Transcripts

SPEAKER: Well, here's a question. If you're in working for the Eagle company and Welcome or really anywhere in Minnesota and you're looking for some top flight executives these days, how in the world do you get them to come to Minnesota? It's 20 below outside. Mark Sathe runs an executive search firm in the Twin Cities, and he joins us now. Good morning, Mark.

MARK SATHE: Good morning, Gary.

GARY EICHTEN: How do you get people to come out here when it's so cold?

MARK SATHE: Well, I think most people that we go to recruit, although temperature might be a concern at a few days a year, like we're having, Gary, I think they're really more focused on career opportunity and business opportunity, and not so much on the temperature.

GARY EICHTEN: This doesn't bother them?

MARK SATHE: Well, certainly, it bothers them like it does us. When they ask me that, I said, well, I'd scrape my windshield a couple of days a year just to be able to know that my kids are in a top educational system. I've got access to the best quality health care-- allegedly in the country, maybe the world-- the top-10 orchestra in the world, and every major sport. No commutes. No long train rides. And anybody you recruit from, you have to look at-- where are they now?

Some parts of the country, it's earthquakes that are getting them some place else. I used to have an office in Tampa. I remember going down there in August. It was unbearably humid. My grandmother used to say, as far as Minnesota, you can keep putting more clothes on, but you can't keep taking them off if it's too hot.

GARY EICHTEN: Let me ask you this, though. Do you try to avoid flying people in right in the depths of the worst of it? Maybe put this trip off for a couple of weeks?

MARK SATHE: You'd think that you would try to plan that. But who can predict the weather and when all the candidates are available and the employers are available? I'll share with you a fun story of a guy we just brought in from Mexico City. I say, just maybe about a year ago, dead of winter. It was the biggest blizzard when he came up for his interview. He stayed at Sofitel on a Saturday night.

I drove down and took him to a Vikings game on Sunday, and he helped me push the car out of a snow bank when we went for a pizza. Didn't have any high overshoes or anything. Now, he lives here, and he said, boy, am I having fun? He said, I've been ice-skating for the first time in my life. I've been cross-country skiing. I said, well, I'll take you ice-fishing up at I-80. And he said, that sounds great. I've never caught frozen fish before.

GARY EICHTEN: So no big problem, though. People are willing to come anyway.

MARK SATHE: You know what it is? Again, I'll go back to career opportunity. Where it's harder for me to recruit, as a search, I just finished in Rapid City. Now, Rapid City's weather is agreeably nicer than ours. It's much like Denver. That's the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. What people were concerned about and considering a job there wasn't weather. The guy we got out of California was most concerned that if he didn't stay with the company two or three years and lived there, there wouldn't be other career opportunities in a Rapid City, where Minneapolis should have that.

GARY EICHTEN: Thanks, Mark.

MARK SATHE: You're welcome.

GARY EICHTEN: Good talking with you. Mark Sathe, who runs an executive search firm in the Twin Cities. Many people over at Minneapolis-based First Bank are smiling these days. Employees.