Roomba Recruiting

quite a few minutes to find her way with us. However, she showed tons of promise and potential and was just so dogged and professional and did so many things right, we knew that once she learned her niche, that it was going to be a okay. She has consistently been a top producer for us. I am super excited to have with us Elise Gay, part of our legal practice. Elise Gay. Welcome.

couple of years. So share with us the how, what, where and when and why behind your process of the Roomba?

be going after passive candidates. And I really think of the Roomba number one as working smarter, but number two is like, almost like a business just turning on their open sign, right? You pull the string on that neon sign. That doesn't guarantee that you're going to be successful, or that you're going to get customers in the door, or that you're going to keep your business afloat, but it's a signal to the world that you're open for business. And I think a lot of the Roomba idea

is really just in support of that. And so the idea of really talking about the Roomba, at thinking ahead and in business, literally came from when I first started here, a little over six years ago. My kids were much younger, and I don't know about you, but on Saturday morning, I'm like, I want to get my chores done because I want to be outside. I want to exercise. I want to go do fun things with my kid. I want to kick my feet back and enjoy time with family and friends. So it's like, how can I

multitask in doing my household chores, right? To get done quicker and get to my fun stuff, right? And I think again, we're going to take this back to business. But I really started this because I used to have these little one pound hand and ankle weights that you would like Velcro on, and I would put those on, and I would fold my laundry so that I felt like I

was getting exercise while I was folding laundry. And I would crank up some 80s music, or I would turn on a podcast for work that I'd been meaning to listen to, and I would listen to that while I'm folding my laundry with my weights on, and at the same time I was running my dishwasher, I'd be running my clothes washer and my dryer, and I would literally have my Roomba going on around my house. So I was like, All right, I'm getting these chores done. We're going to have some fun this weekend.

And that's kind of the idea behind it. And work is deploy all of your resources so that you can have confidence in the hard work that you have to do to get stuff done for your clients and your candidates. So that's the background. The same mentality absolutely applies in executive search. You always have to work hard at this job, but you can still work hard and work smart. And again, when you serve other people's needs in

this job, you always serve your own. So how can you serve people faster but also better and more thoroughly, and how can you serve more people? That's really the name of the game and being successful in executive search. So I think a big part of my mindset in this job is that you have to be confident and humble, you have to be patient and urgent. You just have to be organized. Period. There's really no and I think you. Have to be tunnel focused and adaptable, and I think you have

to be both proud and polite and humble at the same time. So there's a lot of ands in this job. One thing that I've always thought about in this role is that you have to be a bit selfish with your time. Well, selfish on that surface level, sounds negative and sounds self serving. It's actually not, because I think when you come to this job, when you come to your desk every day, you really have to think about that efficiency and spending your time on tasks that are going to move the ball

forward for your clients and candidates. And how can you take the same hours in the day that everybody else have and kind of get that job done. So we've talked about deploying resources. I think that we can think about those resources in a couple different buckets. When you're in executive search, we all have job postings. We can all post on LinkedIn. I call those things kind of the extras, or the icing on the cake, if you will. Again, that's that Roomba kind of working in the

background. And what I want to challenge people to think about is that that's not a post and pray, if you will, kind of a situation. It's not always the and it's rarely, by the way, a one to one relationship. I'm going to post a job, the perfect candidates going to apply, and they're going to be the one that

gets the job. But I would like to challenge people to think about posting or talking about what they're working on on LinkedIn or just kind of on some platform, whether it's a mass email, a newsletter, any tool that you're using to get your work out there really just does a lot for you. In the background, again, it's that Roomba running while you're making the calls, while you're prepping the candidates. You're really building presence and familiarity with candidates and

clients. You're establishing yourself as that market master. I also try to think about, if I'm posting a job or I'm posting on LinkedIn. What's my goal for the week? And let me make my post about that. Let me make it intentional. What I'm posting and putting out there should almost be like a hey, this is my goal this week. I'm working on this particular search, and that's going to be very closely tied to goals and metrics that

