YES! I love helping my clients find the right people to help them grow. Doing search work on challenging assignments is something I really enjoy.

In order to do quality search work, however, I limit the number of new high-priority searches I take on to ONE per month. This is an entirely different model from other search firms (both retained and contingency), who hedge their bets by taking on as many searches as they can get.

Having too many searches on at once doesn't work for me, nor do I think it works for my clients. I do my best work when I'm focused on a critical search and can work my search methodology (see #5 below) to identify the right candidates.

Aside from my monthly high-priority search work, I am most interested in developing a long-term ongoing relationship with clients who want to partner with me as a "talent scout" and recruitment consultant, where I learn about the needs of the client and am able to introduce my HPL members and other talented individuals when it makes sense for strategic "bench building".

I enjoy working with companies that understand the importance of long-term HR strategy and who know that relying mainly on ad hoc urgent position-filling is just a short-term fix.  I believe that strategic talent identification and acquisition is the long-term secret for success and companies who understand this and work with outside recruitment specialists to find the best talent in the market are the types of companies I want to work with.

For maximum impact on your organization, please note that I am most able to deliver high-performance candidates who come from an advertising/marketing/sales background or who are business-building senior-level general managers with exceptional skills and leadership qualities.

Yes, I'm in my 8th year as a professional recruiter in Japan, which is relatively long by local standards as many recruiters come and go in this market. In total, I have 24 years of Japan-focused business experience and I have a long-term commitment to the profession. Looking forward, I anticipate that I'll be here for at least another 10 years recruiting top talent in Japan.

I've consistently been able to deliver talented people to my clients by making a sincere effort to develop real relationships with both my candidates and clients, something that is critical to navigate through all the challenges of successfully closing a search.

For a list of some recent placements, please see #5 in the "For High-Performance Leaders" FAQ section above.

The majority of my clients have been foreign-capital ("gaishi") firms in Japan who are looking to hire the best and brightest local talent. I have enjoyed worked with Japanese firms as well to provide them with bilingual professionals for their global growth.

About 40% of my clients are from the agency side—traditional ad agencies, direct marketing agencies, interactive agencies, PR agencies, research agencies, brand consultancies, production agencies, etc. The remainder are a broad mix of clients who are usually sales and marketing-driven companies that need to hire the best senior management and sales/marketing/business development leaders available in the market to enable their ongoing growth.

I believe in the "find your strengths" and "performance-based hiring" approaches to talent identification and acquisition and I look for people who have demonstrated effectiveness in specific mission-critical skills while developing their general management abilities. The specific types I focus on are:

Advertising Wizards
Marketing Mavens
Digital Visionaries
Green/Cleantech Business Builders
C-Level Leaders (CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, CSO, etc.)
Sales Management Superstars

If you are looking for types outside of these areas, I can refer you to a colleague at Robert Leonard Consulting (they are all great, really) or to a recruitment professional that I know who specializes in the type of person you are seeking.

I first came to Japan in 1985 and my entire professional life has been focused on doing business in Japan. Over the past 24 years I've built a contact database of over 10,000 individuals. Though a very small percentage of these people are in my special tribe (see "High-Performance Leaders" above), I do try to keep in touch with many of them.

When taking on a search I move outward in concentric circles. I start with my HPL group, then direct contacts, then warm contacts, then cold contacts. At each point along the way, I gather data on "likely suspects" and do whatever I can to turn them into a warm contact via referrals.

Though the success of cold-contact recruiting is getting lower due to poor quality and abusive recruitment tactics by aggressive firms, it is still an important factor in identifying the right candidate for any job.

I can't give away all my success secrets here, but it is important for clients to know that I do cold-calling, and do it in a way that results in a fairly high contact to qualification ratio. It is not the easiest part of the business, but it can be fun.

I aim for quality over quantity and do my very best to filter out candidates with a low probability for getting the job. The most important thing for me when working with a client is communication and I expect excellent two-way communication on identifying high-probability candidates for any specific open position.

• I love helping clients fill critical positions.
• I work closely with a group of high-performance leaders who I know extremely well. If any one of them are a fit for one of your open positions, they would be a major asset to your organization.
• I have a broad and reliable network of bilingual professionals beyond my inner circle who help me identify talented people who are open to moving. These candidates don't always respond to advertising, post their resumes online, etc.
• I do cold-contact recruiting.
• I am open to working on both retained and contingency search.
• I'm easy to work with and believe in high integrity communication.
• I love helping clients fill critical positions (did I mention that before? )

Please send me a mail at gary(at)robertleonard.jp and I'll follow up right away to see if we'd be good partners.