2 Moms Quit Jobs in Financial Services Field, Form Employment Firm

NEW YORK —  As a single mother balancing a high-pressure job on Wall Street, Suzanne Rinfret Moore remembers working 12-hour days and organizing her son’s birthday party from a hotel phone while out of town on business.

The pressure of selling government bonds to institutions was so intense that Moore “felt like I had to write a detailed memo about why I needed to leave for three hours” to attend a school play.

After years of juggling, Moore quit her job at J. P. Morgan Securities Co., where she had risen to vice president, to form her own business. She now works fewer and more flexible hours trying to help other Wall Streeters strike a similar balance between their roles as professionals and parents.

Moore, 37, teamed with college chum Karen Strauss Cook, also 37, to form Alterna-track Inc., a specialized search firm that matches top professionals in the financial services industry with part-time or temporary work.

Working out of a midtown Manhattan office, it’s a kind of sophisticated Kelly Girl service for Harvard MBAs, takeover lawyers and corporate accountants. Nearly 90% of Alterna-track’s candidates are women.

Moore and Cook, a mother of two who, for a six-year stretch was the only woman equity block trader at Goldman, Sachs & Co., had plenty of contacts to tap.

To confirm their hunch that women are hungry to cut back on grueling hours but are afraid to admit it to hard-driving employers, Moore and Cook sent hundreds of questionnaires to high-level women in financial services companies.

The response was even more resounding than they anticipated. Within a few months they amassed a pool of more than 300 resumes, mostly from women interested in everything from flexible time to job-sharing to contract work.

Their research paralleled a wealth of data already available.

For example, a poll of 1,000 men and women conducted last year by the executive search firm Robert Half International Inc. showed 78% would sacrifice rapid career advancement if it meant spending more time with their families.

The demand for the type of talent Alterna-track offers also partly reflects the increased role women are playing in the American labor pool. Many employers are finding that to hire and retain the most talented, they must offer flexibility.

Labor Department statistics show 57.6% of women age 20 and older are in the work force. By the year 2000, 47.5% of the work force will be female, versus 42.5% in 1980 and 38.1% in 1970, says the Hudson Institute, a research group that has studied American labor trends.

Moore and Cook launched a crusade to get employers to, in Cook’s words, “retain the person during a critical few years” when child-rearing is at its most intensive.

“If an intelligent employer could hold their hand, they’ll be back on track again,” Cook said. The retention of valued employees is worth more than a little inconvenience.

For example, Moore and Cook said it costs about 150% of an employee’s annual salary to replace that employee.

Besides the cost, employees have been “groomed . . . they know the company vertically,” Moore said, and companies should realize that knowledge could take years to replace.

In addition to assembling a rich resume pool, Moore and Cook are targeting corporations, banks and financial firms from the Fortune 500 level on down. So far, however, 60% of Alterna-track’s business clients have called the firm unsolicited, asking for a presentation of services and job candidates.

“One major company we’ve talked to said it is losing three times as many women as men in the 30-35 age category,” gutting its middle management ranks, Moore said.

But Moore and Cook aren’t robbing Merrill Lynch to pay Shearson. On the contrary, most of the women they place come from large firms but are teamed up with much smaller firms that need top talent but can’t pay top salaries on a full-time basis.

One recent match put Cynthia McClintock, a former associate in Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc.’s corporate finance department, at Ampton BCS Investments LP, a merchant bank with fewer than a dozen employees.

“The problem with a small service business like this is that you kill yourself by adding expensive staff,” said partner Laurence Strenger, who selected McClintock from five Alterna-track candidates.

“It would be imprudent if we started adding people at multi-hundred-thousand-dollar salaries,” he said. “Here we have someone with a Harvard MBA on a piecework basis. It’s marvelous.”

Strenger has called McClintock to work on three more projects. For McClintock, whose first child is due in June, it meant getting a head start on “part-time work that will make sense later on.”

For their efforts, Moore and Cook receive 30% of a placed applicant’s annual compensation. It may not sound like much, but the average woman in their pool is earning about $150,000 a year.

That average candidate is 35 years old, has been on her job for eight years and has one or two children.

Cook noted that it’s usually after the second child that women just give up on their jobs. Cook resigned from Goldman Sachs just before the market crash of 1987 when her youngest was 2 with a feeling of “guilt that I was not giving as much to the firm and also not having enough time with my kids.”

Moore and Cook aren’t sure how the recession at major investment houses will affect their business. They know, however, that “the pressures have multiplied fivefold on Wall Street,” Moore said, stressing working mothers even more.

This year they have placed five professionals and expect to place another five in the next few weeks, three of whom will cover for women taking maternity leave from a major consumer products company. When those women return, Alterna-track’s candidates are likely to share jobs with them.

By midyear, Moore said she expects to have placed up to 30 professionals. To keep pace, Alterna-track has hired a director and will open a Los Angeles office in June. Other sites under consideration are London and Chicago, but Moore said there’s no reason the company can’t go nationwide.

Despite the expansion, Moore says she’ll still have time to take an afternoon off to go play tennis with her 9-year-old son, and Cook and can still go ice skating in Manhattan’s Central Park with her boys.