Southwestern Family of Companies

Tired of losing people…try keeping them

By Stephanie Maas, Partner, Banking Exhausted By the Time and Expense of Hiring New People? Try These Three Retention Strategies Do you know and truly understand the best assets in your current organization? Most managers consider their clients to be their most important assets, but others might beg to differ. Your employees — those who find, service, and maintain your…

Why Posting Jobs is Not Enough to Get Good Candidates

By Christy Farrell, Partner, Healthcare Technology & Innovation

You’re encouraged, but also overwhelmed: a single job posting has brought in hundreds of applications. Executives are so busy they can barely find time to sort through the most qualified candidates — and it’s doubly frustrating when less than 10 percent of applicants are qualified for the role. What’s going on? Where’s the top talent? If this scenario sounds familiar, you may need the expertise of…

Applicant Tracking Systems may Not Always Capture the Best Candidates

By Cathy Moll, Manager and Partner, Life Sciences

Empowered by job-seeking sites and online career boards, candidates no longer have to diligently type out and mail resumes and cover letters to the jobs they’re genuinely interested in. Instead, with a single click, they can apply to numerous jobs at a time. For job seekers, this makes things easier and saves enormous amounts of time, but for businesses, it’s…

4 Ways to Keep Your Millennial Employees Engaged

By Courtney Rice, Partner, Banking

We all want the same thing – a rewarding job filled with opportunities for growth and career development. Although these younger employees has been increasingly dissected and analyzed, perhaps the most overlooked aspect of their generation is that they do indeed value stability, contrary to the stereotype. Having grown up in a sluggish economy and dealt with profound challenges from student…

Secrets to an Accepted Offer: Get the Buy-in Early

By Sean Sposeep, Partner, Life Sciences

How quick is your company’s average time to hire? If it’s hitting the one-month mark, you could be wasting valuable resources interviewing candidates and making offers — only to repeat the process when a candidate turns you down. According to DCRTrendline, the average time to hire is currently around 28 days, which is an all-time high. At the same time, hiring experts…

Contingent vs. Engaged Recruitment

By Matt Lewis, Partner and Practice Lead, Banking

Defining and managing expectations is critical for every client-recruiter relationship to ensure that the objectives for every search are reached. As such, clients and recruiters typically agree to either a contingent recruitment or engaged recruitment plan in order to define and manage those expectations. Clients managing costs would love to conduct each and every search under a contingent arrangement. What…

Client-Candidate Communication: Managing Expectations

By Sean Sposeep, Partner, Life Sciences

Hiring doesn’t have to be the difficult process everyone assumes it is: what I’ve found is that it comes down to understanding that there’s no magic recipe for a hire. The hiring process involves a unique convergence of the needs and desires of both candidates and clients, and in order to understand those requirements and manage expectations on both fronts,…

How Managing Human Bonds Creates Truth in Recruiting

By Christy Farrell, Partner, Healthcare Technology & Innovation

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines human bonding as “the formation of a close relationship (as between a mother and child or between a person and an animal) especially through frequent or constant association.” As a recruiter who specializes in healthcare technology and innovation I realize that I am working with clients and candidates who have so many other relationships in their lives: family, friends,…

Go Back to the Future

By Stephanie Maas, Partner, Banking

Go Back to the Future with Millennial Hires Banking has a storied history and a firmly entrenched corporate culture. It’s only natural, then, that the hiring practices of both established and emerging financial institutions hark back to the past more than they look to the future. Hiring managers in the banking industry face greater challenges filling open positions than ever…

Hiring a Professional Recruiter Can Actually Save You Money

By Jay Boone, Partner and Manager, Banking

Save Time, Save Money “Time is money.” – Benjamin Franklin There are numerous factors that impact the time it takes to identify, vet, and onboard a quality job candidate. Creating an effective job profile, launching the initial search, evaluating resumes, conducting interviews, making an offer, and navigating counter-offers are all important parts of an increasingly intricate process that can be…