Case Studies

Client: Hallett Financial Group

Position: Commissions Specialist

The challenge:
Hallett Financial Group, an insurance wholesaler, had created a new position which incorporated duties performed by a key player going on maternity leave. The new role also encompassed other responsibilities driven by the company's growth. The resulting job was complex and difficult to describe, a mix of commissions calculations duties and executive assistant functions. The right person would have to have a unique blend of experience and a willingness to embrace the varied aspects of the position.

Our approach:
After researching similar jobs within the industry, we settled on a title that best described the role and set to work writing a keyword-loaded employment ad, incorporating our most persuasive tactics to attract applicants. Of the 225 people who applied, we pre-screened 25, and Hallett met with its top few choices—highly qualified people. Unfortunately, the first round of interviewing did not result in a new hire, a discouraging situation for us as well as for the client. Where many traditional recruiters would have stopped their search, Red Seat's hiring experts kept looking. Soon, our persistence paid off.

How we found the winner:
We went back to the candidate pool, reposted ads, scrubbed our database and delivered to our client a select few additional candidates to bring in for interviews. One of these candidates proved to be an absolutely perfect fit for the position—an awesome person who had just exactly the industry experience, the interest in the work, and the enthusiasm for the company that Hallett Financial Group sought. They extended a job offer and the candidate said yes.

Client: Nolan Properties Group

Position: Project Manager/Acquisitions

The challenge:
The owner of Nolan Properties Group has been a Red Seat client for over fifteen years. We've helped him hire a variety of employees from accountants to administrators to construction managers. This recent Project Manager/Acquisition position was one of our most challenging projects. It was a newly-created role in the company, and the person who landed the job would play an integral part in Nolan's strategic plan. The focus of the position was in the area of real estate development, an industry in which significant downsizing provided us with a deluge of interested candidates—939 of them, to be exact.

Our approach:
At 939 resumes, finding good candidates was not our problem—ranking them was. The person our client sought would need to have a detailed matrix of skills, industry-specific knowledge, and personality traits, so our first matter of business was to develop meaningful criteria and screening materials to help us narrow the field. Internally, we closely evaluated resumes, searching for those candidates whose backgrounds were similar to what the client had in mind. We also developed a comprehensive phone screen that covered the major points of experience and behaviors that the winning candidate would need to have.

How we found the winner:
Our screening process allowed us to narrow those 939 candidates down to thetop 6, who then met with Nolan for interviews. Three made it to the second round, and the best of them received the coveted job offer. Believe us, the person who won the position was one talented individual. To float to the top of an applicant pool of almost one-thousand hopefuls, he had to be.

Client: Weatherly Consulting

Position: Ongoing screening of project managers and business analysts

The challenge:
Weatherly is a firm that provides consulting services to some of the biggest names in the financial industry. We worked with them from 2003 to 2005, during a period of rapid and dramatic growth for the company. Our job was to maintain a hiring plan for Weatherly's Minneapolis and San Francisco offices, screening for numerous positions, many of them requiring very specific qualifications—most of the positions required candidates to hold PMI (Project Management Institute) credentials, and many required project management experience in a specific type of financial services company, like a bank, a brokerage firm, or a life insurance company. Although Weatherly needed to hire a large number of project managers, business analysts, and other consultants, they maintained extremely high standards. The most difficult part of our job was making sure candidates fit Weatherly's exhaustive criteria so that Weatherly's internal staff would be making good use of their time when conducting in-person interviews.

Our approach:
Over the two years that we worked with Weatherly, we received more than 2,000 resumes and conducted hundreds of preliminary phone interviews. For every candidate who made it to the finalist stage, we conducted an average of 6 reference checks. This was a highly collaborative effort in which good communication with both the client and the candidates was paramount. Because Weatherly's hiring team was so strapped for time, there was little margin for error: we had to respond quickly and ensure that the candidates we sent for review were of the highest caliber and had all of the necessary qualifications. In addition to getting the staff they needed to grow their business, Weatherly also saved a lot of money by working with Red Seat—we documented all of our activity and billed the client on a monthly basis, which cost them only a fraction of what they'd have been paying a full-time, internal recruiter.

How we found the winner:
There were lots of winners, but perhaps the biggest one was Weatherly. They grew to the point that it became more economical for them to bring their recruiting in-house, and so our final project with them was hiring their human resources director. To make the transition as easy as possible for them, we transferred our entire database of Weathlerly applicants to their new recruiting system.