canadian headhunter

No News Is....

No word from HP yet on which candiate from our short list has been put forward by Russell Reynolds to succeed Carly Fiorina. This seems to be bugging some people:

HP's interim management frustrated any shareholder attempts to find out how its CEO search is really going at its annual meeting Wednesday.

The company's non-executive chairman Patricia Dunn said she wouldn't answer any question about the search.

People had to be content with her assurance that "We are pleased with out progress and we are where we expected to be and want to be at this juncture."

Of course, BusinessWeek has claimed that the slot could be filled by the end of the month. Meanwhile, if Carly had her heart set on being the next head of the World Bank, a balloon that was floated two weeks ago, her hopes have been dashed. The White House is putting up Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Senior level searches, and especially ones of this magnitude, tend to take a fairly long time. Part of the problem is that CEO level candidates tend to travel quite a bit and the process of even meeting them for an interview becomes quite time consuming.

But why certain shareholders feel they should be kept abreast of the search is beyond me. One of the complicating factors of any search is confidentiality. Candidates are employed with other firms and don’t want their intentions bandied about at shareholder meetings.

This search is a critical one for HP, it is not one to be taken lightly. Even if the search wasn’t going well should Patricia Dunn have said “OMG we are so screwed we don’t know what to do we have NO candidates!!!!”

Of course that would be a lie since we have already done half the search for Russell Reynolds when we outlined a short list some time ago.

Holders of HP stock should relax. If Russell Reynolds doesn’t get the job done Canadian Headhunter will be there for the easy slam-dunk.

Now as for finding Carly a job……