Standard Furniture | Right Recruiting Facts
Remote Locations
Successfully completed numerous placements in challenging rural locations.
Continuity
Repeat business with CFO who moved from another major corporation to SF.
Meet Time Demands
Projects completed on schedule or before anticipated.
The Client:
Based in Alabama, they are a 700+ person furniture manufacturer and retailer with a large Southeastern US presence. They were growing on their own and had just bought another company with locations in Mississippi, Virginia and Asia. They needed to strengthen both Finance and HR to support the acquisition and organic growth. As a mid-sized firm, they relied on both a handful of local recruiters and an overworked HR Generalist to fill their normal openings. That worked for Store Managers, but not so much for their new openings.
The Challenge:
Standard Furniture was in a bind. They had almost doubled in size and also had to integrate their new acquisition, they needed to create and upgrade specific functions. In other words, they had to bring in new talent. Managing a two person team in one location is not the same as managing ten people in three locations, for example. And, to make matters more complicated, some of that talent needed to be located in parts of the country in which they had no contacts and where an advertising driven recruitment campaign won’t work. For example, how do you hire an HR Business Partner for a location in which your plant is the major employer? In those situations, there is literally no one to hire FROM. Add a newly created Finance Director job and Business Unit Controller job to the equation and you are now in uncharted waters.
The Solution:
Fortunately for all parties, Standard Furniture had just hired a new CFO to help support their growth. She brought two things to the table:
1) She had significant experience in managing acquisitions
2) She had worked with us at her prior employer
She knew us and our work ethic. We had successfully completed projects for her at her prior employer and she had faith in us.
A nice, but skeptical, Vice President of Human Resources called and described the situation. One of the positions that she needed filled was local to their headquarters and two were in other locations. They had scoured the local talent for the one job. They had local recruiters working on that project for months with no success. Could we find people who would move there as well as find people for their other remote locations in both HR and Finance? And, could we do it quickly and affordably?
The skepticism increased when we suggested that we should not assume the local candidate pool was dead. It was an attractive job and our research showed that there were a number of local employers from which to pull. I assured her we could find a local candidate for the one job as well as people for the remote locations.
We reached a fee agreement that was actually LOWER than the local, non-performing recruiters and we went to work.
I am sure it won’t surprise you to hear that we filled the first job, as predicted, with a local candidate in 6 weeks. We filled the remote HR Business Partner job in 2 months and are beginning final interviews for the third position now.
If you have seen our videos in another part of this web site, this is a perfect example of how hard we work to give our clients the best candidate, not the convenient candidate. The other recruiters skimmed the candidate pool. We dove into it deeply. That’s why we were successful.
