Company Description

A Chicago-based product-development consulting firm offering user research, design, engineering, and prototyping.

The firm specializes in Global User Research Design Strategy and Planning, Digital Experience Design, Technology Innovation and Development, Medical Design and Development, Pharma Delivery Devices and Systems, Risk Mitigation and Quality Management.

Case Study

CreativeSourcing was engaged to fill a Business Development Manager position based in the Chicago Headquarters. The Business Development Manager is responsible for the acquisition of net new business within product design and consultation primary into the medical device sector. The BDM will be responsible for lead generation, presenting and closing new business opportunities for the firm.

Areas of Expertise to Search

• Consultative Sales Experience.
• Selling services engagements – specifically customized solutions.
• Highly technical sales background selling a sophisticated service or customized solution

CreativeSourcing Search Strategy

• Reach out to all of the candidates in our database that have connections with the above skill set. Ask about who the top players are in their industry.
• Cold call into the clients  competitors to begin to break into their Business Development departments and identify the top performers.
• Scour LinkedIn for candidates who have referrals connected to their name based in the areas identified.

Result

• Identified 6 qualified and interested candidates for presentation to the client.
• After first round of interviews the pool was narrowed to 2 candidates.
• Offer and Acceptance were made to the final candidate and is currently employed with our client. Candidate is now considered a perfect prototype for all new hires for business development.

Please let us know if you would like to create your own success story. Submit your job opening and let us get back to you.

Looking for the right fit?

But why have job openings declined when there are a large number of people looking for work (13 million at the last count), many of whom are highly qualified and raring to go? Are employers just “saying” they can’t find qualified candidates or are they playing the waiting game?

“As the job-seekers ratio shows, what’s happening is not that millions of workers have become lazy, unskilled, or unproductive; it is that there are not enough jobs available,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Has the nation’s high unemployment rate left many companies feeling they don’t have to look very hard to find the perfect candidate and can provide less money or benefits?  Now that the job market is gradually improving, companies are getting pickier and are raising the bar for candidates.  When you don’t have an urgent need to hire, why not take your time until you find the perfect candidate?

In some areas, maybe there is a legitimate shortage of skilled talent? In the past, some firms have invested in their workers’ skills but now that people have to pay their own way, they can’t afford this level of training.

Also, the survey showed an uptick in the number of people who quit their jobs, which is often seen as a sign that workers are more confident about their job prospects with a new employer.

Wouldn’t it be great if this picture reversed?:

Looked like this:

[source]

As An Employer, What Are My Options?

If you DO have a job opening, where do you start looking for a candidate to be the perfect fit?

• Post an Ad: Receive hundreds or thousands of resumes and many are unqualified, leaving you in the same position as when you started your search.
• Go through past resumes still on file
• Ask current employees if they know anyone
• When you are driving home, open your window and shout at strangers

Okay, that last one was a joke but you get the picture. It takes a lot of time and is not an easy thing to accomplish.

Use a Professional

Alternatively, as an employer, you could submit your job to us then let us take care of finding the candidate. As professional Chicago sales recruiters, we have developed a system to:

1. Begin each new client partnership with a strategic vision meeting to review needs
2. Develop a tactical plan
3. Research our database
4. Source and search
5. Interview and assess each candidate
6. Shortlist candidate presentation
7. Organize candidate interviews
8. Carry out reference checks
9. Negotiate the offer

Once you’ve selected the right candidate, we will begin the offer process, helping mediate salary and other compensation, start date and benefits. Our consultants also help the candidate follow through on resigning and dealing with counteroffers. We maintain close contact with the candidates to work through this stressful period in order to prevent the falloff of candidates who have received an offer from you.

Even after the candidate has commenced his or her new role, we will maintain communication to ensure that both you and the candidate are satisfied with your decision.

Ready to focus on helping your business grow rather than hoping for the right candidate to show up? Send us your job opening…

Green shoots peek through state’s economic frost

Illinois companies embark on comeback, as Illinois’ growth trails the nation’s

For Cary McMillan, CEO of True Partners Consulting LLC (tax advisory firm), one signal of a strengthening economy in the past year came with a sharp edge: A competing firm offered jobs to about 20 of his staffers and succeeded in luring away about six. “If business was terrible, they would not have come after my people,” he said. He shared the anecdote with good humor but added, “It was not funny at the time.”

Source: chicagotribune.com (January 2012)

Green shoots of economic recovery?

At CreativeSourcing, this is an interesting take on how companies find staff for their job openings.  They sometimes go right to the heart and directly approach the people they want to hire rather than use a professional recruitment firm to filter out a candidate. But this tactic has its drawbacks.

