Career Journal: Recruiters Fail To Check Past Of Some Hires



Career Journal: Recruiters Fail To Check Past Of Some Hires

By Joann S. Lublin. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York , N.Y. : Oct 8, 2002. pg. B.1 | |Abstract (Summary)

Mr. van Someren was hired at Korn/Ferry in June 1996. In a statement, the firm says Mr. van Someren had voluntarily disclosed information about his departure from A.T. Kearney during his job interview. But Mr. van Someren didn't disclose the full extent of his personal charges on his corporate credit card.

The Korn/Ferry statement adds that the hiring manager decided "Chris deserved a second chance" after contacting a current and former co-worker at the New York search firm Johnson Smith & Knisely, where Mr. van Someren was employed at the time. The Korn/Ferry hiring manager didn't speak to Mr. van Someren's boss at A.T. Kearney, a unit of Electronic Data Systems Corp., or at Johnson Smith & Knisely.

Mr. van Someren flourished under Ms. [Barbara Pickens]'s tutelage and eventually was promoted to recruiter. Mike Wellman, then head of Korn/Ferry's New York office, says he began wooing the young man in spring 1996. During his second job interview, Mr. van Someren admitted leaving A.T. Kearney because he had used his corporate credit card for personal purchases, according to Mr. Wellman. "Chris said the amount was somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000," he recalls. "I got the sense Chris had learned a lesson." Mr. Wellman says he didn't feel he needed to confirm the amount or the circumstances of Mr. van Someren's departure with Ms. [Patricia Cook].

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Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Oct 8, 2002

FEW RECRUITERS have risen as fast as 38-year-old Christian van Someren.

In 1991, he was a secretary for the executive-search division of management consultants A.T. Kearney. A decade later, he became one of six presidents and the head of global markets for Korn/Ferry International, the world's biggest search firm. The plum promotion put him in charge of five specialty global practices and revamping the management of key global accounts.

But there were problems in Mr. van Someren's past -- blemishes that the Korn/Ferry top brass failed to investigate fully until May, nearly six years after it hired him. Mr. van Someren has now been stripped of his presidency, and his situation is the talk of the search-firm world. The saga highlights serious shortcomings in the way the search industry investigates its own job candidates, even as the industry promotes its background-checking skills to employers.

Patricia Cook, a former A.T. Kearney recruiter who supervised Mr. van Someren, says she fired him in March 1993 after he admitted using his corporate credit card to buy $28,000 in Christmas gifts and refused to repay the funds. She adds that he then also owed $17,000 on a bank loan she had guaranteed largely so he could pay other personal debts and follow her to the firm's New York office from Denver .

Mr. van Someren was hired at Korn/Ferry in June 1996. In a statement, the firm says Mr. van Someren had voluntarily disclosed information about his departure from A.T. Kearney during his job interview. But Mr. van Someren didn't disclose the full extent of his personal charges on his corporate credit card.

The Korn/Ferry statement adds that the hiring manager decided "Chris deserved a second chance" after contacting a current and former co-worker at the New York search firm Johnson Smith & Knisely, where Mr. van Someren was employed at the time. The Korn/Ferry hiring manager didn't speak to Mr. van Someren's boss at A.T. Kearney, a unit of Electronic Data Systems Corp., or at Johnson Smith & Knisely.

Mr. van Someren declined to comment for this article beyond his participation in the Korn/Ferry statement.

Within the search industry, the van Someren case is hardly an isolated event. The newsletter Executive Recruiter News uncovered 16 cases of high-level recruiters with background discrepancies from 1973 to 1993.

This past January, the president of A.T. Kearney's executive-search division resigned a week after industry consultants Hunt-Scanlon Advisors raised doubts about his professional and educational credentials. Gene Shen, the departed president, denies he misled A.T. Kearney about having a master's degree or about his title at New York search firm Whitney Group, his prior employer. He still maintains he was a Whitney Group co-founder, a claim that firm says is untrue.

Jack Groban, a former A.T. Kearney managing director who helped recruit Mr. Shen in March 1999, has said he and colleagues didn't check Mr. Shen's educational background because they cared more about his Whitney Group work. Nor did they confirm his title there. "Nobody ever called me from Kearney to do a reference check on Gene Shen," says Gary Goldstein, CEO of Whitney Group, a division of Headway Corporate Resources Inc.

"The thing that happened with Gene was an embarrassment," concedes G. Stephen Fisher, Mr. Shen's successor. "We're real careful at this point about referencing who we hire because we don't want to have problems."

