Dina DeMarco
speaker
38 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dina DeMarco’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, perfect. Well, Scott, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me today. As you've mentioned, I have been with Human for 15 years, and I have spent the majority of my time at the organization leading large-scale RPO operations, so helping organizations to build high-performing recruitment teams.
About five years ago, I pivoted my role and I have helped to launch and subsequently lead our private equity division. Today within our PE division, we created this division after we realized that there was a gap in the market. Portfolio companies needed help hiring and not just with executives.
There are tons of great executive search firms out there, but when it comes to hiring staff and middle management, what we found was there wasn't necessarily a great solution. So that's how we started this business.
Today, we partner with PE firms to ensure that their portfolio companies have access to scalable, flexible, and affordable recruitment resources so they can help build out their teams quickly without having to rely on an overpriced headhunter or Sometimes they're under-resourced internal HR teams. So that's what we do here in Human PE Talent Solutions.
Myself, as I said, I've been with the organization for 15 years. I am based in Atlantic Beach, Florida. I do a good amount of charitable work. I was previously on the board of our local humane society. So anything with animals, I love. I'm working on becoming a certified bird or wildlife rehabilitation specialist. That'll take a while, but that's the next thing on the docket for me.
Yeah, yeah. So what we found is that lower middle market private equity firms that are investing in the lower middle market often have significant growth plans for their investment. However, those portfolio companies lack the resources and know how to effectively recruit.
So rather than calling in a search firm, a different search firm for every role, Human is designed to be a holistic recruitment solution. So the majority of our partners are PE backed portfolio companies, and we can come in and hire one role up to 100 roles. And that's anything from your staff level positions up to your VP level roles.
And concurrently, we're not only there to fill positions, but we're also there to help these organizations build out their own recruitment functions. So we do something that we call an outsource to insource model, where we actually help companies build a best-in-class recruitment process.
So when they're ready for their next transaction, they have the systems and processes in place to really maximize value.
Yeah, I love that question. So first, I am a big believer in recruitment for all. And so I think that what we've realized is that you can provide really great recruitment service and it doesn't need to be at 33% of somebody's total year one cash compensation. We found that if we deliver really good results, we can help our partners out at a fraction of the cost.
And so we're able to execute on searches anywhere from a third to half of what traditional agencies would charge. And at that rate, what we find is that our partners can come to us with more searches.
It might be something that historically they would stay away from an external partner because they didn't want to pay the large price tag, but they can come to human and they can get the same results and pay a fraction of the price. So we know that if we keep our rates low, we'll get scale.
Yeah, yeah, great question. So we still have a very large portion of our business that's concentrated in healthcare, but we carved out a nurse staffing company and we actually sold that business to private equity in 2017. And it was during that transaction, we developed a really great relationship with the firm that purchased that organization.
And what happened was they kept coming back to us at Hume and saying, hey, we know you know how to recruit. We've just acquired this company and they need to hire a financial controller, but we don't want to pay 30 percent. Or we've just acquired this company. It's peak season. They need to hire 40 HVAC technicians. Can you help us figure out and do it? how to do it.
And so we had this informal relationship and we were doing that for about 12 months. And then we had a light bulb moment and we said, wait, there is nobody out there that is serving this, this group with a really scalable and affordable recruitment resource. And so that's when I had the opportunity to figure out what this business looks like.
And that's when we decided to formally launch this, this practice. Yeah.
Yeah, I guess. So it's very interesting right now. So obviously, everybody is watching the economy. Being a talent person, what I'm watching is the labor market. And I like to describe it as cooling but optimistically resilient. So I look at the JOLTS report every month and we're seeing this continued downward trend in job openings.
But what's interesting is the number of hires is remaining relatively stable and the number of quits are remaining relatively stable. So we know that people are confident enough to make job changes, but we also know that employers are trying to hold on to talent. So it tells me that we're in really a strategic phase of hiring where organizations are doing precise hiring.
And so we have to focus on quality, efficiency, and making sure that we are putting forth the best candidate experience that we possibly can. From the candidate perspective, candidates are willing to take jobs It takes a bit more convincing than it would have historically a couple of years ago, for example.
What we know is there's not as many active job seekers, but if you have a compelling position, candidates will have the conversation and they'll explore additional opportunities. The other thing we're watching, which I think everybody's watching this as well, is AI and how can we use AI in the recruitment function.
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