Working at Playing Hard to Get

To land a job at the relatively small consulting firm Marakon Assoc., candidates must demonstrate authentic intellectual curiosity, and navigate a series of challenging case interviews that might even include a bit of role-playing, says Lori Massad, chief talent officer and chief operating officer at Marakon. But once you're in, the company wants you to stay, and is willing to negotiate all sorts of flexible work options. The company, which employs about 200 consultants worldwide, is based in New York and London, with offices in Singapore, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Massad joined Marakon in February, 2004, as director of North American human resources and was promoted to CTO in December the same year. She took on the COO role in May, 2006. Before joining Marakon, Massad spent eight years at The Boston Consulting Group, where she became a senior manager on the consulting staff and also oversaw aspects of the firm's global recruiting, training, and development strategies. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School .

Massad recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online reporter Jeffrey Gangemi. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

How does your firm's small size affect you in the on-campus recruiting market?
We do very much a grassroots level of recruiting on campus. We conduct open presentations, but we'll also get the résumé books early on and do a targeted mailing and phone-call campaign, calling those students who we think would be a great fit at Marakon, just from some things we see on their résumé.

Do you have a group of target schools?
We have two types of targets and different strategies for each. We target Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, as well as Columbia Business School. At those target schools, we'll do traditional things like a presentation and big dinner.

At our non-core schools where we have alumni, we'll do small dinners to have our people identify candidates they think would be a good fit at Marakon.

Are you hiring more people this year than last, given the strong job market?
Our headcount is probably going to increase by about...

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