20A – Growing Your Social Capital

Person 1:

Jim Wong is the Founder and Board Member of Brilliant, which is an award-winning recruiting firm. He has over 15 years of experience in recruiting. I would consider him a domain expert based on his vast knowledge of the recruiting industry and with how many companies he has assisted in helping them hire better people. Jim was recommended to me by a former colleague of mine who met Jim at an industry networking event. I sent Jim my elevator pitch to get his feedback. The feedback he provided is that it is a sound idea, but the challenge may be that the time it takes for the Talent Acquisition teams to truly start reaping the benefits of my service, they may have lost out on additional qualified candidates during that time, which would lead them to still leverage a recruiting firm. I will continue to keep in touch with Jim and solicit more feedback. He may even be a potential angel investor down the road.

Person 2: 

Peter Leffkowitz is the Owner of Morgan Consulting Group, which is a consulting firm that specifically trains recruiting agency recruiters to be better. I would consider him a market expert due to him offering a similar service, but focused on recruiting agencies, not companies. Another former colleague of mine went to a training seminar that Peter led and recommended I contact him. I emailed him to connect and have not received a response from him yet. I feel adding Peter to my network can provide invaluable insights about building a consulting business based on training. Additionally, I would assume he has a vast network of former agency recruiters that he trained that now work on the corporate side that I could tap into. 

Person 3: 

Daniel Zinn is an Enterprise Account Director at pymetrics, which is a recruiting assessment company that uses neuroscience backed gamification assessments to help companies better identify candidates for their openings. I would consider him an important supplier in my industry since he is currently selling a technology product to companies I would be targeting. I came across Daniel from some of my own research since my company may be looking to add an assessment. I spoke with Daniel and he was receptive to my idea. He felt there could be a partnership opportunity for some channel sales of pymetrics through my engagements. Adding Daniel to my network may open doors up into existing pymetrics business partners.

Reflection:

This networking exercise was right up my alley since a larger part of my job in Talent Acquisition is proactively networking in the market to find the best candidates. With that said, this was my first time networking for myself, so it was interesting pitching myself in a way that did not come across over-confident. I will certainly do more proactive networking for myself moving forward.