Category: Leadership & Hiring Trends

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Great communication is a vital part of what we do in recruiting. It was the same for every Olympic Games I worked at – even more so when the inevitable language barriers hit. 

As a reporter at the 2010 Singapore Youth Olympics I was paired with a fresh-out-of-college camera operator from Guangzhou, China called Pu Ke. He told me the way to remember his name was by calling him ‘little puke’. He only spoke a few sentences of English, which was still better than the haphazard Mandarin I picked up at the Beijing Games in ‘08. 

After 48 hours of orientation meetings, we set off to news gather. We worked together every day for nearly three weeks and I still can’t quite understand how we managed to make the relationship work so well. I do remember there was quite a bit of gesticulating. It was also a lot of fun embracing our obvious challenges.  

We made films in flea markets, asked the FIFA president questions at a press conference in a swanky hotel, and filmed soccer and 3-on-3 basketball like we were made to work together. We shared a common understanding and a common goal. And through the monsoons, sapping humidity and long days and nights we made sure to laugh at the moments when we came unstuck. 

I often think of that time in Singapore and how with a little persistence and the right attitude, you can break down a lot of barriers. 

#olympics #communication  

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun
Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew
Olympic Reflections #7: Transport
Olympic Reflections #8: Bolt

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

If you were looking for a great quote at the Olympics, Usain Bolt was a treasure trove. I had the great fortune to interview the fastest man on the planet by the finish line after six of his gold medal successes at the 2012 and 2016 Games. Total thrill. 

Faced with a quote machine like Bolt it should have been easy to get what you needed. But part of the challenge at the Olympics was that you rarely had more than a minute with him, before a media liaison officer tapped you on the shoulder to wrap it up.  And fair enough, when scores of other reporters were waiting to have their bite. So being short, sharp and targeted on your outcome was key. 

While he’s the least shy guy on earth I’m pretty proud of getting him to call himself ‘a legend’, and then four years later describing himself as ‘immortal’. I love the art of the interview and I really enjoy that through recruiting, I still get to work on it every day. 

#olympics #interviewing

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun
Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew
Olympic Reflections #7: Transport

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Transport headaches.  

At any Olympic event, they’re inevitable. 

Beijing in 2008 was, shall we say, a challenge. Figuring out the subway system (entirely in Mandarin) from the fifth-ring road business district to Tiananmen Square was fun. Less so the return three-hour bus ride at 10mph from the main press center to the Canoe Slalom venue (‘it is for your safety’). 

Rio was an altogether different beast. If our local driver had to use the main city freeway at rush hour they would deliberately turn off early just to keep moving, even if it added an extra 40 minutes to our journey.  They explained it was to avoid the risk of carjacking, as we would be sitting ducks in a brand new, brightly marked ‘Olympics 2016’ car along with our $50k camera equipment. 

But my favorite was Buenos Aires and the 2018 Youth Olympics. We drove ourselves, getting used to the chronic traffic around toll booths. We figured out that if enough impatient drivers honked their horns as loudly as possible, the toll operators would give in and lift the barriers, letting us through for free! We later learned they actually did it for safety reasons but it didn’t burst our bubble, and I prefer my version of the story anyway 😊 

#olympics #honkyourhorn 

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun
Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Working at an Olympic Games was exhausting. But it was always fun. In Beijing, I tobogganed from the side of the Great Wall of China, ran the 100 meters in the Bird’s Nest Stadium and blindly ordered food from backstreet noodle joints. London was special as my ‘home’ Olympics.

Rio was an intoxicating city and allowed me the chance to interview Usain Bolt on a historic 100-meter treble. It was tough going in Tokyo, with covid looming large – but still a fascinating cultural discovery and a month-long excuse to eat sushi.  

One of the six values we hold at Herd Freed Hartz is Fun. After all, if what we do isn’t fun then shouldn’t we be doing something else? 

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience

#olympics #executiverecruiting #fun

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Working at an Olympic Games was always a great privilege. Yet it often came with plenty of challenges. I learned a lot about my resilience levels at the delayed Tokyo 2020 Games.  

Due to covid, the Olympics were pushed back a year but even in July 2021 there was a very different feel to any other Games I’d covered. Precautions were understandably high.  After stringent testing and airport checks, I was allowed into Japan, where my colleagues and I would spend a significant chunk of our first two weeks isolated in our hotel room. We were only allowed out to go to our place of work and once the workday was finished, we were expected straight back in our rooms. It made for interesting mealtimes.  

