Finding cleantech's keepers

As the cleantech sector continues to grow, it's becoming harder to find the right people to fill positions, say leading search executives.

One part of the problem is skills. Ray Fortney, managing partner of the executive search organization Cleantech Search, says some skills transfer from industry to industry, like management.

"Leadership is a skill without a doubt," he said. So is a CEO's "evangelical nature" to be able to sell the company to investors.

Some skills like sales, marketing and business development, however, especially for the customer-facing or tech-facing sectors, aren’t as flexible as one might suspect.

"Just because I've been a CEO selling chocolate doesn't mean I know how to make lithium cadmium batteries," Fortney said.

As cleantech start-ups pop up, hiring for them and the more established companies becomes difficult.

Jonathan Visbal, head of Spencer Stuart's global Technology, Communications and Media Practice, has worked with early stage start-ups to find and place employees. To find candidates, he said, they've had to go to people who understand the start-up culture.

"Traditional industrial companies don't have the entrepreneurial sense and wherewithal to drive a new sector like this," he said.

"It’s harder to place cleantech than high-tech," agreed Max Shapiro, CEO of PeopleConnect. "There are companies that want people with industry-specific experience, which is a challenge because the industry hasn't been around that long."

Placing candidates with a start-up is easier if they have start-up experience, Shapiro said. And as the companies grow, they often tend to keep an eye out for people with start-up experience because they're multitaskers. "It's different from moving into a slot that already exists," he said.

Fortney said entrepreneurial skills shouldn't be the only qualification. "Simply because somebody has been in Commerce One, which was supposedly an entrepreneurial company, doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily a good leader," he said. For him, people who've worked in industry or with hardware experience are easier to place in cleantech.

"People selling shrink-wrapped software don’t understand this business," he said. "They don't have an appreciation for industry."

Finding the right person for the job is hard enough; keeping them seems to be a different matter. People who move from one start-up to another may not want to stay put.

Shapiro doesn't think retaining such people is any harder than keeping other employees with no start-up experience. Fortney disagreed.

"The venture community world doesn't want to admit there's a lot of turnover, but there has been a fair amount of turnover in these positions," said Fortney. Though start-ups might think a serial entrepreneur is the solution to stopping management turnover, he said, they can't always make the company grow.

According to Visbal, people entrenched in a position at one company who then move to an early-stage company sometimes have difficulty adapting to the work environment.

"Oftentimes, the retention of those folks is not that great because they can't adapt to the change," he said. "That's why we've moved to get the people who are a little more entrepreneurial; because they're more used to those kinds of changes and they can pick up the domain."

Companies do typically hire candidates with experience in larger companies later on, said Visbal. "You look for people at different stages of a company's evolution," he said. "Getting the first $5 million in revenue is much different than growing from $5 million to $25 million."

Visbal said placing people in cleantech comes down to "domain expertise vs. competencies." The latter may be judged by a candidate's success at growing a company or by their recruiting ability, he says.

"They learn from osmosis," Visbal said. "There's a very steep learning curve, but they’ll figure it out very quickly."

Prospective applicants for cleantech positions take note: self-preparation is a requirement for entering this field.

"Given the plethora of information available today, you're not successful as a candidate if you don't invest time and energy into self-education," said Cleantech Search's Fortney.

Cleantech Search is a division of the Cleantech Group, the parent company of the Cleantech Group.

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