June 25, 2010

Teamwork with a Hint of Luck

Julie here, bringing you another week of LMP updates. I technically started out as an intern early June, but I've officially become more and more of an LMP member (recently added onto the email listserv!). Anyhow, I can't talk about my experience at Comrise without describing the culture and the people. From day one, the GM, Tom, stressed to us the value of teamwork, telling us we'd have to be leaders and followers, always ready to step up and make the star plays on the court and to sit on the sidelines and hand water to our teammates as they made those game-winning shots. Since then, I've seen how that value has been internalized in our culture; everyone has been so willing to help each other, whether one's on maternity leave, out sick, or just another new employee like me. Simply put, the people here are awesome to be around. Plus, they all have diverse backgrounds and interesting stories to share (maybe a perk to being a minority-owned company!).

As I wrap up my third week of sourcing, there's an interesting point I'd like to share about it. Sure, there's a lot skill and experience needed, whether in understanding the technical requirements, creating the perfect Boolean string, or snuffing out the bad resumes, but there's also a hint of luck involved. Sometimes, you're given a straightforward job requirement (shortened to "req") with simple keywords to put in the search box and candidates responding promptly to your calls and emails, and other times, you're hit with a crazy req filled with rare skills and candidates that just don't feel like picking up their phones that day. As job seekers, we're always worried about bad luck coming our way and having that one recruiter read our resume that was having a bad day or simply didn't like our interest in classical music. Well, on the flip side, we as recruiters worry about bad luck and having our ideal candidate accidentally skip over our email or get an offer the minute before we call.

Either way, how do we avoid this bad luck? We can't. But we can increase our probability of success. Remember that great thing called teamwork? This week, we received several difficult, somewhat impossible reqs, but we sat down together as a company and decided that we'd all be working together, full-force, since we understood the importance of fulfilling these top-priority reqs. Immediately after dispersing from the meeting, everyone jumped onto job boards, called former connections, and brainstormed new ways to find candidates. It was amazing to see how when faced with a company-wide challenge, we all quickly dropped our tasks at hand and adapted our schedules to focus on our new priority. Undoubtedly, having the entire team work together helped us get more submittals than a few recruiters could have pulled off alone. Hence, we saw firsthand the importance of teamwork (mixed with a bit of luck) and why it is one of our core values.

“Teamwork must be at the core of the Comrise culture, and we should strive to be as collaborative as possible. This teamwork shall be built on the principles of mutual trust, mutual respect, effective communication, accountability, candor, and integrity.”

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