Stephanie Mattice - Kinsa Group

A job seeker walked into a staffing agency looking for temp work.

No HR experience. No degree. No obvious reason for a recruiter to go the extra mile.

But Stephanie Mattice saw something most people would have missed.

A firm handshake, eye contact and a follow up message that same day are the kind of soft skills you can't teach. 

So instead of filing her away, Stephanie did something different.

She sat down with this candidate, reworked her resume from scratch, translated her admin and customer service experience into HR language and then sent it to clients who weren't even hiring yet.

That move landed her an interview. She crushed it and got the job.

Fast forward a couple of years and that same woman is now an HR generalist, lighting up LinkedIn and about to become a mom.

One more thing?

She works at a food and beverage company. Stephanie now recruits in food and beverage. The candidate is becoming the client and everything has come full circle.

This week on Recruiter Wins, Stephanie Mattice from Kinza Group breaks down the whole story and drops real, tactical insight along the way.

The line that stuck with me most?

"People are going to remember how you made them feel. And if you're in it long enough, that's going to come back to you."

If you've ever wondered whether going the extra mile for a candidate is really worth it, this episode is your answer.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Recruiter Wins, your fight size 15-minute podcast with your host, Zach Gallinger. This is the show where every guest answers one simple question. Tell me about your biggest recruiting win. You'll hear everything from gut-wrenching candidate conversations to game-changing business development wins. Real story with lessons you can actually use in your next search.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Recruiter Wins. My name is Doc Gallinger, and I'm the founder of Talent Hero Media, a digital marketing agency that works exclusively with recruiters. In this podcast, we sit down with a highly successful recruiting expert to ask them a single question. Tell me about your biggest recruiting win. Our guest today is Stephanie Matisse, executive recruiter at Kinza Group. Stephanie's been finding food and beverage leaders for Kinsa for the past two years, but is going to share an excellent story from her earlier days in the industry. And so with that, I'll ask you the question: tell me about your biggest recruiting win.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

I would say all of my biggest recruiting wins are kind of the full circle ones. The one most recently that came back to mind was when I was working for more of a traditional agency. When I started back in like skilled trades and general labor, we would have walk-in days where people would come in. These people are looking for, you know, more like temp jobs, temp to perm. We did have some more professional roles, and that was kind of mushtick. And a woman come in and she presented extremely well. Sometimes that, you know, that was not the case. It's not a professional environment, you know, when you're at that kind of agency. But she came in, firm handshake, smiled. We talked about what she was looking for. She was looking for her big break into HR. She had some administration, some customer service, but it was all entry level, a year or two actually at a staffing agency she had worked at. So it was HR adjacent. That was our plus there. Thing is, for those HR roles that she's looking at, they usually want even entry level. They already want HR experience and they want the degree. This is not something that she had, but I she just presented super well. She had super great at attitude, energy, and I knew the skills were transferable and she could do it. I talked a little bit longer with her and we collaborated, made a plan. We reworked her resume together, translating the skills to more HR terms and I know what I knew they'd be looking for. And then I star marketed her resume to a couple clients. I know that sometimes are looking for some of those admin type roles and HR roles, just in case they might be looking for someone, you know, it's kind of hit or miss, but I mean something. Eventually, there was a CSR slash HR coordinator position that became available. And I went to bat hard for her for that job. Gave them a call, sent them a resume, said you need to interview her. And they did end up interviewing her. She knocked it out of the park. They hired her. She is still there a couple of years later as now an HR generalist. So she's made that big break to the actual HR role. And I see her like lighting up LinkedIn. Like she has amazing posts. She's doing amazing things. I actually am reaching out to her now, asking her for coffee because I'm trying to get her jobs to recruit for food and beverage, so it's actually like a spice plant. And so we're actually meeting up for coffee later to celebrate because she put up one of those like caricatures, the new viral one. And she had uh pink little booties in there. And so I got super excited because I have a toddler girl. And now that she's gonna be a girl mom, I'm like, hey, it's a good time to reconnect and do that. So it's just awesome to see the impact that you make in such a tangible way, like just full life circle, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah. No, that's a cool story. And I guess like, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking about is that you sort of saw something in her that made it worth it to invest that extra time in her. So, what told you this was someone you should go the extra mile for?

SPEAKER_02 4:30

The way she showed up for the interview at an agency, you know, a lot of people don't really see that as a professional interview. She absolutely treated it as such. She dressed for it, she sat up straight in her chair, she led with a handshake, she was very polite. He had just a great attitude and energy. Afterwards, she followed up the communication. That was great. Yeah, I could just kind of tell that she was gonna do well in a role like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

So those subtle details that I guess you might expect in that professional setting, but not in the soft skills.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Yeah, you can't really teach those. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Yeah, that's right. Another thing you talked about was the star marketing technique. That's I'm assuming is similar to kind of like most placeable candidate MPC. Is that what you meant by that?

