Recruiting EQ Podcast E109: Featured Guest Igor Quézel-Perron, Co-founder of Kint Partners

Kint.

Thank you, Igor.

And thank you for that summary.

I have a million questions for you, so I'll try and keep it as focused as possible.

One of the things that I thought was an interesting differentiator for you at Kint compared to other executive search firms that I've spoken to, for sure in the US anyhow, was, like you're saying, the collaborative element of it.

Often, even in boutique firms that I speak to in the US, the collaboration is hierarchical, right? It's like one person is doing origination and they only do origination.

One person only does delivery, one person only does research, and that's it.

And that's their model of collaboration.

But it's like three people put together to make one 360 consultant.

But interestingly, at Kint, you guys are equals, right? It's not a hierarchy to an extent, right? Where you're all 360s.

So if you have two to three people, it's two to three people who are like-minded, who think of things in three dimensions, who are contributing in a much more robust way than just doing one piece of a chain.

And I thought that that flat market of collaboration, putting heads together, is fascinating.

Have you seen that that's really, I would assume, giving you different results to have that non-hierarchical collaborative approach?

Yes, I think the results is that we, well, in seven years, only two people left.

And after staying four years in the company, and for some reasons, one wanted to go to AI and the other one to ONG.

So it's a different journey.

uh it's uh how we do that and why we do it you know uh consulting is uh my my ex-boss was saying it's it's a stupid job you to re to succeed in consulting you have to recruit the best and to keep them and if you want to keep some people you well i'm going to say really something cliche but they need to be happy and and people happy when they develop their potential So we want people to be the stars of the company, to develop the potential.

So if someone wants to do business development and is able to do that, Let's go for it.

And if someone wants to go in production, let's go for it.

So we develop people.

It's true that we are not hierarchical.

Well, we are only 14.

We can give some direction.

We can give some advice.

But people, they've got the right to not agree with us, to disagree, to have different ideas.