[ Back ]

DON'T SPAM CLIENTS WITH CANDIDATES, UNDERSTAND THEIR NEEDS
Perry G. - Director for a large financial company
I have a friendship with Stephanie. When I heard she had come to Roy Talman & Associates, she had known that I was looking for someone, so we talked about it and decided to move forward with Talman & Associates. We had worked with headhunters before. Overall the quality of people we saw through Talman & Associates was better than the other headhunters. Stephanie introduced us to five candidates who were far better quality than any of the prior people shown to us. What we were hoping to find would have been someone who had network administration capabilities and in addition would be able to do workstation support, and if that person had some database programming…great. When we put together the job description, I think it was pretty targeted in terms of specific skills we were looking for. What Stephanie identified with was that it was going to be hard to find a candidate that had all of those skills, and she helped us identify the most important skills for the position. What we really targeted was the network administration side of the position. Kevin (the eventual hire) had come from a more professional environment, had a couple years of experience doing network administration and support for a smaller group, and his goals matched with the environment we provided. One of the keys to the right fit for us was a Sys. Admin. who wasn't just a techie. We have a very professional environment… a lot of higher-level people Kevin would be interacting with daily. We didn't want a techie to lock up in a closet and let them 'do their thing'. And the first impression I had of Kevin was that he would be able to interact. The rest of Kevin's interview was spent drilling down and identifying what Kevin's technical capabilities were, and finding out how comfortable he would be in our environment. We're not your typical IS shop. We were not going to hire a friendly person who didn't know what they were doing. And we didn't want someone that was purely technical who wouldn't be able to interact and truly support our people. Kevin really was the perfect balance of the two. He wanted to gain a broad range of capabilities, which is what we had to offer him.

[ Back ]