Best time for the recruitment industry, says global executive search firm’s chief  ( May '29,2001, FE)

WE are very focused brokers of talent,” is how he would like to describe his work. Meet MRI Worldwide managing director Mr Douglas G Bugie, the man spearheading the international division of MRI, the largest global executive search firm. MRI, which logged $725 million in fee in 2000, is now focusing on the Indian market.So much so, Mr Bugie is considering shifting his base to India. “India is a huge complex market. We have put India ahead of China in terms of importance,” he added. Mr Bugie, who has spent 17 years with MRI feels that it is perhaps the best time for the recruitment industry. Despite the much-touted US slowdown, unemployment rates globally are at an all-time low.

ermany and France, with nine per cent and eight per cent, respectively, are witnessing 10-year lows. And despite the slowdown in the US, the unemployment rate at 4.5 per cent is much better than in the past. Moreover, with the series of cuts in Fed rates, the economy is expected to look up further.

Mr Bugie feels that the massive layoffs by companies like Cisco were inevitable. Cisco, at one point of time, was hiring around 1,000 people per month in Europe, he adds. “After all, trees do not grow on skies,” as he puts it. Despite the shakeup, the recruitment industry had a healthy growth rate of around 15 per cent last year. True, it was lower than the last five-year industry average of 20 per cent. MRI has, however, outperformed the industry average with a scorching 46 per cent growth rate over the last five years. This year, MRI has grown at 27 per cent, which is healthy considering the situation. MRI, as Mr Bugie puts it, does not only look at “C” level positions, i.e CEOs and CFOs.

“We find people from just above seniors to vice-presidents,” he adds. “We work with large multinationals and small and medium-sized enterprises. One of our strategies is to work with people who have never used search firms before,” he says. MRI has 15,000 hours of training in video library and 5,000 pages of training material. The organisation has 500 video conferencing units. Mr Bugie is very optimistic about India. Though he admits that every country has its own characteristics, he believes that studying markets and looking at new answers help in finding solutions.

The MRI network now exceeds 1,100 offices worldwide, making it the largest search company in the world. Mr Bugie is optimistic about the future. The Indian middle class is four times the size of the British population. Yet the British recruitment industry at $5 billion is a hundred times the size of the Indian market. So, the potential is enormous and the market can only grow, sums up Mr Bugie.