1. Poaching your competitor’s people can portray the wrong image and even get you bad press.  An agency as a 3rd party and can call who they want with no negative consequences reflected on your organization.
2. We have our hand on the pulse in the Chicago job market. We can save you time in consulting where good talent can be and what people are making in certain companies and verticals.
3. Without an agency, you have no filtering to match the right candidate specific to the opening.
4. There’s no support system, no one to call for advice. You are on your own.
5. It takes a lot of time to manage the job offers and deal with feedback.
6. You do not establish a relationship with a partner who understands what (and who) you need and can help you grow.

This is where CreativeSourcing come in. If you have a sales or manufacturing job opening, you can submit it through our easy job submission form then we take care of the rest. But why use us versus going it alone?

1. We are one of the only firms that exclusively recruits for sales candidates in Chicago.
2. We have been a profitable business since 1996 and have an extensive database of over 20,000 candidates.
3. We put all of our candidates through a two hour face to face interview before submitting them to your position.
4. We are able to cold call into your competitors to find the talent that you might not be able to find on your own.
5. We do what it takes to find the right candidate for your position EVERY TIME!

We are not just blowing our own horn (well, maybe a little, Satchmo), we can actually help your business grow. That’s why we are here. Send us your job opening and be a green shoot…

Say you’ve been informed of your status as the leading candidate or you’ve received an official offer of employment. Your courtship as a potential candidate for the headhunter’s client has indeed been a journey.

Finishing this journey depends on trust and faith. You have to trust the headhunter can communicate with the client and reinforce why you are the best candidate for this job. You have to have faith in the headhunter’s ability to fulfill your expectations about compensation and other benefits—and to negotiate in earnest. And yes, you have to have faith you are up to a new assignment.

If you haven’t already, you will probably be asked to provide references who can confirm your fitness for the job. Make sure the references you provide know you well and will say good things about your work experience, professionalism, and capacity to tackle a new senior-management role.

Pitfalls of the Counteroffer

If you’re in line to become a C-level officer, don’t be surprised if the hiring company wants to run a background check and perhaps even asks you to get a medical exam. Given the investment the company is contemplating, these are reasonable requests. You should also brace yourself for what could appear to be a too-good-to-turn-down counteroffer from your current employer, with a fatter salary and a loftier title. But it rarely makes sense to forsake a promising new position under such circumstances.

Accepting a counteroffer, after all, will only buy you and your employer a little extra time to attempt to find common ground about how you can live up to your true potential. Your current employer may also wrongly perceive that you’re motivated purely by financial gain, which could change the way it treats you in the future. And should you accept a counteroffer, you can kiss goodbye the relationship you’ve developed with the headhunter who has taken you this far in the process.

Beware of Family Ties

Much in the same way the headhunter must orchestrate mutual commitment between you and the client hiring organization, you must inform and manage communications with those closest to you about your potential transition. If you’ve told the headhunter and the client you’re willing to relocate, you should really mean it. If you have a trailing spouse, partner, and children, you owe it to those currently pursuing your candidacy for this new leadership role to make sure those family members are on board with the change and are willing to disrupt life as they know it.

More than a few executive headhunters have seen their otherwise flawlessly orchestrated search assignments go by the boards because the candidate never fully won the support of loved ones for relocation during the recruitment process.

It’s this potential search-busting dynamic that leads many consultants to simply steer clear of any high-performing executives with a child who is a junior in high school. To the list of relocation nonstarters one might increasingly consider adding an executive’s inability to sell the family’s home for something near what they paid for it (in which case the executive’s net worth could take a real beating if the new employer doesn’t cover the loss) or a family’s commitment to serve as caretakers for aging (perhaps also ailing) parents or other relatives.

Creating a Win-Win Scenario

As the executive search approaches a successful conclusion, you should plan to be in close and almost constant communication as the headhunter negotiates and otherwise advises the client about the true market value of someone with your credentials.

Often, these discussions lead to the hiring organization agreeing to pay you more than it had anticipated when it first launched the search. That may be because someone of your caliber was deemed unattainable at the outset or because the hiring organization has received advice from a compensation consultant.

You can trust the headhunter to go to bat for you and, in the interest of closing the search to the client’s satisfaction, try to create a win-win scenario. After all, he wants to work for the company again, and if your new role requires you to recruit new external talent, the headhunter might also view you as a future client.

Onboarding Feedback

As you prepare to sign an offer of employment, you should press the headhunter and your new employer to include a provision for performance feedback, or what is often referred to as “onboarding” feedback. You will want the employer to commit to gathering feedback from key stakeholders about your performance 90 to 120 days after you start the new job. Such feedback is intended to reveal how your entry into your new employer organization has been perceived, how peers, boss, and subordinates would rate your performance to date, and whether you truly mesh with the organization’s culture and internal politics.