I'm measuring myself by. I also think publishing and posting and talking about on some kind of a platform what you're working on, it can get you referrals. It can get people talking in the marketplace. It can also get you candidates and connections that maybe aren't even on LinkedIn or social media, but they have a

friend who is and the friend shares things along. So I think that there's just huge power in posting and sharing, whether it be videos, whether it be a blog that you do, but just having that presence can really be huge for your personal career, and again, for serving your clients and candidates. Well, I also think another bucket to think about when we think about that Roomba. Again, kind of vacuuming while you're folding your laundry is, you know, leveraging support of what some people call

a project team. You know, if you have a team that sources for you, if you have a marketing team that helps you build job announcements, deploy those resources. Don't be afraid to delegate and to use that Roomba, but again, make sure that what you're delegating is directly helping you to meet your

immediate and urgent goals. These, you know, research team sourcing teams, they're also great for just helping you to find candidates, but not only that, to find new clients, to find dream clients that you want to work with to help you connect more deeply with hiring managers in your space, or certainly with candidates in your space. Video is a huge platform. I have done

a little bit of video. I have other colleagues I think that have really embraced video and gotten huge results again, just positioning themselves as a market master and positioning themselves as an expert in their space, and just building that network for today and for down the road.

referrals. It can help you gain that market Intel. You're really also potentially finding new clients to take that same body of work that you're working on, if it's not exclusive, and kind of recycle it immediately and place more candidates and make more impact.

recyclable is so important. And again, I think on the surface, that might sound a little negative or maybe a little callous, but it really helps you to serve more people when you can build relationships in a space very like a very tunnel focused approach, almost you're building relationships in a very

specific geography with a very specific job duty. And you can go and get more searches, more candidates, and it's almost like you're able to take people from one search, maybe that were the runner up and place them quickly with a different client that has a need in that space.

be kind of selfish. But if it's the right kind of selfish, it's self care, especially someone that is so high producing, oftentimes and high functioning, there's this misconception that they've abandoned all else, and this is all that they do. And I think you're truly one of the most well rounded folks that perform at your level that we've ever seen. So can you talk me through that a little bit?

yourself in this job. Is anyone's life perfectly balanced? Of course not, but I am just a staunch believer that if you don't take care of yourself outside of work, this job must become infinitely harder, and it's just harder to lift yourself off the ground, because the positive mentality is so huge in what we do, being able to sit down and talk to people and smile even through the hard days, is super important and what we do so I do believe that your personal

habits truly fuel your professional success. And what I mean by that, you know, we all have different things that fill us up, but for me, I think exercise has just become so important, and it really has nothing to do with physical appearance, but it is purely mental stress relief, anxiety relief for me. I mean, exercise is just paramount for me. Sleep, although sometimes I don't get enough, I find I have to be pretty disciplined about my sleep habits, eating and just

calendar management in general. How am I? You know, I try to look at my calendar as Okay, in this week, this is what I must accomplish professionally, and this is what I must accomplish personally. Are there things that I need to say no to in order to be laser focused on what I've got to get done for

the week? Are there things I can turn down. I'm also the older or the more seasoned I've gotten, I'm just a big believer in having space for a little bit of silence and a little bit of stillness, and that really breeding creativity, I think, on

and off the field in work and in life. Life. And sometimes that can be sitting with a cup of coffee and thinking about something like this on a Saturday morning, or sometimes it can be, let me just block off 30 minutes at the end of my day, and instead of making 10 more phone calls, there's something with work that I need to just let those creative juices flow a little bit. Let me turn myself on Do Not Disturb and let me just kind of think in a little bit of white space about what I

need to get done. I feel that most of us in executive recruitment, we are urgent, we are fast, we are furious, but you can't always live in that fight or flight mode. I think

you have to change over to arrest and recovery time. I've just realized, the longer I've done this, the importance of that for me, I am a big mind, body, connect person, and I think that having work habits that are working smarter, not harder, and giving myself this space is so important, and I couldn't do this job without it.

get. I think that if you can just force yourself to get on the phone and start talking and have that mindset of being open to the possibility of what you're going to come up with that day that that gets me through a lot.

yourself hyped up for it. You don't have to convince yourself, he said, but somewhere in your conscious or subconscious, you make a decision that you want healthy teeth, so therefore you brush your teeth, hopefully twice a day, but most days, at least once a day. Do you even think about any kind of an emotional response to brushing your teeth. No, it's just part

of what you do. You know, if you weigh a certain length of time before you get on the phone, it's going to become emotional, because you're letting all these other parts of your psyche come in. So what I've observed with you is you just have a standard for performance. And for you, it's just, hey, I produce at this level. I do this kind of work. This is just what I do. And as a part of doing that, you don't go in every morning and go, gosh, do I want to get on the phone? Do I not? You're

like, Nope, okay, I want to make my 10, 15 calls. We'll see what happens after that kind of thing. And I get for people who are highly emotional, that's a hard perspective. And I think with somebody like yourself, where you've got this incredible emotional intuition, and yet you've really figured out how to take the emotional out of just doing the job. Kudos to you.

to do today. It's you have to talk to yourself like you talk to your kids sometimes, like, Hey, this is the plan.