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STRATEGIES SELLING THE CITY

How do local companies in highly competitive industries lure top guns into the market?
By SARA PETERSON |

JOYCE LEBOVITZ IS A PROFESsional thief. For 16 years, she’s been stealing upper-echelon employees for Dallas-and keeping them here.

She’s the president of Community Introductions (CI), an innocuously named relocation firm that aids big-shot companies like Texas Instruments, Southwestern Medical Center, Exxon and Cyrix in recruiting elite executives and renowned specialists from their fiercest competitors throughout the country.

She’s not a headhunter. She doesn’t scout talent. Her clients already know who they want-employees who are eminent and highly recognized and who receive job offers like most people receive junk mail. But these dynamos are settled, secure and quick to balk at the prospect of moving to a different city. So local companies hire Lebovitz-a seasoned expert in the art of enticement.

“Do you think the good people are looking for jobs? The good people are ; employed,” says Lebovitz. who receives ’ about two to three angry phone calls a week from corporations that are furious they lost key staffers to her clients. “Ninety percent [of the people we bring to Dallas] are perfectly happy where they are.” says Lebovitz. “But let’s say John Doe meets your needs, everything you need to head up a division that’s in trouble. You’ve got to do everything you can to get him. Everything.”

And according to Lebovitz’s mission statement, recruiting the best requires easing the anxiety of relocation, which she rates as the third most difficult event in life, behind death and divorce. And that requires selling Dallas-a city whose nationwide image still erroneously tends toward oil gushers and roaming cattle-and inveigling the person who usually makes the final decision to move-the spouse.

“I don’t think my husband would have come to Texas unless I wanted to come,” says Lynn Minna, who moved here in 1991 when her husband, Dr. John Minna, took the position as director of the Simmons Cancer Center at UT-Southwestern. She had lived in Bethesda, Md., for 23 years, was counseling at a law firm and could not fathom the idea of migrating to Dallas. “I didn’t want to uproot my life,” she says.

When Southwestern hired CI, Lebovitz realized Mrs. Minna would need extra attention and persuasion. She established career contacts for her by scheduling lunches with high-profile attorneys; she catered to her interest in the arts by introducing her to violinist Eduard Schmieder and members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Guild (of which Minna is now on the board); and she helped her find a home on Turtle Creek. “I think she spent more time with me than with John,” says Minna.

And for good reason-luring the spouse is a significant, if not the most important, part of Lebovitz’s job. “A lot of these companies say, ’Deal with that wife; we don’t want problems with her,’ ” explains Lebovitz. adding her own rationale. “There’s not a company in this country, not one, that could tell me today they haven’t had somebody who was key to them walk after six months and say, ’We’re leaving, my family is not doing well, my wife hates the city.’ Quality of life more than the money is the No. 1 issue.”

Times have changed. In the late ’70s, when Dallas was beginning to host a boom of corporate moves like American Airlines that lured thousands of new employees from around the country, Lebovitz was the head of social services at Methodist Hospital. There, she saw many relocated executives struggling to adjust to their new environments and admitting themselves with physical and emotional problems. She saw just as many senior VPs ignorant of their executives’ conditions. “It’s not my problem.” they would insist.

But when patients had prolonged stays, she argued that it was the companies’ problem and something that should have been handled at the time the executives were hired. Lebovitz felt there was a need in corporate Dallas that wasn’t being fulfilled by in-house human resource departments. In 1980. she left Methodist to create CI.

During the early days of her budding business-when Lebovitz was still defining strategies-she researched different relocation firms across the country and interviewed dozens of employees who had recently turned down job offers in Dallas. She asked them why they had refused to move here. What she found was no surprise. After the employees had their interviews, most of the companies followed it tip with an antiquated wine-and-dine routine, giving them a hearty meal, but no indication of what it is like to live in Dallas. None of them throught to promote the city they were asking people to come to. Instead, says Lebovitz, “They were told, “Here’s a map, go around the city.’ Well, good luck. People won’t do that. They won’t go.” Enter CI- a firm that today services over 1,000 people a year and pursuades 80 percent of them to live and work in Dallas.