That kind of environmental intelligence is critical. It can help you course-correct if need be. Otherwise, it should make you confident others believe you’re firing on all cylinders.

After you start work, you can expect tan occasional call from the headhunter to make sure things are going well and to see how you feel about the new job. Take these calls and maintain your relationship with the headhunter. Staying on the headhunters’ radar—and continuing to build your own professional network, for that matter—is one of the best ways to position yourself for the career and lifestyle you want.

Source: Business Week

Joseph Daniel McCool is a writer, speaker and advisor on executive recruiting and corporate management succession best practices. He is the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, which has been recognized as “one of the 30 best business books of 2008″ by Soundview Executive Book Summaries.

Employers are being especially prudent when selecting a new employee. The costs incurred hiring a new employee and uncertainty in the future of our economy slows the hiring process. Job openings go on hold or hiring managers wait for the perfect candidate that can make an immediate impact.

Candidates face a marketplace where one job opening can lead to hundreds of resumes submitted.  It results in the company looking for any reason to knock a candidate out of the process. Improper experience, gaps in employment history, extended unemployment, salary expectations and grammatical errors are just a few reasons for an employer to stop the interview process dead in its tracks.

Managing these challenges can be difficult. As a candidate, your time away from work should be used wisely.

• Make yourself more marketable and valuable by developing your skills through further education.
• In addition, build your networking skills by attending functions, utilizing Linkedin, contacting old managers and talking to recruiters within your career niche.
• As an Employer, utilize job sites that are in your specific market category, increase your budget for current employee referrals and utilize a professional agency that understands the employment marketplace and your category.

We have edited the video to show only the relevant piece.

Job Seeker Jimmy

One candidate I spoke with was recently laid off from his company due to the financial downturn.  His first inclination was to put his resume on a major job board.   When I asked him about the results he was less than pleased.  “Between calls from financial service companies and 100% commission jobs, I can’t decipher the difference between what jobs are worth it and which ones are just scams.  It’s a little overwhelming.”

You may ask how can a job board overwhelm you?   Well, when you have your cell phone number on your resume, you’ll be receiving calls morning, noon and night from all types of companies.   I’m finding, as a recruiter, a more effective way to reach candidates during the day is by making one call explaining in detail the purpose my call and what I have to offer.  I then follow up with an email containing my contact info.  If you’re overwhelmed with the amount of phone calls you receive, maybe utilizing only your email address may be an option for you.  Sometimes emails are easier to filter through.

Manager Matt

I also found hiring managers are also having issues with the job boards.  A current client of mine, we’ll call him Matt, is utilizing the job boards in his search for a marketing candidate.  He recently posted an ad on both Careerbuilder and Monster. I asked him about the results:

Matt:”I can’t believe the amount of resumes I’m receiving! I mean, literally, dozens every hour!”

Me: “So that’s a good thing, right?”

Matt: “It would be a good thing if I had the time to go through these resumes! Or if even half of them were qualified!!”

Me: (smiling) “Well that’s why you should leave that up to me.”

He laughed, but all marketing efforts aside here, this is a problem that many hiring managers face.  The unemployment rate is sky high and everyone is applying to positions, whether they’re qualified or not!  The question is how much time do managers have in a day to sort through dozens, maybe hundreds of resumes per day? How much time is it taking away from what they should be focusing on?  In sales, time is money.

Recruiter Maggie

I can’t say I’ve used the job board much lately.  Everyone has access to the boards and quite frankly, I feel like they’ve lost their glitz and glamor. Great commercials, but not so much value anymore.  Not to employers, or job seekers.

Times have changed, and I believe job boards are a resource for information, not a suitable means of finding a new job or employee.  It’s just not that easy.   The old adage holds true for job seekers “Finding a job is a full time job”.   Try networking, finding a niche recruiter, checking with your alma maters career services.  Anything that will separate you from the multitude of resumes companies are receiving.

In reality, we shouldn’t have to offer any guarantee.  When we decide to recruit on a position the only thing we are guaranteeing is that we will find the most qualified candidate based on the needs of that client.  We do the upfront work in prospecting and finding the best fit, but we can’t guarantee retention. After all, we are talking about human beings here.

I had a sales manager tell me last week that another recruiter offered him a ridiculously low fee and a year long guarantee.  A YEAR LONG guarantee, for a sales person?  Interesting.  Why would they offer such a long guarantee?

“Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of s#%*!”

