My Career and Lessons Learned

I have been selling something (professional recruiting is selling) since I was 13 years old. I started selling Magazines door to door in Long Beach, California. What I have learned over the course of my selling career so far is:

  1. You can not sell ice cubes to Eskimos but you can sell them ice picks.
  2. “The best way to get what you want is to help enough other folks get what they want.” — Zig Ziegler
  3. If a sales person is not professionally persistent they will have very skinny kids.
  4. Relationship development is the key to developing the life blood of any sales organization which is the dynamic of a repeat & referral book of business.

What Drives Me?

  • Maintaining my spiritual, family, mental, social and physical fitness
  • The excitement of meeting new people
  • The constant challenge of learning new concepts, technologies, applications of the multi-faceted Engineering field
  • Seeing the professional recruiting world as the best way of applying Zig Ziegler’s philosophy of finding satisfaction by helping others get what they want
  • Professional persistence and always being a student in my profession of technical recruiting
  • Making friends of clients and candidates

I am a seasoned & professional Senior Technical Recruiter with a proven track record of solving the trickiest of staffing challenges. I am a professionally persistent closer. Virtual Recruiting provides me the highest degree of concentration and focus on the job at hand with very few outside distractions and the greatest production.

The Key to Problem Solving

“Seek first to understand and then be understood.” — Stephen Covey

It‘s always a challenge for me, but I find when I listen deeply and let folks vent, it helps in crafting a mutually satisfying win-win solution.

Recruiting Career Highlights

  • Defined and implemented a corporate recruiting process and procedures for a fortune 500 company.
  • Created what I call a Marketable Position Description, which uses a bulletized format, for the purpose of
    • Focusing the resume for the position being applied for
    • Condensing the content for all pre-screening, phone and on-site interviews by adding standardization and a job focus to the process while reducing the chance of litigation over non-job related questions from being asked (see interviewing tips for employers for more details).
    • Including missed actual hands on experience the candidate has for the position
    • Providing a sample of the technical writing skills of each candidate submitted
    • Evaluation in annual performance reviews
    The benefit of this is a consistently high hire to submittal ratio, saving my client companies time and enabling a faster recapture of investment on recruiting service fees.
  • Created what I call an “in their own words” form of professional reference checking system resulting in a very accurate and a significantly more detailed reference check.
  • I track every step in the recruiting process to make sure that process is performed with excellence and accuracy every time. I created flowcharts, weekly client progress reports, check lists and followed the process using systems like iCIMS and my own ACT Contact Management program.

A Real World Recruiting Assignment Representing How My Process Works

I had an assignment to fill the Chief Engineering position for a $1 billion DOD Radar Upgrade & Sustainment Program. A very rare “Purple Squirrel” assignment if ever there was one! Through some fun, old fashioned networking I found the perfect candidate on Kwajalein Island in the South Pacific.

It turns out that the candidate, his wife, and his family had been living on an island paradise for 12 years and he was the classic passive candidate. On a scale from 1 to 10 the he was a minus 2 in motivation for changing jobs. Through some relationship development conversations, over long distance calls, I was able to bring him up to a 4 of the scale. Even still, he insisted that he would not move.

After the getting to know him over the course of several weeks, I had enough confidence in our relationship to ask if there was a serious family issue that was standing in the way of at least having a good technical phone interview. He replied that there were concerns that a move of this magnitude would destabilize their 12 year son who had Asperger syndrome, which is similar to autism. I asked him, if I could recruit someone in Colorado Springs with expertise in Asperger syndrome, would he and his wife be willing to phone interview this person? And, if he decided to come in for an on-site interview with the company, we would arrange to bring his wife and son and I would personally setup an interview for the three of them with the Asperger syndrome expert. To that he replied, “You are a recruiter! Recruiters don’t things like that.” I said, “I don’t know why not.”

Here’s the rest of the story. The candidate had his technical interview and became very open to this career move. He and his family flew in for the on-site interview and was offered the position. Bill has been the Chief Engineer for the SENSOR Program with the ITT Systems Division for over 5 years now.

I have used this relationship development approach
to win other high value candidates many times.
It never fails.