Job Candidates Often Find That Wives Have to Pass Muster
When the directors sat down to dinner with the two candidates for the San Jose savings and loan’s top job, they knew whom they preferred. But when the evening ended, the other man got the nod.
It wasn’t his social graces that won him the job. It was his wife’s.
“The No. 2 man had the more charming wife,” recalled Edmund Hergenrather, a Los Angeles executive recruiter who led the search for the new S&L; president. “The other wife drank too much. She talked too much. She cost her husband the job.”
Welcome to couple recruiting. A common ritual, before women’s rights led many employers to look askance at such practices, screening the candidate’s mate is making a resurgence as a corporate hiring test.
As has always been the case, companies in the market for a chief executive or other high-level officer are most apt to check out the spouse’s suitability before making a final decision. At such levels, “the distinctions between work and play, office and home, are so blurred that the husband and wife have to be a team,” said Gerard R. Roche, chairman of the nationwide executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.
But some executive recruiters say they also are noticing a rise in the number of spouses brought into the interview process by companies recruiting marketing officials, public relations consultants, investment bankers and others who are expected to entertain clients.
Service firms are more likely to involve spouses than are manufacturing companies, they say, as are companies in smaller cities where community involvement is an important aspect of doing business.
And with rare exception, the spouse being asked to pass muster is the wife. “We almost never see the reverse,” Hergenrather said.
Why the return of a practice that one college-placement officer calls “a throwback to the white gloves days”--before affirmative action and equal rights made strong inroads in hiring practices? Executive recruiters most often cite the increasing reluctance of executives and their families to move around the country for new jobs.
“Candidates now are much more reluctant to make a move at all because they want more control of their lives,” said Ronald E. Gerevas, a partner at the Los Angeles office of Heidrick & Struggles. “Companies want to make sure both people feel easy about the move.”
Some also cite the rise of two-career couples. “The greater concern for having the right wife comes with many of these gals being business people themselves,” Hergenrather said. “In these cases, the company wants to be especially sure that she is in agreement with this move because she may have to give up something.”
Rarely, said recruiter Roche, are companies so gauche as to “check out her pedigree” in a formal office interview. “No husband would put up with that. And no wife, either,” Roche said.
What’s more typical, wives of candidates who have made the final cut are invited with their husbands to dinner or asked to join senior executives and their wives for a weekend of boating or golfing.
“What usually happens is that the chairman of a company has pretty much made up his mind on Joe Blow but he said to me, ‘Why don’t you bring Joe and his wife out for cocktails and dinner?’ It’s as much so the wife has a chance to feel, not inspected, but comfortable with the top executives as they are with her,” said A. S. Blodget Jr., president of the Assn. of Executive Search Consultants.
When the situation is handled tactfully, said Gerevas, “it’s a rare exception when the wife does not feel good about it. I have not encountered a situation where the wife resented it.”
Jean Clark did. Now a spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women, Clark said her husband was considering a job with a financial planning firm, which put candidates through several weeks of pre-acceptance training. He later decided that the job didn’t suit him.
But early on he advised his wife that the firm expected her to attend the last session. Her response: “Are you crazy?”
Many are similarly astonished to hear that executive wives are becoming fair game for recruiters again.
“Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to hear this,” said Caroline W. Nahas, a partner at the large Korn Ferry executive search firm in Los Angeles. “And it is true that there are certain jobs that require a great deal of entertaining, and it is very helpful if the spouse is interested in this kind of activity.
“But all of our surveys show that such things as social contacts and even a good marriage are traits that receive scant attention when senior executives are asked which traits most contribute to their success.”
The trend is in keeping, though, with the increasing role of the wife in all aspects of career-related moves. Recent Heidrick & Struggles surveys show that fully 44% of executives accepting transfers now request job assistance for a spouse, up 20% from a year ago.
Sometimes the wife’s role is so key that her behavior during a single evening can either clinch or kill a job for her husband.
When the Lockheed Corp. was trying not long ago to fill a key position in Saudi Arabia--where women are subjected to strict social rules--the wife was an integral part of the interview process.
“She had to be someone who would get involved in organizing tours, who could handle herself without being overbearing, who really could be Mrs. Lockheed in Saudi Arabia and housemother” to Lockheed’s 700 other employees there, recalled Hergenrather, the recruiter for the job.
So after the list of candidates was narrowed to three men and a front runner selected, they and their wives were invited to dinner so Hergenrather and his wife could “look for how the wives handled the knife, fork and spoon,” he said.
Throughout the evening, the leading contender’s wife “came on too strong,” Hergenrather said. “She was a very aggressive gal, and a smart gal, and she had been in Saudi Arabia and knew something about what it would take to live there. But she talked too much and was too domineering” and her husband didn’t get the job.
In some instances, a conversation with the wife over dinner isn’t adequate.
When Western Gear--a Los Angeles-area heavy equipment company now owned by the manufacturing company Bucyrus-Erie--was a family-run company looking for a new president, the chairman had what struck recruiter Hergenrather as “a rather odd request.” As a final test, the chairman insisted on spending a weekend at the top candidate’s home to observe “how he and his wife acted together in their environment.”
The chairman “was a strong family man who doesn’t really go for the hell raiser kind of guy mostly looking for money in a job,” Hergenrather said. “He was evaluating values and home life.”
The couple were apparently willing to accommodate the house guest, and he apparently liked what he saw. The man got the job.
More often, companies seeking a new chief executive will look for a wife “who can talk to people, who is well groomed and who, hopefully, is well educated,” said James Makrianes, president of the executive recruiter Haley Associates in New York.
In short, the ideal executive wife is an effective entertainer and one who is eager to get involved in community affairs.
“The wife is a particularly important factor in the hiring of senior executives in major regional communities . . . where the wives are expected to get involved in civic things,” said Blodget, the consultants association president.
Such was the case when a small college in Pasadena sought a new president recently. The college’s board is heavily involved in Pasadena community affairs and expected both the new president and his wife to share that interest.
“The board insisted that the wife be an integral part of this hire and that she be interviewed, too,” recalled Gerevas, who handled the search. When they learned that the wife of their leading candidate “had some real hang-ups” about moving to Pasadena, “they had conversation after conversation with her not only to make sure she was interested in a very active social life, but to make sure they felt the move would be an easy one for her.”
Her husband eventually got the job.
Boeing, the large Seattle aircraft manufacturer, insists on meeting the wife of serious candidates for a different reason: Seattle’s weather.
“They go to some trouble to escort the wife around for several days, said Hergenrather, who recruits for Boeing, “to let her get a feel for whether she can handle days and days of no sunshine.”
