Derek Schlender
speaker
59 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Derek Schlender’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you.
Wow. Thank you, Stephanie. Team mascot wasn't something I expected, but you know, sometimes you just get these little delights in life that you just got to roll with it and embrace it. So it's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me.
And I think the last six years, they've been probably the highlight just from a professional standpoint for me, not just the work that we do, but the people that I get to do it with. But yeah, I focus on SBA recruiting for our banking team. I run that niche nationally. Personally, my family, we reside in Athens, Georgia. No dogs. Family of five.
We have a nine-year-old, seven-year-old, and a two-year-old. So my world is beautiful chaos right now.
Absolutely. So as I got started in search, a big conversation between my mentor and myself and just our team in general was talking about, hey, what's going on in the market in terms of what drives it? Is it client driven? Is it candidate driven? Do we see that swing from year to year? The thing that really came to light with SBA as a niche is that it was incredibly candidate driven.
And I guess the best way to think about that from a macro perspective is just simple supply and demand. My niche in SBA lending tends this way largely because there's been a high number of baby boomer generation bankers who have been retiring. There's just not been as many Gen X, millennial, there's just not enough people getting into banking to outnumber those that have been retiring.
And so over the last 10 to 15 years, that's resulted in this growing bubble of demand where there's just a lot more need than there is talent. And so that's resulted in something for me that's just sustainably been candidate driven. I haven't really had a lot of client-driven moments in my time so far.
There's definitely been clients who have said, hey, Derek, you're the recruiter we want to work with exclusively. There's just some roles that have to go to search. But the lion's share of what my market needs is the talent, and it's on a constant basis. And so this supply and demand idea
And with demand so high and supply so low, if you can go bring to your clients what they're needing, that's kind of what I would define as candidate driven.
Yeah. So it's candidate driven. I think what appealed to me a lot coming to thinking ahead was that we are not generalist recruiters. And so you've got a lot of banking recruiters in the marketplace, a lot of finance recruiters, but very few of them are truly market masterminds. Masters is what I would say we kind of call it as a niche expert.
And so when I was starting off, and frankly, anyone who's gotten their start in search, you don't know what your niche is until you really cut your teeth and you get a sense of where can I win? Where can I go add value? And so I just started to pull what we call pull the thread in the market. Like you see a thread, you start to pull it. And what comes of that is you start to get traction.
Where I was getting traction was SBA lending. What's unique is we were heading into the pandemic as I was gaining traction. What happened is everyone stopped coming into the office. The marketplace basically overnight was completely remote. While SBA lending is a national product, a national program, I was thrust into a market that was even more national by nature to everyone being remote.
It didn't matter where you lived as long as a company could hire in your state. And so that just became more and more of a focus almost as a product of just circumstances around the pandemic. That's kind of where it all started for me.
That's a great question. And I think that's the most important question because when it comes to marketing talent, why are they marketable? Why is there value? That's an important question. So for me, you've got kind of multiple candidate types that you are looking for in the world of finance. You've got people who are straight up and down revenue contributors.
They're directly tied to the bottom line profitability. You've got people who are in the background, back office people. credit, operations. So for me, it's different depending on what type of candidate it may be. But to put it simply, if someone's a revenue contributor, have they produced is number one.
Have they produced at a level that is recognized by the marketplace as impressive, as meaningful, but even more complex than that? Have they produced within the deal box or the buy box of the clients that I represent. If they have, I've got somebody who can add value for my clients, for the marketplace that I serve. If they haven't, there's a disconnect there.
And so it's my job as the market master to say, hey, tell me about production, Tell me about where you've won. Let me make sure that I'm connecting the dots in a way that's going to be meaningful and recognized for the value that you bring. And so I've got to uncover that with a candidate and understand that on a deep level. If I'm a generalist who doesn't really deeply know one niche,
over another, that's a lot harder. So if you're somebody who does accounting recruiting, commercial CNI recruiting, mortgage recruiting, all of these things, that's great. If you don't have enough depth to talk shop with somebody and understand what kinds of deals they actually do and where you could take them or that wouldn't add value, that'll be harder.
With credit and operations, I think a lot of it comes down to efficiency and proficiency. Are they efficient at what they do in credit decisioning from a timeline perspective? But also, do they have a complexity of understanding of different deal types where they can actually get in and truly decision deals based on the experience that they have?
For me, a lot of times, somebody who is a MPC as a credit candidate, they need to be a little bit more experienced. Because if they're not, it's a lot harder to showcase that talent and to say, hey, based on their experience, they're going to add XYZ in value. And then the same is, you know, generally true of people in operations and other capacities.
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