In mid-June, the executive recruiter became a general partner in venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures. Before that, she was a "human capitalist" at venture capital investment bank Garage.com, where she created and nurtured a program that paired obscure start-ups with like-minded but high-profile executives.
Vernetti loves her job, which requires her to build top-notch management teams for start-ups that would normally struggle to find high-profile executives. She calls herself an "evangelist for investing in solid management teams," and she has plenty of advice for aspiring executives.
She equally loves basketball. Vernetti attended St. Mary's College of California on an NCAA Division I basketball scholarship, took a break to have her first baby seven years ago and returned to sweep a corporate tournament at Heidrick & Struggles. She still plays pick-up at least twice a week. In fact, that's how she met her current boss, TCV founding partner Jay Hoag, and her previous boss, Garage.com CEO Guy Kawasaki.
Vernetti stopped dribbling and attending business meetings long enough to talk with CNET News.com about how to spot a good executive, why Silicon Valley companies have so few women, and how basketball relates to both.
How has the downturn changed the war for talent in the technology sector? With so many layoffs, is it an employer's market?
There are a gazillion resumes floating around right now, but is the war for talent over? Hardly. It's only harder to separate the good candidates from the bad.
How do you separate the good from the bad?
I put people into three buckets. First is the rat deserting the sinking ship. These people were either laid off or about to get laid off--and their employer had reason to let them go. They're low-hanging fruit.
The second bucket is the people who simply didn't do their due diligence in checking out the company before they took the job. The company failed because the business plan was bad--not necessarily a horrible reflection on the employee, but they didn't do their homework. I also call these people the "what were they thinking?" people.
Third is the people who just got caught in a bad situation. The company had a solid business plan, the management was solid, but because of the current funding situation, it just didn't make it to the second round. Obviously the best people are from the third group.
How do you find people in the third group?
You look for pedigrees--the people who went to the best schools, who worked for IBM or did consulting for McKinsey. They should also have an established track record...Today, you see all these people with five companies on their resume that I've never heard of, and they've spent 18 months at each company. That's not long enough to really develop skills.
The pedigree approach strikes me as provincial. What about the person who has excellent people skills and solid references--but didn't get an MBA from MIT?
There's no question CEOs have had great success with someone without a pedigree. You always hear about the CEO who took his nephew under his wing, mentored him for a decade and then that nephew did great work. But the key is that this person had a great mentoring experience. Those kind of people are just as valuable (as someone with a pedigree).
You also need diversity of careers and experience--just like you look for ethnic and gender diversity. You want the 16-year-old wunderkind who is a technical genius as well as the 52-year-old IBM veteran. You want Stanford MBAs and Cal Davis (University of California, Davis) grads.
Let's say I'm an aspiring manager who gets laid off from a technology company. I didn't go to Harvard Business School and I never consulted for Accenture, and I switched jobs 3 times in the past three years. How do I present these unseemly facts during a job interview and still show that I have potential?
Present it as honestly as possible--they'll find out the truth no matter what you tell them, so you might as well be honest. If you're in the first or second bucket, you might as well admit it. Everything is forgivable, as long as you don't do it a second time.
A lot of companies, especially more established technology companies, are offering employees voluntary buyouts to trim staff. In some cases, employees can get six months or more in salary if they quit--ample time to find a new job. If you take the money and run, how does that affect your career?
As a recruiter, when you hear buyout, your red flag goes up. It's definitely not something positive. It's definitely not a good idea from a career management perspective, regardless of how much money you get...It's not the same as getting laid off or fired, but at the end of the day, from a recruitment perspective, you're still not working.
But again, everything can be forgiven. It depends on the individual situation...Was this a 20-year IBM employee with a very strong track record, who still has a decade of being very productive? Maybe that person just hit a wall and couldn't work at IBM anymore, didn't see anything interesting at IBM so took the money.
