Hey...I'm a Newbie !!!!!!!!! NOT !
The Rant Continues....
Here comes the Search Committee. For whatever reason, they are tasked with finding a new superintendent. Chances are pretty good that none of them have ever been a golf course superintendent. Chances are that many of them have seen their better days in their own work worlds and are on the downslope, where life is getting easier and they aren’t wielding their own swords as much as they used to.
When a club begins to look for a superintendent, they do have some options. There are some solid professional Head-hunters out there who provide an excellent service. For me, it is interesting when I get a call from a professional search firm looking for a candidate. It just tells me that they are getting paid for having my name and a list of other “insiders” in their Rolodex. The going rate, anywhere from 10%-20% of the total package. Not a bad number for having some good contacts. But I do believe that clubs who get the help of a professional are following a good line of thinking and to a candidate, it may be that a telling sign is the club’s willingness to hire some professional help. Headhunting superintendents is no like headhunting in other professional ranks. A club that uses, hires, asks or deals with a firm that has no golf experience gets a bad package. An example, a search firm executive is on the committee and he has his assistant (who knows nothing about golf) call a list of superintendents to see if they are interested in a nearby position. Superintedents are smart and a tight community and before long they figure out that they are not “special” because they got a phone call, they are just on a list. But that’s OK, because they can still go to their boss and tell them “Big Club in the Sky CC called me, and they want to know if I am interested in the job---just to let you know”. Bingo, instant raise, thanks to the club searching.
The committee who thinks they can do it all by themselves is the one that places a club in a bad position. And they often handle things badly by talking too much and thinking too little. They played down the road or across the country one day last May and maybe that superintendent might want the job. The call gets made and suddenly a person that no one knows much about has an interview. No one knows about that superintendent’s secret passion for his landscaping business that everyone in the area knows he’s run out of his shop for the last 10 years. Let’s face it, most members don’t know much at all about what is going on at their own club, much less have any ability to know what is happening anywhere else.
The committee may mean well posting the job with the local and national superintendent’s association. Nice idea, but this move will probably earn them a stack of 300 resumes that they have no idea how to read or tell if there is a shred of truth in the words. It amazes me that the GCSAA continues to create all kinds of “career development” opportunities so that superintendents can look for better jobs. I’m pretty sure that if clubs really knew what was being talked about in those sessions, they wouldn’t spend their money on this kind of “education”. Don’t bother jamming on me about taking a shot at GCSAA. Big Brother needs an arrow fired at them now and then. Professional Job Switching is probably going to turn out to be career suicide for bunches of people “educated” in how to get work.
So the 300 resumes have come in. The so-called screening has been done and now we think we have a list of “great people” to interview. Clue: People who are good at their work and are doing it well at their current place of business probably aren’t reading and responding to job postings. The committee or sub-committee for Resume Screening has met and by some bizarre method they have created their stacks of Yes, No and Maybe. I’ve sat in on some of these sessions. It is hard to watch. Sets of criteria are debated about and established, such as “must be from the area”, “must be educated at a certain turf school”, “must currently be a superintendent”, “needs to know how to grow our kind of grass” and all kinds of currently illegal stuff like “needs to be young”, “needs to be stable and married” and stuff like that.
Interview time is amazing. Most committees do all they can do to make this hard. By whatever process, there are usually a couple of interviews, maybe even a phone interview, sometimes one-on-one meetings with individual committee members. The questions asked? Think of the silly questions people ask superintendents all the time and then imagine them being asked in a situation where someone decides right or wrong. Mind boggling.
In the end and often the biggest source of frustration is money. Committee members don’t read “Job Interview Tactics that Work” and they don’t hesitate to break all the rules of human resource management types that tell us how to survive interviews. A professional HR person knows the rules and the limits. Club members usually don’t. Questions about how much the candidate currently makes usually come out early on. Questions about how much the prospect would like to make at the new job are usually on the tongue tip. Thus the bidding begins.
Let me back up a bit for a moment. For sure, at this point there has been extensive discussion about the salary of the new superintendent. Some members of the committee will undoubtedly think the previous position holder was making far too much money and seek to hire below whatever that numbers is. Some members may have done their own study of area salaries by asking whomever they can about what so and so is making at such and such a club. As if they’ll get any information that is even remotely correct. General Manager types sometime really spill the milk here, because often they have a study of some sort of area salaries that is usually never correct or comes close to comparing apples to apples of different compensation packages. Asking a superintendent what they make usually gains one an answer that may include a number that the head person wishes they are making. The facts are that lots of talk may float around about money, but most of it is either inflated or deflated to suit the needs and wishes of the individuals at hand.
So finally there are two or three candidates that the club wishes to look at and maybe make an offer to. In some cases they have one person who stands out, but when they make an offer to that person, they forget that they are probably pitching to the best-employed person who really has nothing to loose. In fact, that person may not at all want the new job, but would like to see what they are worth. When they return home with an offer from the new club, their old club is more than likely to counter offer very quickly.
All of this is again, not big news. But what I am having a hard time understanding is the representations that members make during salary negotiations. Time and time again, I see clubs that are well known in the industry as wasters of money thinking that they are pulling the wool over a candidate’s eyes by telling them that they can’t afford a sensible number. Really? You just pissed off 8 figures on a club house. You just paid a restaurant consultant six figures to tell you that you have to raise the price of a bowl of soup. You settled with Mrs. Slipslide for six figures when she slipped on her soft-spikes down a slope where most people know better than to walk down. On and on. But suddenly they are trying to tell their new superintendent that he or she is not important enough to compensate to the level of letting them live within a 15 min drive of the club. They are saying that they need an expert budget manager who will “save them money” and not offer up any compensation for doing such a task.
By the time the dust settles in this kind of debacle, the good candidates are long gone. Probably they weren’t in the picture in the first place, but if they progressed, what they probably learned is that they don’t want to work for this club.
How is this bad for the Game? To me it seems obvious, but to many, no matter what they hear along those lines, they don’t see the value that competent greenkeeping brings to them. I’m not talking about competency in the form of getting it right for a few days for the Invitational. I’m talking about total professional competency. A steward of the property. A person who knows where the money goes and why. A person who is savvy enough to know to come to the powers that be at the club and tell them what they often do not want to hear. A person who cares how the course plays before they care how it looks and can defend that position. A person incapable of making 5 figure mistakes on projects, because they understand how to build, fix, tear-down and maintain a golf course.
A person who knows how to tell the green chairman from another local club that they are treating their superintendent badly by phoning to get info and second guess their own superintendent.