Her Story
About Melissa
We are primarily in the med device and life sciences space. We meet with clients - we've got global companies that are doing billions of dollars in revenue, all the way down to emerging med tech companies with 5 employees that we partner with to help develop their go-to-market strategy. We're typically having meetings about who they are in the market, who they want to be to potential candidates, and then we do our planning in terms of strategy with our team to determine what kind of candidate profile we need to go after. We put together a strategy and outreach to do that, and we spend a lot of time talking to people that are very happy in their current roles, but trying to get them to see the bigger picture that we're presenting, and trying to get them to the finish line with our clients that we're representing, and making those matches happen. Most of the day is - I wear 18,000 hats - half of it could be talking to clients, and half could be talking to candidates, and then the other third in there somewhere is just more like operations and business development.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Melissa
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best piece of advice I've ever received has likely been to find a way to make yourself indispensable. Whatever level you are in an organization, if you start out as an assistant, just really always ask, try to take on more, be a problem solver, be efficient, think outside the box, and just really try to be as valuable as possible to your colleagues around you, because that's where you're going to get opportunities. That's where all my opportunities have come from, because I've taken initiative. Obviously you'll always hear people say anybody is replaceable, but I do believe that when you really work to be a part of as many pieces of an organization as possible, and be a contributor in as many ways as possible, you do become a little bit invaluable. Figure out how to do that.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Challenges are people are unpredictable. Talent acquisition is definitely not the industry where it's like finance or sure things. It's very subjective, so you're just really trying to manage that whole dance of those candidates and the hiring manager and kind of getting them to the finish line. People are unpredictable, and that is our commodity, so it can be a challenge a lot of times. We gotta do a lot of brokering, a lot of negotiating to get it there, but it's very rewarding when it all works out.
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