A hilarious movie scene, but more importantly a fantastic lesson!  I’m sure there are all kinds of companies and independent recruiters working out of their basements who offer low fees and guarantees.  But, a year from now when you’re asking for that refund or replacement will those agencies or recruiters still be there to honor that guarantee?  Lowering fees and extending guarantees does not fit a successful recruiting business model.  If you’re able to get a firm to abide by those terms ask yourself why are they willing to do that?

The difference here is value. CreativeSourcing and other great staffing firms, wouldn’t be in business if there wasn’t a value behind our fees and guarantees.  We guarantee we will find the right candidate based on clients needs.  We guarantee we will be there during every step of the recruiting process.   We guarantee we will save our client’s time in the recruiting process.  That is the value and responsibility we take seriously.  As a Hiring Manger, responsibility has to be taken in making the right hire.

It reminds me of playing college basketball. Sometimes it took a losing first half and a reaming from our coach to make adjustments and attack our competition in the second half.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, regardless of your occupation, it’s time to hit the locker room and re-group. Bottom line, what was working before IS NOT working now. We can’t continue to do the same things in a different economy and making adjustments to our work patterns is vital to our continued successes.

Compete

Our staff at CreativeSourcing recently attended a sales training session hosted by Scott Love, expert in business human behavior and game theory. Love uses his expertise to teach managers and sales people all over the world how to win in the game of business.

In relation to my last post, he spoke about exploiting our advantages and values and being BETTER than our competitors. Love says he believes we only have to be 1% better than our competitors. He compares it to a racehorse. “The difference between the one and two horse may only be an inch, but its a million dollar difference in pay”

It makes sense. Our competition, whatever that may be, is what stands between you and the win. By being 1% better from now on, could mean the difference between how many WINS we have this year.

Believe

Love says that 50% of our success comes from our thoughts. The other 50% is a combination of strategy, work habits and tactics. At CreativeSourcing, we use the term PMA, or positive mental attitude.

There are many theories behind how our thoughts influence our outcomes. Some are more extreme than others, but for the most part the central theme is the same.

I’m not saying run out and purchase a motivational cassette tape to play on the way to work. I’m the first one to admit its hard to stay positive when you continue to get hit, but its part of the game. If you’re in the game, you have to believe it will get better.

Magic Johnson Enterprises was founded in 1987 and is basically a portfolio of different companies. Interestingly enough one of them is a staffing company, “Magic Workforce Solutions”. In the article Johnson discusses his successes in many arenas and the many challenges along the way.

At one point in the article Johnson quotes, “When selling a service or product, find your competitive advantages and exploit them.”

I thought about how that can apply to what I do in placing sales people and it just hit me! We are in a tough economy right now. God knows you don’t need to read this blog to know that. So, how can this apply to you?

Well for one, if you’re looking for job right now, GET IN LINE. The competition is that much tougher and bottom line, there’s probably someone out there who is just as good or better. If you think your resume looks great, check it again. Interview skills a little rusty? Well you better get some WD40 because the interview stakes have raised and employers aren’t going to hire unless they’re blown away.

Finding a job is a full time job. Its work, time, preparation and a competition in itself. A tough economy isn’t necessarily a time to panic but its certainly a time to step it up and put a little “magic touch” into your job search:

• Check the WEB! Google yourself, because ALL employers will do their homework on you.
• FACEBOOK and MYSPACE-even if you think your profile is private, ITS NOT so be aware of how you come across in your college keg party pics!
• If you have resume that is scented or has your picture on it, DISPOSE immediately.
• BRAG BOOK-interviews are the one place you can boast so gather all your awards, achievements and other accomplishments and bring them with you to interviews
• Utilize your network-stay in touch with old colleagues, employers, clients, etc. You never know who might be able to point you in the right direction.
• And obviously use a talented recruiter who specializes in your industry!

Let us know if we can help you “add a little magic” to your job search.

Maggie Hughes

Senior Sales Recruiter

• How do you handle pressure? Do you like or dislike these situations?
• The sign of a good employee is the ability to take the initiative. Can you describe situations like this about yourself?
• What’s the worst of more embarrassing aspect of your business career? How would you have done things differently now with 20/20 hindsight?
• How have you grown or changed over the past few years?
• What do you consider your most significant strengths?
• What do you consider your most significant weaknesses?
• Deadlines, frustrations, difficult people, and silly rules can make a job difficult. How do you handle these types of situations?
• One of our biggest problems is… what has been your experience with this? How would you deal with it?
• How has your technical ability been important in accomplishing Results?
• How would you handle a situation with tight deadlines, low employee morale, and inadequate resources?
• Are you satisfied with your career to date? What would you change if you could?
• What are your career goals? Where do you see yourself five years from now? Ten years?
• Why should we hire you for this position? What kind of contribution would you make?