RSSM Digital First Interview Edition December 2019 | Page 2

PARTNER SUCCESS STORIES When Bob Werrbach asked me to write this article on a First Interview Partnership success story, I thought this would be no problem since I have had numerous experiences over the years partnering with affiliates to fill difficult posi- tions. What is interesting though is, in the last few years my traditional success stories have changed. No longer is it “call an affiliate, give them the opening, we work it together and then share the success”. That doesn’t mean I am not having success, but it does mean that the meth- ods have changed. Since I hadn’t thought about it, I was surprised. Let me explain. I joined First Interview at the beginning. Hilary Trader referred to me as a Flintstone at one of the more recent national meetings. Had I stayed in the stone age though, I don’t think I would still be having the success that I have had on the network but, how have things changed? When the network started, we all mainly concentrated geographically, and our candidate pools reflected this. As a recruiter, you knew your local market and you knew the local players. That was long before the internet was invented though, so it was almost impossible to have the candidate da- tabases that we have in today’s world. While we still have affiliates that do know their local mar- kets, that is the exception rather than the rule. We do have numerous affiliates, though, that are trying to concentrate on being a candidate pro- vider nationally and, most of us have candidates all over the country. That is where my success stories come in. I have started to post openings that I want help on the network. I know many seem to consider posting as a bad thing but not anymore, in my opinion. If I find affiliates that just blast old resumes to me, they are blocked and don’t even see my posts. I had a search in the east last year for a startup client of mine. I needed a surgical candidate, some disruptive experience and I needed some- one that had some specific call points. I did call 2 WWW.RSSM.BIZ the local affiliate but since they worked nation- ally it had been quite some time since they had done a local search and they didn’t know the candidate pool. I still worked it only with them for a couple of weeks with not a lot of results so I finally posted the opening. Within a week I had 4 qualified candidates from 4 different recruiters and within two more weeks, I had a placement. My opening was in the east, but the split was with Russ Cipriani on the west coast. But for that post, I may not have made that placement. I have another client that needed someone that had a background in EMS / Military / Govern- ment to provide clinical support. A real needle in the haystack type search, I posted that one immediately. One of our affiliates saw the post- ing and called me. He then went through his network and recruited 4 candidates for me that were spot on. Since the opening wasn’t in his city, I would not have necessarily called him and he probably would not have known about the open- ing yet, so we split the deal. That would not have happened if I didn’t post. First Interview has the most well-connected group of sales recruiters in the country. I be- lieve moving forward that we need to utilize our strengths to continue to thrive and combat all of the new sources of competition. Our client companies continue to become more sophisticat- ed with their internal efforts and with the large retained search firms making a serious attempt to penetrate the contingency search segment our best chance for growth is to fill the searches we have more quickly. I have found that posting has been an effective way to do this. Clay Ward Sales Source / Tower Group [phone] [email protected] Glens Falls, NY WWW.RSSM.BIZ