Mary had been a candidate of mine since 2002. She is absolutely stellar and always has been… top performer in every place she’s ever been. For all that time she has worked for large companies…really large companies. I would call her from time to time when really good opportunities came up. She always made a lot of money and there never is as many of those kind of jobs as everybody thinks.
She never really relished the politics of big companies and always managed to do really well. Most success in our profession is timing. It’s simply catching the right person at the right time in their career. It’s a high-volume business, making lots of calls and talking to lots of people and getting down the timing of supply and demand. If you talk to enough people and do it intelligently, sometimes it just works out.
One of our clients is a fairly small software firm that’s been around for 10 years. But the technology is phenomenal and they have hit the market at just the right time. They have less than 100 people in the company but their trajectory is phenomenal. The folks that run it are absolutely first-class and are about as good as it gets. They needed a salesperson who had been extremely successful, so, I called Mary.
She had been at a very large software firm for the last year, and although she was doing well (as she has done in every place she’s ever been), she was a little disappointed. The five people that she was hired with in the new group her company was building had all left, and her management was wondering, out loud, what they were going to do with her. The timing was right.
She agreed to meet with our client, but was very afraid of it being a very small company and she kept saying that in the interviewing process. She had just never worked for a small company and had heard all kinds of stories about “small companies”. I kept sharing with her, as I’ve written here before, that the size of the company has nothing to do with success or lack of it; it has to do with the people.
Mary is the kind of person that everyone would want to hire. Even after she met with all of the managers in the company and agreed that they were as good as I said they were, she was still dubious about a “small company.” But, she thought the perceived risk might be worth it, so, she joined.
Talk about make my day! Mary called me on Friday and said that this was by far the most impressive company that she ever worked for in the 30 years of being in the workforce. She said it was a phenomenal opportunity and she was so glad she joined. She claimed that they had better ideas, better resources, better managers than three of the largest software firms in the world that she had worked for. She called to simply say she was about as happy as she could be, and was thrilled with everything and wanted to thank me for helping her overcome her fears of a small company.
Not all of the placements we make work out quite this way. After all, it took me 20 years to find this lady the right opportunity. But when someone of her caliber calls, and is so grateful for the service that she got, that joy goes beyond the business transaction. She not only made my day, she made my week. Since I know the CEO, receiving the note about how grateful Mary was to be associated with their company gave me great joy.
What fun!
