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
It's honestly been extremely positive. And one of the things I love most about the world we live in is we have something called LinkedIn. Is it on the World Wide Web? It is. It is actually the website. But every placement I make, it's part of my process. I ask first for the candidates I place to leave me a review. And thankfully, almost everyone is so willing to do that.
And the feedback I've consistently had is they just love the ethical experience that they have. And that's interesting to me that that comes to light so frequently because you would think that ethics were something that every recruiter considered to be a high priority, but it's just not.
And I think what it comes down to is a lot of recruiters don't really know what else to do with a resume than to go run to their clients and try to put it in front of them. And so for me, it's a lot different than that. So much of what I do is it's not spaghetti on the wall. It's not resume spitting. spamming.
It's very much a partnership with candidates in the market around, hey, let's work together on developing a wish list of organizations that you want to go to. I'm going to come to the table with recommendations. I expect you to come to the table with dreams and desires. We're going to put that together and come up with a list of target organizations.
The result is you're going to get in front of the organizations you want to get in front of. And a lot of times it's people who they have all of the qualifications, all of the resume to get them the job, but they don't have the connections. It's the timing. It's the coaching. It's the representation at the offer stage. It's giving voice to, this is what the market's supporting.
You need to be paid X amount to right-size you, get you paid what you're worth. Or it's, hey, you're paid very competitively. Let's go get you an opportunity that lets you maximize your incentive compensation and make you a lot more money all in. It's that expertise. And without that, it's open season. They're on their own. They don't have representation.
And so many people I work with have had that experience. They would much rather have a advocate working with them, but somebody who's really a guide, a trusted advisor, someone who's not just going out there and saying, hey, let me go. I'll keep you posted on what I get for you in terms of an opportunity to interview you. But no, let's go target an organization we agree on. You're in charge.
I'm going to guide you there and let's get there together. So the feedback I've gotten is that that's really value for a candidate. They appreciate that. They don't get that from everyone. And so I feel really good about the work that I do based on that feedback.
For sure. For sure. And I'd say too that like, I think most organizations would like to have the unlimited time, unlimited bandwidth to take everything to search and competitively select the slate of candidates and pick the best one. And I mean, that's an ideal world, right? We want that on paper. But in the reality of what we are dealing with is you have a goal to meet by end of quarter one.
It's the beginning of March. Your top producer just collected his bonus and left for whatever reason. What are you going to do? Can you go to search? Can you go find that slate of candidates? Can you go through that full process? Well, what if someone called you and said, hey, I've got someone who can produce at a level that's equivalent to what your top producer was producing at.
Who wouldn't want to have that conversation? So again, it's a time saver and a money saver because the time it takes to take an opportunity to search, you're losing money on that top producer's revenue. And so a lot of it is, it's a monetarily efficient way to select top talent.
But again, I think the clients that I work with value the industry expertise so that they know when I bring them a candidate, it's not just someone's resume that I got from a job postings.
Stephanie, you probably said this already, but I think the overarching principle is that good recruiters are good listeners. Great recruiters are phenomenal listeners. And with everything I'm talking about, if you don't go in with a really active listening mindset, you're only going to be able to default to transactional recruiting.
But if you can really listen and really learn from every conversation, you become someone who is incredibly valuable to your marketplace and to the candidates you recruit. So that's it. I mean, it's listen, listen, listen, and do something with what you've learned. Love it.
confidence and focusing on work habits and attitude. I think that's what's allowed me to be successful in recruiting and what really early on helped me build a good foundation in building a network. What we do at Thinking Ahead, it's much more of a long game. So it's a lot more inch things forward on a daily basis. When something closes, it results from a month or two of work.
You're not going to have five customers in a day. You're going to have five successes, five work activities that you're really proud of. But ultimately, you're just inching things forward in the process. So it's more of project management than it really is closing a sale every single day. Not only that, but we're surrounded by some of the highest performing recruiters in the industry.
And so we are constantly being shown exactly how to do it at the most excellent level. You build a very good foundation of understanding the different pieces of a sales process. When you're moving to intangible sales, like recruiting... when it's a professional service, really, there's a lot more trust that you're building in who you are and your process that you're going to follow.
And so it really comes down to connecting with people, asking interesting questions, and being able to communicate value. It's unique in that you feel like you kind of step off the treadmill a little bit in terms of the pace to possibly three-month process. And so your daily activities are very controllable. You kind of know what you're walking into every day. It's very planned, very scheduled.
But you really can enjoy life outside of work. We really do maintain good work-life balance. I think that's something that we all want in our professional careers. You want to work somewhere that you're able to kind of do things outside of what you do professionally and enjoy life a little bit.
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