Over five years ago, the CEO of a respected company contacted us here at Ridgeback about possibly adding Ridgeback to their list of third party vendors. He had some unique needs and ultimately committed to us once he learned that Ridgeback could find his industries rock-star talent, while saving the company thousands of dollars in hiring fees. The results turned out to be so impressive they even surprised us.
The CEO wanted to hire us for a few months to help him identify and hire between five to eight proven project managers, but he wanted to avoid paying the high recruitment fees normally found in the recruiting industry (contingency and retained fees averaging 20% or higher of the new employees’ first year salaries), and asked how we could help with that.
We were able to craft a solution for him that allowed him to bring on the talent he wanted, while also not having to pay the high fees that are normally associated with 3rd party recruiting firms. Today we refer to that solution as “SMART” Recruiting.
What began as talent hunting for five to eight project managers in three to four months, blossomed into a five and a half year project. Ridgeback’s aggressive talent hunters went straight for our clients competitors best talent and very quickly found success. We also leveraged our network database of over 7 million highly skilled working professionals to greatly surpass our clients initial needs.
Over a 5 1/2 year period, we successfully identified, recruited and brought on board:
● 38 full time hires
● 15 part time employees
Contact us if you’d like to get great talent in a SMART fashion.
Recognizing that the average annual salary of each of the new employees that were hired was approximately $100,000 (in 2020 dollars), the CEO was committing millions of dollars to staffing his company and wanted to make sure he was bringing on true industry leaders. Setting aside that much money for all of that talent requires a significant amount of time, research and due diligence into potential candidates. As the CEO stated, he simply didn’t have the capability or talent on board to find the right talent.
Therefore, he needed recruitment support and put his trust in Ridgeback. If he had partnered with a traditional third-party recruiter, there would have been an expensive recruiting fee attached to each new hire, therefore making his growth plans cost prohibitive.
