November 4, 2021
Happy November! We’re excited to share our next recruiter spotlight featuring Rhiannon Dixon, Chief of Staff at Lorient Capital, a private investment firm based in Michigan. Below, Rhiannon discusses how she’s grown into her recruiting role at Lorient, what challenges she has faced in hiring throughout the pandemic, and what’s helped her overcome these challenges.
Welcome, Rhiannon!
I started as an Executive Assistant for one of the managing partners. Gradually, I was able to identify areas of our portfolio for development, one of which was acquiring strong candidates across various departments. We spent a fair amount of money on third-party recruiters, and I started to assist in searches by posting them, reviewing candidates, and offering up resumes, and that organically progressed into full-cycle recruiting. I started working with leadership teams, CEOs, VPs, and Directors across our portfolio, which spans across the entire U.S. and focuses on healthcare.
I had a lot of success with finding high-caliber talent for key positions. With that, I’ve been able to take on a larger role in HR in general. At this stage, I now have a recruiter that works with me and continues to expand the number of searches we do. She also makes sure we have reporting around each of our searches and that it’s very data-driven.
I’ve always participated in hiring and recruiting, even as a resident assistant (RA) in college. I sat at the decision table for the interviews and helped the college in finding the next year’s RAs. I do think that I enjoy talking to people, and getting to know them more. This is such a great avenue for that - to learn about different backgrounds and industries. I can talk to anyone, so I think that’s a natural part of it, too.
The newness of it has been in balancing qualifications with things like culture and personal characteristics. Do they fit in with that leadership team? I think there’s a bit of psychology that goes along with it and that’s really interesting to me. Ensuring that hires really thrive in the environment is so important for all parties. I’ve become better at fleshing out these details at the beginning and really understanding the ideal candidate profile. We’ve also incorporated personality assessments into our processes and we want to see quantifiable data around that too. We’re always looking at how we can do it better.
So yes, I liked recruiting initially and now as my role broadens, I’m realizing how much I’m drawn to it even beyond the people aspect of it.
Yes. At Lorient, we were hiring a finance manager in the Northeast region. It was actually one of my first searches with Fetcher and the candidate we hired was a Fetcher-sourced candidate. It was a challenging hire, with a re-location aspect to it. We were able to overcome these obstacles and it all worked out well.
The interesting part is that recently, the finance manager I recruited needed a staff member and it was the first time I pulled the curtain back on our sourcing tool, Fetcher. There was this really fun conversation we had - I said, “remember that email you received? That was automated” and “I didn’t find your profile, but look at how great this is going to be for finding talent for you.” He was cracking up because I had never explained to him how he was sourced, and I think it just speaks to the personal touch that Fetcher has. He would’ve never known unless I told him how I used Fetcher to support the search for his role.
A big challenge is the availability and interest in remote work, when our positions are all related to healthcare and onsite is usually necessary. Generally, our positions don’t speak to the ability to be remote. While we’ve made the transition back and most of our companies have, it’s just the changing landscape around hybrid and remote work that unfortunately eliminates a pretty large candidate pool in any search for us. That being said, our companies have become more open to hybrid opportunities, so there’s a progressiveness that’s wonderful for work-life balance. On the recruiting side though, it is still challenging when we have a hard-line, onsite position.
When we were recruiting at the start of the pandemic, it was a really saddening. Everyone was furloughed and they weren’t sure what was to come. You really wanted to find a home for everyone. Now, everyone is highly sought after, and there are more jobs out there than there are people.
“At the end of the day, as hard as it is for me in hiring now, I’m happy to know that people have a lot more options than they did at the start of the pandemic.”
Never underestimate the power of cold outreach. We have had such great success with not just waiting to see what comes to us, but really sourcing and looking for people who will potentially be very happy in a particular role.
Also, really look at all the tools you have available, like systems and integrations that can speed up your process and also increase your outreach. If we hadn’t made the decision to look for tools to do cold outreach and found Fetcher in that process, I don’t think we could be doing what we are doing today at the scale that we are.
I learned about Fetcher when researching ATS systems. It wasn’t exactly what we were looking for but it looked really interesting. The demo I did was actually really engaging, and everyone that I spoke with was also very engaged.
That’s the other thing; not only is Fetcher a great tool, but also having the ability to access human beings on your support team through the contact feature and through my weekly standing call with my personal Customer Success Manager - that’s really hard to find now. We pay a lot of money for different platforms and it’s nearly impossible to get someone on the phone, let alone on a video call. It’s usually strictly email. It’s so much more enjoyable knowing that you guys are on my team.
We do a lot of self-resourcing still, so being able to add candidates to campaigns through Fetcher’s LinkedIn extension is also helpful. We often use that when we open a search. Being able to do what we do, and having Fetcher to build on that, is great.
Thanks, Rhiannon for sharing your experiences and expertise with us! We appreciate your insights into the challenges and opportunities of today’s recruiting landscape.
Know a recruiter who we should spotlight? Tell us about them via email at hello@fetcher.ai.
Check out our other blog posts for more talent acquisition tips and insights into recruiting trends.
At Fetcher, our mission is to introduce companies to the people who will help them change the world. Our full-service, recruiting automation platform automates those repetitive, top-of-funnel tasks, so you can focus more on candidate engagement & team collaboration. Simplify Sourcing. Optimize Outreach. Hire Top Talent. Learn more at fetcher.ai.
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