For Hiring Success, Look Beyond Job Boards

When Tupper Kinder, vice president of IT at Marc Ecko Enterprises, needed to fill two specialized director roles, he turned to traditional means to find and attract them. His company is in the wholesale and retail apparel industry with headquarters on both coasts, and Tupper was desperately seeking candidates for Director of Business Intelligence and Director of Wholesale Systems.

For the BI position, Tupper was hoping to find someone who had both the technical and thought-leadership skills to head up an effort to create a corporate data warehouse. With the wholesale systems position, business skills were critical; the company required someone with a solid understanding of the technologies involved but who also could be a leader in developing business processes.

Sifting through resumes and interviewing numerous candidates didn't get the results Marc Ecko was looking for. The candidates they saw were overly technical and not strong enough from a business-process point of view. After months of searching for candidates who always managed to fall short of the mark, Tupper called The Connors Group. "I had worked with them in a previous position at another company, and they helped me fill two retail IT management positions," says Tupper.

The Connors Group worked with Tupper to complete and review job descriptions, providing Tupper with resumes to review within days. Jackie Connors helped Tupper narrow down the resumes to schedule interviews with only the most-appropriate candidates.

"Tupper had been pretty frustrated with the results he was getting from traditional job boards," says Jackie, "so when he came back to me for help at his new company, I knew our approach would help him to find the right candidates. Because more than 60 percent of our business is generated from a unique IT focus in retail and apparel, I already had a number of candidates that I felt had the level of expertise Tupper needed."

The Connors Group uses a Niche Market Specialist approach to staffing, which allows the firm to quickly and effectively identify the right candidates from a network of IT and business professionals in multiple retail and apparel areas. The system worked for Tupper in less than 30 days. He wound up personally interviewing one candidate for each position from Jackie's list, and hired both.

The two new hires are working out "extremely well" and Tupper says he'll work with The Connors Group again. Jackie says, "I'm glad we could solve his staffing needs. It doesn't have to be hard to hire the right candidate; you just have to know where that candidate is."

The Connors Group provides IT staffing solutions. To learn how we can help your organization, contact Jackie Connors at The Connors Group at 201-537-0006 or jackie@theconnorsgroup.com.