Jennifer White, Partner and Attorney Recruiter for ThinkingAhead, talks about the connection between search and sales, the RIGHT time to catch a candidate, and throws a shoutout to Talent Trade host Stephanie Maas!Discover what sets ThinkingAhead apart, hear stories from recruiters, and browse opportunities by clicking here.
I actually have always been kind of doing search for most of my professional career since probably 1996, but in a different way. I think what I was doing was being more of a sales connector.
And one of the things that I learned quickly when I started this job was that it was something that was very natural to me and that I had been looking back and thinking about how much I actually was doing that. being in sales and also being in leadership.
There's a big part of that too, that you need to be able to understand what companies need when they're hiring and not just looking at it as a linear need. You have to kind of look at it at different levels of how the culture is going to fit. And so it just became very natural to me.
And I think it's one of those things too, that when I saw a very good friend of mine that works at Thinking Ahead, I'm really enjoying what she was doing. And after talking with her about it for one or two years, I decided to take the plunge. Funnily enough, she was mentioning how she was going on a trip to Italy. And I said, how are you doing that? And she said, oh, I want it.
And I said, through thinking ahead, and she said, yes. So it just kind of made me realize because at the company I was with at that time, we were trying to do an incentive program, and it was never getting off the ground. So it really made me feel like
thinking ahead was a company that had their stuff together that knew how to incentivize and follow through and there were a few other things too such as the fact that she was working remotely and that it was based in nashville and it just seemed like the people that she was working with were really quality people and i have been so impressed with the support the leadership the training
One of the sayings that they say here after you kind of understand about the success of people and then why people don't necessarily make it is that, you know, you can't teach that kind of 1% to 2%, which is you have to have in order to be successful, right? So outside of that, there's 98% I feel like comes from the leadership and the training abilities and the support.
And I think that the first month or two when I was going through training, I have gone through a lot of sales training in my past. And I felt like it was so valuable that you had someone, Stephanie Moss was my trainer at that point, that was able to really walk through the everyday steps that you take and And also just the ability to kind of run with it.
I had a little bit of an unorthodox start for my career and it kind of took off really quickly. But I loved the fact that I was able to kind of run with it and they weren't keeping me in a box. So I just think that also the ability to have a family and be there for them and also get your work done is amazing.
Really good recruiters, what people don't understand is that when we are recruiting, we're actually looking for what's called a passive candidate, and that's someone that's not looking. So you're catching them at the time where, you know, they literally will say, well, I'm not really interested in moving, but I'll listen to what you have to say.
that's when you know you have someone that's valuable. Because the companies that are looking for you to fill a position that they have, they're saying, look, we know we can go ahead and shuffle through some resumes on Indeed or on LinkedIn Recruiter. What we need is to know the gems out there that we can't find. That's what we need to do.
And also, I think a thing about that, too, is that a lot of times what I try to do when I talk to a candidate is I try to educate them on Being careful with the types of recruiters that they do use because recruiters, there's a lot of recruiters that will take their resume and throw it out there like a cattle call.
And a lot of times they don't even know that their resume was put in front of them until I get in front of that client and they say, yikes, this guy was actually submitted a month ago. And then when I go back to that candidate, they're really upset because they find out that their resume has actually been submitted to dozens of firms that they didn't know about.
So I think that the misconception is that they're all one typical type of the way that they do their business, that they just kind of go ahead and throw things around and hope that it sticks. But a good recruiter is someone that understands the value of what that client's looking for, understands their culture. is kind of at their desk, you know, part of the team, part of the C-suite.
And then, you know, they can rely on you knowing that you're going to always hit a home run whenever you put someone in front of them.