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Professional help to find the same Start-up providing assistance in grilling future sales people
June 11th, 2007

Professional help to find the same Start-up providing assistance in grilling future sales people By Ann Meyer Special to the Tribune Published June 11, 2007

Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet's handcrafted barbecue grills and custom outdoor kitchens are so hot, the company's Chicago owner is predicting its sales will triple this year. Still, reaching that goal would be easier if owner Pantelis "Pete" Georgiadis could hire a few more sales professionals.

He is behind schedule on that front, thanks to a tight labor market. "It's a market that's increasingly getting tighter. It's good for the economy, but it's hard for us to find the right people," said Georgiadis, who is also founder of Synetro Group, a management consulting and private-equity firm in Chicago.

With the nation's unemployment rate at a low 4.5 percent, businesses positioned for high growth will be scurrying to find qualified workers, particularly in hot segments such as sales, information technology, health care and accounting, experts said. Small businesses typically are at a disadvantage in searching for talent because they often are short on time, money and recruiting expertise, said Sean Bisceglia, founder and chief executive of start-up TalentDrive, a resume-sourcing company to be launched this month. Georgiadis has hired TalentDrive to scout for sales candidates for his company.

TalentDrive pledges to deliver 10 qualified resumes in 10 days for $2,500, far less than the one-third-of-first-year-salary fee that is standard in the recruiting industry, said Terry Shade, a former senior vice president at middle-management executive search firm JobPlex, who Bisceglia hired as TalentDrive's chief operating officer. The company uses a combination of proprietary technology to scour resumes on some 40,000 job sites, including those of professional and alumni associations, then employs experts to screen for the most promising candidates.

The human component makes the service distinct by saving business owners' time, Shade said. If anything, the rise of Internet job boards has complicated the recruiting process for small firms, which must wade through hundreds of resumes to find a handful of applicants worthy of an interview. "You really get inundated with resumes, probably because it's easier [for candidates] to apply," Georgiadis said. At the same time, many small companies don't have the means to seek out niche job sites that might provide better candidates, said Bisceglia, a serial entrepreneur who in 2005 sold CPRI, a marketing staffing firm, to Aquent. TalentDrive is Bisceglia's first start-up, though he has acquired, built and sold two other companies.

Most of the TalentDrive's resume reviewers are "sequencing mothers" with eight or more years of experience in one of the industries TalentDrive specializes in: sales, information technology, accounting, engineering, manufacturing and distribution, said Bisceglia. TalentDrive had about 30 part-timers signed up to review resumes as of June 1, with plans to ramp up to 50 reviewers by the end of the month, he said. The TalentDrive process starts online with a tool to help businesses come up with a detailed job description. Then the company's algorithm-based technology takes the job description and scores resumes according to how well they match up, Shade said. The top 200 or so are reviewed by the company's industry experts. Top contenders are approached by e-mail to gauge their interest in the position. And a final list of 10 is presented to the company.

"It takes us close to 1,000 resumes to get to those 10 that are qualified and interested," Bisceglia said. Georgiadis said he was pleased with the first resumes he received from TalentDrive and has begun interviewing candidates. He is one of the first to try TalentDrive, having struck out twice using other approaches to find a sales professional to help manage part of the company's dealer-partner channel.

It is a position he had hoped to fill before the start of the peak grill-selling season. The first time, he used the recruiting arm of a professional employer organization, he said. Next, he tried advertising on two major job boards. "With the job boards, it's really a very hit-or-miss experience," he said. "It's like putting a fishing net where there's traffic, but you're not sure what's going to pass through."

It is a scenario to which many small businesses can relate. At Initiate Systems, a Chicago-based software company that plans to add 100 workers this year, Gina Sandon posted an event-management position on a major job board and received 400 resumes in the first two days. "You can't wade through that kind of volume. There's probably a golden nugget somewhere, but it's a challenge" finding it, said Sandon, vice president of marketing. Instead, the company filled the position through its employee-referral program, which awards employees $2,500 after they refer a candidate who joins the company. About 25 percent of Initiate's new hires are referred by employees, Sandon said. Still, with 100 positions to fill, the company needs to broaden its search. The company hired a new vice president of human resources last month to look for ways to streamline the hiring process, Sandon said. "We spend a pretty significant amount of time recruiting, reviewing resumes, interviewing and going through that process," she said. "I won't say that it's been easy. You have to look in different places."

Even with help from outside recruiters, Initiate is four to six weeks behind schedule in hiring for certain positions, Sandon said. In some segments with a dearth of candidates, such as software development, Initiate has hired with the intention of training the person to fit a specific need, Sandon said. The market for technology professionals likely will get tighter before it improves, said Stephen Pickett, past president of the Society for Information Management, an association of IT professionals, which has launched the Future Potential in IT program with Microsoft to encourage college students to pursue technology careers.

"The society is sufficiently concerned that we've initiated programs to try to address this [shortage]," he said. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is forecasting a gap of 4 million more IT jobs than workers by 2012, Sandon noted. Although most businesses prefer to hire experienced workers, technology firms increasingly are looking to college campuses for recruits, hoping to nab new graduates before other companies get them. Lincolnshire-based Junction Solutions has hired about 15 percent of its workers out of college, said Brian Carpizo, chief executive of the software company with annual sales of between $35 million and $40 million.

The company employs 200 and has plans to add 100 new workers this year, Carpizo said. "We're seeing less 'A' candidates coming through the job boards" as the technology sector has improved, he said. The company uses both an employee-referral program and executive search firms. "From our perspective, it seems like there's always a shortage," he said. "There's fewer people looking for jobs. The good people get snapped right up."