Hire-in-One: Corporates look to find the sweet spot with golfing executives
Golf has always been a good facilitator of business deals, but now corporates are getting in on the act by making it a key element of executive search.
For many business-owners, golf has long been a great tool in the business development toolbox, but it looks like the game is becoming a bigger deal for corporate hiring managers now.
So says a recent news report in the mainstream media which states that standout amateur golfers are finding a way to put their game to good use by mixing the company boardroom with golf’s locker-room.
Years of fatigue with Zoom meetings and online networking seems to have opened up a spot for some high-powered handshakes out on the course.
There was already strong evidence that midweek play was hugely on the up — as I wrote about academic research into golf course visits data last year:
Saturdays, generally the peak day for the club player, were down 5% (31,500 trips measured on Saturdays in 2019 compared to to 29,800 in 2022), whereas Monday through Friday were all massively up.
2+ hour golf course visits on Wednesdays, for example, rose from 10,800 in 2019 to more than 26,000 in 2022—a jump of 143%.
This gave corporates a choice:
Clamp down on this behavior and demand that executives get back to the office, or
Find a way to cash in on golf’s traditional business-friendly network
The obvious choice for the cleverest corporates, of course, is to tap into the marketability of someone who can combine golfing skills with the networking prowess to get the deals done.
A Wall Street Journal article, titled “A Killer Golf Swing is a Hot Job Skill Now”, quoted a number of people with first-hand experience of the growing phenomenon.
Shawn Cole, the head of executive search head-hunting firm Cowen Partners, whose LinkedIn page outlines his typical clients as “publicly traded, pre-IPO, private, and non-profit organizations, typically $50 million to multi-billion dollar revenue Fortune 1000 companies or have assets over $1 billion”, stated that he had received an increasing number of requests for candidates who are also proficient golfers, even going as far as taking note of their golf handicaps in his candidate database.
He said,
“I know a guy that literally flies around the world in a private jet loaded with French wine, and he golfs and lands hundred-million-dollar deals.”
Despite golf’s reputation for exclusivity and its challenges to diversity and inclusion efforts — or, whisper it, because of it??? — golf has always been a staple of business wheeling and dealing.
The game’s popularity surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Americans playing a record 531 million rounds in 2023.
As Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford researcher who has crunched the numbers around the time of the week of golf course visits, said,
“In 2024, if you’re producing results, no one’s going to see anything wrong with it.”
WSJ tells the story of Matt Parziale, a former professional golfer who spent several years trying to make the grade in the game’s minor pro tours, even playing in the Masters and US Open as an amateur in 2018, later transitioned to the corporate world.
In 2022 he landed a job with Deland, Gibson Insurance Associates in Massachusetts and his skills both in golf and relationship-building has been a valuable asset to help the company win some large customers.
Another key person in executive search quoted in the article was Cullen Onstott, the managing director of Onstott Group and himself a high-level former collegiate golfer with Fairfield University in Connecticut.
As the article said:
[Onstott] explained one reason companies prize excellent golfers is they can put well-practiced swings on autopilot and devote most of their attention to chitchat. It’s hard to talk with potential customers about their needs and interests when you’re hunting for errant shots in the woods.
Negotiating a business arrangement at the same time as negotiating a bad lie in a bunker, and the 19th hole deal-making that might follow, has been a part of business life for decades.
It should be no surprise to anyone, then, that corporations are leveraging golf’s capacity for informal professional chat.
Unlike that head-to-head match-play tournament or the longest drive competition, in this case, everyone wins.