Our clients span many different industries – technology, medical device, industrial, building materials, automotive, chemical and aerospace. Over the last few years, we have witnessed many, or most, clients and even non-clients in these markets actively engage in various organizational development, restructuring and change initiatives. Many of these initiatives are implemented with the goal of making organizations leaner, more efficient, less risk adverse or better positioned either internally or in a market space. The traditional short-cycle, long-cycle business plans don’t necessarily fit with today’s global variables and ever changing business landscape. Every leader will tell you that change is essential for an organization to thrive with the new dynamics of today’s global market.

But what we see is that as organizations grow and become more complex, with complicated matrix reporting structures and a strict focus on being “lean”, the unintended by-products are the slow death of internal entrepreneurism and other internal drivers of organic growth. The new change initiative challenge will be how to drive real organic growth in the new structures. Large organizations with talented business development, R&D and product marketing teams struggle with this task. Real organic growth does not mean growing by 4% when the market is up by 3% – it means adding substantive, economic value add to an organization. And it is becoming ever increasingly impossible to do.

The trend of late has been to add growth and value through accretive growth versus organic growth. Wall Street continues to punish CEO’s and stock prices continue to tumble for those companies that don’t demonstrate earnings growth. However, it’s a long-term risky proposition to rely on accretive growth when statistics show the small number of M&A deals that actually generate shareholder value and economic value add to an organization.

In our new “lean,” matrixed and specialized organizations, where organizations are delivering well on capital efficiency, how do we now tackle the great new change initiative of delivering on real organic growth? Those organizations that figure it out the fastest will probably be the biggest winners in the next decade.

We are a successful nine year old search and recruiting firm that is growing and profitable. Our organization is comprised of three operating groups including Westport Intl, which focuses on retained searches at the executive level, while our PinPoint Solutions group concentrates on mid-level contingency recruiting. Our third group, PinPoint Talent is dedicated to partnering with our clients on a project basis to augment their talent acquisition activities.

We are seeking individuals to join our team who want to be part of a growing organization in a fast paced environment. We consider ourselves slightly different from the typical recruiting agencies. With us, our core philosophy is around building relationships with our clients. We don’t believe in the “hard sell,” whether that’s to potential clients or with potential candidates.

We also believe in developing internal talent through our Recruiter Development Program (RDP). People without recruiting experience start with our team as a researcher and progress up through various roles in both our PinPoint Solutions and PinPoint Talent groups. This isn’t a sales training program – this is a recruiter development program. We teach you how to find, recognize and assess talented individuals for companies. Many in our organization have managed talent acquisition functions for global and Fortune 500 organization. This means that you will learn from true talent acquisition experts and professionals.

This program is designed to take high achieving, self-motivated individuals and help make them true search professionals. We have a strong track record at developing talented people and teaching them true professional recruiting skills – use of search tools, assessment ability, business development skills, project management skills, etc.

What we look for in potential new team members –

• A real interest in becoming a search professional
• Business oriented and/or experiences
• Track record of achievement – goal orientation and highly self-motivated
• Career versus job mentality
• Bachelor’s degree
• Experience in HR, sales, recruiting or related business field is preferred

If you are interested in this unique opportunity to enhance your skill set and advance your career, send your cover letter and resume to dennis@westportintil.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

It should be obvious to most that the market for talent is very tight. Top talent is difficult to find because people are discovering that they have options again and are willing to explore those options. This bears contrast to 2010 when employers had a large, actively searching talent pool, and the chance to pursue their ideal choice. Some companies are responsive to this shift in the market; some are not. In either case, how you define and assess top talent, and how you use recruiting tools and processes can make all the difference.

Dynamics

• Supply and demand for certain skill sets and people are reminiscent of the late 90’s.
• The manner in which you attract top talent must be more high touch – candidates want to know who they are talking to, understand the role, company culture, etc. before they engage.
• Recruiting top talent requires a dedicated search process by a professional, and use of multiple recruiting tools and multiple forms of contact. LinkedIn jobs slots, job boards, social media, etc. can help begin the right conversations, but they are a very small initial step in the process.

What does this mean?

• Internal talent teams can’t handle the volume and effectively recruit top talent requiring high touch approaches.
• Execution costs for third party search firms have gone up. Simply put, firms have to put more people and resources to successfully complete searches than ever before.
• For search firms that don’t invest in people, tools, and process, or for internal talent teams that continue to operate with high requisition loads, quality and results will suffer.

What are we doing?

• Adding additional support staff
• Expanding our practice areas so that we have more people active day to day in certain functional areas or industrial markets
• Continually improving our process and capabilities around existing work
• Living one of our core mottos – limiting search volume. A search professional can only execute a thorough process with a certain volume of work.

It shouldn’t be new news to anyone that the housing market has seen its ups and downs since the recession. While the past 6-7 years have shown us that there is a long ways yet to go to recover what this market once was, recent changes have also given a positive indication of growth and stability. Home building markets and home sales have improved, and recent acquisitions in the housing industry also indicated that companies are becoming more willing to takes risks again. This also means that these companies are willing to increase hiring activity and can invest in sourcing the best talent for their organizations.
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