Apr 18, 2012
Today I have the honor of welcoming our newest TxMQ employee, Christina Schweitzer, to our audience out there in the blogosphere.
It just so happens that Christina and I have been business contacts/friends for a number of years, and I’m VERY excited that we finally get the opportunity to work together!
Christina is someone that I’ve looked up to in a general sense, deferred to on tough HR questions, and respect as a “Human Capital Solution Architect” (that coming straight from her Linkedin profile).
This woman is really speaking my language, which is – of course – why we hired her! To be specific, Christina was hired as a Senior Direct Hire Recruiter for our Engineering and Manufacturing Operations Division, and for our emerging Litigation Support division as well! Kudos to her for playing this dual role with us.
I asked Christina what she’d like to see in an informational blog in her honor, and in her true fashion she said that I should “stress the importance of agencies and the full pipeline of qualified candidates they can provide a client”.
What is so interesting about Christina’s topic of choice is that her background up to this point, has been very much in internal HR Management, talent management and consulting. Usually HR Managers are the very people we’re trying to win over with our value-add proposition.
Christina has been in the hot seat for hiring personnel, and while she agrees that some positions can be facilitated on one’s own,she feels that filling the senior level, or niche technological positions are absolutely worth the recruiter’s fee and then some.
Not only is a senior level search time consuming; but it’s draining, and full of nuances and mixed circumstances, and reference checks, and finicky candidates, and the pain of trying to FIND THAT LOCK AND KEY FIT. Most hiring managers will admit that when they get down to trying to facilitate a search and make a technical hire on their own, that it’s NOT EASY. Some will say that at a certain point they deferred to an agency because they finally realized they were wasting their own precious time in an unproductive candidate hunt.
Agencies can be a benefit on a number of fronts.
A) We take out all of the leg-work and present you only with the top echelon of candidates on the market.
B) We have been trained thoroughly in the art of candidate selection. In our industry it’s called “vetting” a candidate. We take a candidate’s background, pull it apart and determine their TRUE skill fit.
C) The best recruiters will be cognizant of culture fit. With every phone call to a hiring manager or with an HR Generalist, we learn more and more about the subtleties of a company’s culture. You will find that recruiters are rather intuitive and sensitive beings who have a skill for match making once they know WHO their client is and WHO their candidate is.
On top of all of this, if you do your research and hook up with a niche recruitment firm (our niche is IT and Engineering) they will likely have exemplary, industry pertinent, candidates in their pipeline who you would never find as a hiring manager because they simply aren’t ACTIVELY on the job search.
At the end of the day, from Christina’s perspective, she believes a healthy organization’s hiring practices should contain a mix of both internal search and the utilization of agencies to find those linchpin candidates, and I couldn’t agree more!
WELCOME, WELCOME! We’re so glad to have you on board.