At breakfast we would go downstairs, put on disposable gloves, place our food in a Styrofoam container and immediately head back to our room to eat. At dinner it was only a little less relaxed.  After signing out with the hotel security guard, we had 15 minutes to go to the next door 7-Eleven and buy dinner, to also have in our rooms. Just to clarify, Japanese 7-Elevens are actually a thing of wonder, with all sorts of unexpected delights! There were a couple of days when I only just sneaked in under the deadline. 

Eating in a Japanese hotel room alone wasn’t exactly an ideal dining experience. If you’re not a fan of New York hotel rooms, I wouldn’t encourage a stay in Tokyo.  To say an averagely priced hotel room is ‘efficiently sized’ is about as kind as I can get!   

After those two weeks were allowed a much more ’normal’ amount of movement and we got to indulge in a little bit of the amazing Japanese culture. But those first two weeks taught me a great deal about resilience and respecting processes – attributes I’ve tried to carry into my work every day since.  

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors

#olympics #executiverecruiting #resilience

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Working at 11 different Olympics events over a 13-year span allowed me the chance to report on a huge range of sports, many of which I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.  

Who knew that Modern Pentathlon was the most gladiatorial, captivating sport out there?  One minute the athletes are guiding a horse they barely know over fences, the next they’re facing off in a fencing competition. Similarly, I’d never have become a fan of Biathlon unless I’d been thrown into it in -4 degrees Fahrenheit in Seefeld, Austria back in 2012.  How the competitors ski their hearts out for miles and then calmly shoot targets I’ll never know. And what about track cycling? Athletes with thighs bigger than my torso racing at 44mph within an inch or two of the bike ahead of them, on crazily banked planks of hardwood.   

The prospect of variety was always a huge draw at every new Games. Here at Herd Freed Hartz there’s a similar theme. We work across industry sectors, with the company placing over 1000 executives in more than 450 businesses.  Variety is the spice of life and all that.

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing

#olympics #executiverecruiting 

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

I’ve never kept a proper count but I’m pretty sure the number of people I’ve interviewed for work in the last 25 years is comfortably over ten thousand. The biggest volume-per-day would always be at an Olympics.  From snarky Polish hammer throwers to blubbing Bahamian sprinters, there was never a dull day.

When I was making the transition from broadcasting to executive recruiting, one of the biggest draws was the continuing need to interview people. Getting to know someone’s story and their motivations keeps me fresh – call it a daily curiosity.   

A large part of my remit at an Olympic Games was to interview every medalist from every event I was assigned to cover, along with any other interesting athletes or competitors with emerging story lines. It was terrific grounding for what I’m doing now. There were so many different characters from all over world – throw in the stress of competition and it made for a powder keg of emotions and responses. 

The gold medalists were often the easiest, for obvious reasons. The British triple-jumper Greg Rutherford was a particular highlight. After storming to gold in the London Olympics in 2012 he couldn’t contain his excitement, bouncing back and forth from the microphone while repeating the phrase ‘I can’t believe it – I’ve only gone and won the Olympics in my backyard!!’ 

The emotional interviews were always a highlight. I felt privileged when an athlete would be so open, natural and vulnerable in one of the biggest moments of their lives. Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas stormed to the women’s 400-meter title in the 2016 Rio Games and proceeded to spend our entire post-race interview in floods of tears after revealing how she had secretly battled through a nagging injury that even her coach and family had no knowledge of. 

Then there were the snubs. For some reason eastern European hammer throwers rarely wanted to give me the time of day, even after winning a medal. I tried not to take it personally! We would have the comedy situation where I would request an interview, the athlete would blankly walk past me and then a poor media liaison officer would have to chase them down and plead for them to return for a chat.  There was an archer who steadfastly refused to remove his glasses because he said he wouldn’t look as cool without them.  And the translators who would listen to an athlete’s 40 second answer to my question and give a 7 second interpretation.  

So I feel like I’m pretty well prepared for whoever and whatever is thrown my way in my new recruiting world.  But I’m always prepared to be surprised – and I’d much prefer it that way! 

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People

#olympics #interviewing #executiverecruiting 

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

One of the most common questions I’m asked around my Olympic experiences is “what was your favorite bit”? I always come back to the same answer – the people.   

The Olympics is one fantastic, gigantic fusion of cultures.  I got to work in multinational teams with new colleagues from Beijing to Buenos Aires, learning so much each time about different pockets of the world. It was also a litmus test for how far a dry sense of British humor could travel 😊  

Just as recruiting is a people and relationships business, I know I couldn’t have been successful in the COVID-hit Tokyo 2020 games if I hadn’t developed a strong bond with the people around me, some of whom were complete strangers from the other side of the planet just days earlier. I’m glad to say most of those bonds remain to this day. 

#olympics #relationships