Mar>’ Kay Inc. uses CI to help fill senior positions about 50 times a year and credits Lebovitz and her 14-woman. multilingual staff with helping it become a threat to the nation’s top cosmetics companies, such as Estee Lauder and Maybelline. as well as to larger conglomerates like Procter & Gamble.

“We use CI as one of our strategic advantages,” says Doug Mintmier, VP of Corporate Human Resources for Mary Kay. “If two companies are trying to recruit a family to two different areas, and if that other company doesn’t have something like CI, it gives us a competitive advantage. It helps them accept our offer.”

Mintmier also uses CI to promote Dallas as an attractive place to work and live. “A lot of people from the Northeast aren’t excited about coming to Dallas and they |CI| help change people’s perceptions.” he says. “The employee has to want to live in Dallas as much as they are excited about working for your organization. It may be the difference between taking your offer and taking someone else’s.”

Before prospective employees come to interview with a company. Lebovitz determines their needs and interests. A mother wants day-care; a single man wants a brownstone like the one he left in Manhattan; an astronaut (Mary Ann Weber, formerly with TI) wants to skydive. Families will need schools, churches, dentists, electricians and Realtors. They’ll want names of women’s groups, men’s groups, apartment complexes, dry cleaners and fitness centers.

CI’s staff then researches and produces a packet of information for the new employees and their families when they arrive.

“The key here is that you’ve got to hook these people into a system somewhere,” says Lebovitz, who has served on more than 30 boards during her 25-year residency in Dallas. “Picture yourself getting off a plane and not knowing hardly anyone and not knowing what you’re doing. It’s a disaster.”

Following that advice, companies can choose various CI “Relocation Programs” for their prospective employees: the S90-an-hour tour of the city or the $2.600.46-hour deluxe introduction, which is primarily reserved for international families or heavy spouse-enticing, says Lebovitz. Some companies hire CI on a case-by-case basis; others who use the firm more often pay a retainer, but every client Lebovitz services is shown her favorite Dallas sites.

“Everyone is taken downtown and shown the core of the city,” she says. They’re also taken to White Rock Lake. McKinney Avenue, Highland Park Village, the Park Cities, Bluffview and Greenway.

“Most people are in shock. Most people haven’t got a clue what’s here.” says Lebovitz, recalling the cliché cowboy imagery she has to replace with cosmopolitan gusto in almost every Northeasterner’s mind. “They think we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

The Research and Development Office at Texas Instruments uses CI an average of 12 times a year in recruiting fresh Ph.D.s- many of whom are also interviewing at top labs like IBM and Bell and who have never seen Dallas.

“We like to use them for everyone we bring in from outside,” says Richard Wiggins, director of the software research lab. He believes TI has had more recruitment success since it started using CI seven years ago. “I just found that we didn’t have to spend as much time trying to sell Dallas. Invariably, people we do hire who come here tell us it was very helpful.”

Lebovitz differentiates her company from other recruitment firms in two ways. First. CI does not operate on referrals; that is, they have no financial relationships with the decorators or the builders or the doctors they recommend. “You have to be careful about that because, for instance, you can’t make a referral to a nursing home.”’ says Lebovitz. “You’ve got to know who’s got complaints against them, who’s doing a good job.”

Second, she continues to service her charges after they move to Dallas, claiming, “it’s the insurance policy for the company.”

“I’ve known her to call people six months to a year later just to touch base and see how they’re doing,” says Mintmier. “She wants to make sure that these people are happy with their long-term decision to come to Dallas.”

And the bottom line for Lebovitz, after 16 years of relocating thousands of employees for hundreds of Dallas companies, is simple: “They’re hiring very high-level people from the best around the country. They’re getting them and they stay. That’s the key. They stay.”

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