THE BASICS
Name: Jennie Ellis
Location: Seattle, WA
Position: Founder and CEO of Recruiting Bandwidth
What word best describes how you recruit and hire?
Potential. We can teach smart people and I prefer to grow and promote my team from within. My goal is to never have to recruit another senior person again. Growing my own!
Would you say you’re more introverted or extroverted?
I’m right in the middle, but slightly over to extrovert. The way this shows up is that I enjoy working alone but I can only do that for so long before I want to talk with my team about my ideas and gain their perspectives.
What basic recruiting and hiring thing are you better at than anyone else?
I’m a systems thinker at heart. I look for and identify patterns better than anyone else, this includes success patterns as well as destructive patterns. I like to implement solutions for our customers that represent the whole system or ecosystem of their recruiting function to make their whole company a talent engine.
What's your best time-saving recruiting and hiring tip?
Pick up the phone! Seriously, a great deal of us are hiding behind email and it adds a big time delay waiting for responses.
What's the best recruiting and hiring advice you've ever received?
Hire for what you need right now, not for what you think you need in the future. The future will surely turn out differently than you expect right now and you need today’s job done well to get to the future.
If you had to pick one recruiting and hiring practice or “tactic” most companies should avoid at all costs, what would it be?
Be careful not to overly hire employee referrals. While I know in many ways it’s the very best marketing and recruiting channel, you can also wake up one day and have a very non-diverse, too many like-minded people environment. The value is in diversity of thought, so you have all sorts of wonderful perspectives on your product, customers, and adding more value for all.
If you could impart one universal understanding about recruiting and hiring to every senior executive in the world, what would it be?
Treat your recruiters as though they are the most important function in your company versus order takers. If hiring well isn’t elevated in this way, you’ll compromise your hires which in turn compromises your business results.
What do you think recruiters and hiring managers should be more recognized for within a company?
They are the gatekeepers of whether your team is stellar or average or even worse. Give them ample time to recruit well versus hacking it all together in between doing their “real jobs” or overloading them with so many requests they can’t possibly give each hire the attention it deserves and requires to hire well. Mis-hires are incredibly costly.
YOUR JOURNEY
What attracted you to your current role/company?
I started Recruiting Bandwidth initially to support startups. After working internally for several startups both as a recruiter and an HR executive, I experienced just how volatile this culture is, especially in recruiting, as the company struggles to find their product market fit and, unfortunately, sometimes throw in the towel. Funding comes in stages, so a company might need to hire 20 people fast and then pause for a year as they are working to prove themselves further.
My vision has evolved now to elevating the recruiting industry as a whole. I’m so passionate about this that I started a blog series on it. As an industry, we can do better, and we need to do better. I won’t feel satisfied until recruiting as a business function is taken as seriously as marketing or sales functions within companies. As my friend and colleague, Shannon Anderson says “The number one predictor of company success is their ability to recruit and retain talent.” Right now we are still working in an industry filled with recruiters that haven’t been well trained and who jumped into a profession with a low barrier to entry.
What initially attracted you to the HR, recruiting and hiring space?
When I was 10 years old, I bought a psychology textbook at a garage sale and read the whole thing. I’m sure I didn’t comprehend many of the terms and constructs I was reading about, but my original vision in my career was to be a psychologist. I paid my own way through college working as a counselor and trainer in the weight loss industry. Honestly I couldn’t take the emotional pain people were in about their weight or the issues that plagued them. I realized I wanted to use my people coaching skills but not in a way that delved too deeply into personal baggage. I cared too much in my mind to “go there” at such a young age.
If you couldn’t work in the HR space, what would you be doing?
I’d probably be an art dealer and I’d like to lead women’s retreats with my friend Marybeth. I think I’ll be ready pretty soon to deal with meatier issues and apply my lifelong learning to help other women be leaders. In order to be at our best, we all have to stare down our demons and if I could help people carefully do this in my later years, I’d be very content.
YOUR WORK
What’s your OS/mobile device/tech preference?
I have an Android and it’s 2 years old. I try hard to not care about phone technology. I actually hate staring at my phone all the time and I think others look silly doing the same. When I walk around in downtown Seattle and see every person staring at their phone, I am reminded of the Stephen King book “Cell”, whereby at one moment in time, anyone on their phone gets turned into a Zombie. I really long for the day for recruiting to come full circle and divert back to face to face events like we did before the internet existed.
The whole arts and crafts movement was a reaction against factory lines and I think we’re getting to similar place now with impersonal email, text, personal relationships that only exist on social media. I believe people are longing for the depth of real human connection.
What apps/software/tools can't you live without?
Despite my phone rant, I LOVE Evernote. I use Evernote to track all of my goals, all of my personal projects. It’s fantastic how you can add pictures to a brainstorm or an ideas list. I’ve also started traveling a lot more so have been enjoying my various travel apps to keep me organized. We’re on the Gmail suite of office productivity and I’m eager to keep expanding into other Google friendly tools and apps. Anything that truly adds efficiency to my life versus another random thing to go to is welcome in my world.
What are your go-to websites for staying current in recruiting and hiring?
I read a lot of business blogs or websites versus recruiting related content. I find I can be more inspiring with our recruiting solutions if I know what’s going on in the business world at large. Locally I read Geekwire and of course use LinkedIn and Glassdoor to do research for prospective customers. For any companies that have less than a 3 rating on Glassdoor, we will still support them, but we often refer to them internally as a client in need of a makeover, remodel or employment branding refresh.
What's your workspace like?
We have a totally open space as a team and I love it. This is the first time I haven’t had an office in years and I can’t even imagine going back to an office environment with closed offices. Our team is mostly introverted so it’s fairly quiet in our office but we all like walking over to catch up versus always emailing or messaging. We give our team a lot of freedom and we encourage frequent onsite time with our customers.
Learn More & Download
How to Recruit the Informed Candidate
A guide to attracting and hiring informed candidates on Glassdoor.