Mr. Shen now works for Options Group, a small New York search firm that, in turn, never quizzed A.T. Kearney about him. "I didn't need to do a reference check on him. I have known him for 14 years," says Michael Karp, a founding Options Group partner.

If Mr. Karp had checked with A.T. Kearney, officials would have divulged that they challenged the business purpose of certain expenses Mr. Shen sought reimbursement for when he quit, according to knowledgeable people. Mr. Shen currently owes two corporate credit-card providers $80,000 in expense-account money, the informed individuals say. Mr. Shen declines to discuss the dispute.

Korn/Ferry's Mr. van Someren got in trouble over a corporate credit card during his first full-time job after his 1989 college graduation. He was working as a secretary and receptionist for Mary Starkey, president of Starkey & Associates, a Denver household-help placement agency, and she let him use her corporate credit card to buy office supplies. Two years later, she says, she found that he had bought several thousand dollars of personal gifts with the card. She docked his pay to recover the money.

Meanwhile, Mr. van Someren applied to be Ms. Cook's secretary at A.T. Kearney after helping her find a nanny through Starkey. Ms. Cook didn't seek a Starkey reference because "he said he and his boss weren't getting along," she says. He joined A.T. Kearney in August 1991, proving so efficient that Ms. Cook promoted him to researcher and backed the loan so he could move a year later.

The following January, Mr. van Someren confessed his $28,000 misuse of his corporate credit card. Ms. Cook urged him to devise a schedule to repay the credit-card debt and her guaranteed loan, but he said that was impossible "because he wouldn't be able to live a normal life with those debts," recollects Ms. Cook, who then fired him. (Ms. Cook now heads recruiters Cook & Co. in Bronxville , N.Y. )

In May 1993, Mr. van Someren became a recruiter's secretary again, this time at Johnson Smith & Knisely. Barbara Pickens, his boss, says she didn't contact Ms. Cook because another A.T. Kearney search consultant told her "he can do a lot of things for you" despite his unspecified problems at A.T. Kearney.

Mr. van Someren filed for personal bankruptcy protection a month later. His Chapter 7 petition, filed with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York , listed scant assets and $100,335 of debt, plus living expenses that exceeded the take-home pay from his $40,000 salary by nearly $18,000 a year. That September, a bankruptcy judge wiped out his debts, including what he owed A.T. Kearney. That move forced Ms. Cook to pay her bank about $19,725 in principal and interest on Mr. van Someren's behalf.

Mr. van Someren flourished under Ms. Pickens's tutelage and eventually was promoted to recruiter. Mike Wellman, then head of Korn/Ferry's New York office, says he began wooing the young man in spring 1996. During his second job interview, Mr. van Someren admitted leaving A.T. Kearney because he had used his corporate credit card for personal purchases, according to Mr. Wellman. "Chris said the amount was somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000," he recalls. "I got the sense Chris had learned a lesson." Mr. Wellman says he didn't feel he needed to confirm the amount or the circumstances of Mr. van Someren's departure with Ms. Cook.

At Korn/Ferry, Mr. van Someren generated so much revenue rapidly that he was named a managing director 11 months later. He won his first management spot in 1999, and took command of the global consumer-industry practice a year later.

His ascension to global markets president in December 2001 occurred partly because he had impressed the recently hired chief executive, Paul C. Reilly, present and past Korn/Ferry employees say. The post enabled Mr. van Someren to enjoy a globe-trotting, affluent lifestyle, earning about $700,000 a year, those co-workers estimate. Earlier this year, public records show, he bought a $750,000 condominium in Greenwich , Conn.

Korn/Ferry senior management finally learned the full details of Mr. van Someren's past in May. A London colleague clashed with him, feared retribution and decided to delve into his employment history, people familiar with the situation say.

In an interview in late August, Don Spetner, a Korn/Ferry spokesman and senior vice president, said an internal investigation of the disgruntled staffer's allegation had confirmed the firm's prior conclusion that Mr. van Someren got into financial problems at A.T. Kearney because "he was basically young and irresponsible. He couldn't pay his credit card, defaulted and declared bankruptcy."

Last month, after weeks of inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, the big search firm quietly stripped Mr. van Someren of his presidency and made him a full-time recruiter again. "I wouldn't call it a demotion," Mr. Spetner said Friday. Korn/Ferry eliminated Mr. van Someren's position and several others as part of "a flattening of the management structure."

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