Hot off her appearance in last month's episode, Heather Campbell, Partner and Executive Recruiter with ThinkingAhead's Nonprofit team, talks about how the search field ticked off all her career boxes, and how ThinkingAhead in particular provides the perfect environment for growth, both personal and professional.Discover what sets ThinkingAhead apart, hear stories from recruiters, and browse opportunities by clicking here.
I had started off school, like my career path in business, got a business administration degree from St. Kate's in Minneapolis and had always wanted to do something entrepreneurial, whatever that looked like. I then kind of continued on in my career path, you know, advancing with just different types of jobs, learned a lot of things that helped me become a better professional.
But that entrepreneurial thing kind of always hung there. And when I found Thinking Ahead, it was this perfect kind of combination of both being able to have a team and structure and a boss. You have benefits, have everything that you get that's a benefit from being employed somewhere.
But then the ability to really have a lot of agency and flexibility with your time because you are running your own business. Thinking Ahead allows you to make the decisions that are best for you. for you that you want to make as you kind of move through that career path.
Obviously, there's metrics and there's people you have to make sure you're still accountable to, but you really get to move through the organization in a way that makes sense for you and how you want to run your own business. So it feels good. It's this combination of two things that I think I really, as I move through my career path, want. An organization like Thinking Ahead, we are boutique.
And I know that sounds like a buzzword, but we take every single search that we handle as if it's its own search. It is something that everything's a little bit different. We're going to tailor it to what the organization needs. We're going to make sure we're listening to what the organization feels like they need and can benefit most from having a partner like a search firm like Thinking Ahead.
And we make sure that then those pieces and elements are a part of what needs to be a part of that process for the search that needs to be conducted. I think that we are an organization that is committed to the candidate process just as much as we are to the client process. We want to make sure that experience for the candidate is one that feels good. They're heard.
Even if that feedback happens to be negative, you know, we're going to put that in a way that's hopefully constructive. They can walk away from that, even though maybe they aren't the candidate of choice. They're someone that still feels good about the process, both us and the partnership that they've created with us, but also the organization and the client we're representing.
Thinking ahead allows for each recruiter to, again, be able to decide how they want to run their own business. And part of that is areas that you want to focus on. I have had the opportunity to work with human rights and social justice nonprofits that I personally have a passion for.
And so being able to work with some amazing people that are doing some really great things, both in the world and right here at home, I'm kind of one degree away from being able to support whatever that impact is that they're making on the ground. As we're working with candidates, we're coaching them to become better in their career path as well.
So, of course, they're being able to make impact at an organization that they probably admire, but hopefully they're kind of being able to look introspectively into what they want and the direction they want to go.
And sometimes it's not the client that I'm working with, but they're able to kind of understand themselves a little bit better and being able to see people make those decisions for themselves and find joy in whatever it is that they're doing, whether that is an organization that I place them at or whatever direction they end up taking.