Recently, two of my clients successfully emerged as the leading candidates for the positions they were seeking. The process to get there was long and grueling, and both felt like a football team that had gone the length of the field: I It was now 1st and goal – close to a touchdown, but no points on the board as of yet.

At Kelleher Associates, we stress the critical importance of strong references, especially in today’s tough economy and extremely competitive search process. We encourage our clients to line-up people for whom they have worked, those who have worked for them, peers and colleagues, customers/clients, vendors and even professional service providers such as consultants, lawyers, and accountants. In most cases clients will need 6-8 references, but for very senior clients, having 10-15 references is not uncommon these days.

One of my clients recently accepted an offer as the CEO of a private equity-owned company and, at the same time, declined a similar offer.

At the time the declined offer was made, it was incomplete and thin in terms of compensation.  It also left open a key governance question. These open issues necessitated a lengthy negotiation which involved the executive recruiter and key principals of the private equity firm fleshing out the offer, bringing it up to an acceptable level, and resolving the governance issue (which turned out favorably in the end). However, because of this delay, my client was able to complete the interview, reference check, and offer process with the second private equity firm, creating an opportunity to choose one of two offer opportunities that were then in a “dead heat” in terms of timing.

I’m currently reading a well written book entitled How Markets Fail: The Logic Of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy, a journalist at the New Yorker magazine which I would highly recommend to my clients and others who like to assimilate new ideas. In the book Cassidy describes the major influence of what he describes as Utopian Economics, thinking that is blind to how real people act, how this leads to market bubbles such as real estate crashes and credit crunches, and explores behavioral economics which focuses on individual behavior biases – overconfidence, envy, herd behavior, and myopia – and how they lead to some troubling macroeconomic behavior that affects all of us.

I’m at a part of the book where Cassidy a paper done in 1990 by David Scharfstein of MIT and Jeremy Stein of Harvard entitled “Herd Behavior and Investment”. The core of their model basically says that if an investment manager goes with the crowd (i.e., invests in the same stocks as other investors) and things turn out badly, he gets to share the blame with everybody else; if he follows a contrarian strategy, he bears the sole responsibility for his mistakes. After the Sharfstein-Stein paper was published, other researchers provided empirical evidence that supported it by analyzing the hiring and firing of fund managers at Fidelity, Franklin-Templeton, and T. Rowe Price. A similar pattern was found in the hiring and firing of Wall Street security analysts – the ostensibly objective professionals who produce quarterly earnings forecasts that investors rely on.

Recently, I’ve been coaching one of my clients on how to prepare for a series of interviews with the Chicago-based, private equity owners of a Philadelphia services company.   This client is now one of two finalists for the CEO role.  As I reflect on our conversations, I realize that a few, key tips from these prep sessions may be of assistance to many other job seekers.

First, some quick background. The services company, which is about $10 million in size, has very solid gross margins, but is suffering from anemic topline revenue growth. My client has a classic marketing and sales background, but has never before been the CEO of a freestanding company.