for Landmark as much as anything I did in my career. Some of them remain my friends to this day.

2010 Copyright Hugh Eaton