For Cindy Pasky, talent is only the beginning.
The founder, president and CEO of Strategic Staffing Solutions has made acquiring talent for clients a specialization in the 21 years she has led the company. The experience in identifying star performers for clients has given her a unique perspective on the recruiting, hiring and retention of talent at her own company, which generated $171 million in 2009 revenue.
As Strategic Staffing Solutions has grown in the past two decades, the company has needed to continually find top talent. Even in the face of a struggling economy, the need is constantly present, meaning Pasky and her management team have had to place an emphasis on finding, grooming and promoting the people who will lead the company’s future growth.
For Pasky, it has required a balance of both outside recruiting and the training and promotion of internal team members. But she says you should always look within your own ranks first.
“You always want to take people who have already been with you,” Pasky says. “You never staff something completely with people who haven’t been a part of your world. So you select people who you know are good at the activity for which you are hiring; you ask them to take the lead. They’ll find their counterparts and go from there. But you always start out with an existing team or team members before you move forward.”
Finding those existing performers on your staff, and then taking your search outside your office walls, means identifying the foundational principles of your culture, what you want to embrace as a company from the standpoint of ethical standards and operational policies, and then hiring and retaining people who also hold those standards in high regard.
“When you want to hire someone, they have to understand the business you’re in and they have to understand the business of your clients,” Pasky says. “Then, depending on the role they’re in, you work with them and continue to give them opportunities to be stretched. We don’t think someone has to be absolutely ready before they move into a more challenging role, [but] they have to demonstrate that they have the capability to perform the job, and then we can help them fill the voids in their skill set.”