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Yeah, pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

What does that look like in practice? Like how do you how do you use that technique to make sure that and get that candidate in front of uh the right people?

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Whenever I am working with a candidate and I find that they are their variety, like they have something special as far as again, attitude and energy are huge for me. And I think a lot of people, the soft skills, communication, but I don't have anything for them right away. I want to make sure that my clients know about them because again, that's it's not something that comes up terribly often. And it would be a disservice to the candidate and my client for me not to share that person with them. So sometimes the clients are gonna be like, oh, another stuff, email, but a lot of times they're like, oh my gosh, stuff, thank you. Like this is crazy. Thanks. So yeah, whenever I have a great candidate, I'm going to help them with the resume and send it to whatever client I think would love to see that resume. And then sometimes we end up getting interviews we didn't even know were available.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Right. You mean like for roles that you're not working on necessarily at that point?

SPEAKER_02 6:35

Exactly. You know, like a lot of times you see something that you didn't didn't know that you needed. You don't know it until you see it.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Right. Yeah. That must be a rewarding feeling to kind of anticipate someone's needs in a sense.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Okay. So let's talk about the the resume sec the resume portion of, you know, this star marketing technique. You said that you, you know, reworked her resume for her. So for other recruiters listening to this, what does that process actually look like? How do you think about the types of changes you need to make to someone's resume to give it that polish that it needs?

SPEAKER_02 7:12

Right. So if we're looking at a specific position, it's a little easier to do. We know exactly what they're looking for. We have that job description. So we're gonna put the qualifications that they're looking for that she has towards the top. We're going to I love the core skills lists. It's I make a bulleted, I put it right under the name in the little profile, like two or three sentences. It's the easiest way to scan. We all know that people actually look at a resume for maybe five seconds if you're lucky. So if you can catch their eye with those keywords that they're looking for, that's gonna be the best way to do it. So keywords up top for me, this is how I do it. And then just we're not adding experience, we're just kind of like clarifying the relevance, I guess, like why this is good for you and making them see that more when they're reading it.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Yeah. Do you use any AI in your resume rewrites now? Like, has that been something that's been helpful?

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Sometimes I mean, like I do a lot of it myself when I get stuck as far as like, oh, this just doesn't sound right, or this just doesn't look right, or my brain just isn't doing what it's supposed to do that day. You know, I'll ask for a little help, but I try and stay away from it as much as possible. And it's hard, not quite honestly, because it is very helpful. But you know, when someone has used AI for a resume, you can clock it real quick. So I'm not gonna be that girl.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah. As of right now, it's still not the greatest writer, and there's still a bunch of, I guess, tells that it leaves, but I have a feeling that may not last forever.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Right. It's pretty good at reacting or telling it, like, oh, no M-dashes. You have to tell it millions of times to stop, but eventually it does.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Exactly. Yeah, I I use AI extensively in my job. I mean, I'm not a recruiter, I do recruitment marketing, but I use it enough to say that the pace at which it is advanced has surprised me quite a bit. Because I thought it sort of hit plateaued, but no, it's still going and should be interesting to see how that affects the industry as a whole.

SPEAKER_02 9:35

For the mundane things too, yeah. Just when you can't think of how to word something or something uh you need to take the emotion out of something if it's, you know, a touchy subject.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Right. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Yes, that's great for that.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

I certainly used it for that type of email. All right. So, final question. You mentioned that you're now sort of considering, you know, speaking with this woman about jobs that she may be able to offer Kinsa in the food and beverage space. How often does that happen where someone kind of starts as a candidate and becomes a client? And how do you kind of nurture that relationship to make sure that you get those roles like when they might become available?

SPEAKER_02 10:15

Full circle that way. I mean, it's it's gonna be rare. And it's gonna, I mean, it's gonna depend on how long you've been in the business. If you end up in the specialty that they end up in, just the fact that she ended up in food and I'm in food, you know, so there was a lot of stars that had to align to make that happen. More broadly, though, I mean, it definitely does happen if you recruit long enough and if you keep the right relationships and do it the right way. Broadly, how you do it correctly, in my opinion, is just being a genuinely more of a nice person and helping people. I mean, doing everything you can for someone, you're eventually it's just gonna come back to you. Without getting too woo-woo, like what you put out there, you're gonna get back. So if someone's going to remember how you make them feel and what you have done for them, and they're gonna talk about it and they're gonna remember, like, hey, yeah, you should talk to Steph. So again, if you're in it long enough, that's gonna come back to you, and you're gonna have people reaching out to you, and it's just awesome that way. I know even with Kinza, we've placed each other people, and then we end up working for them down the road because you know, we've done a good job for them, and they're like, Well, if I need recruiting help, of course I'm gonna turn back to you. So that seeing that is it's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Yeah, that's probably a very rewarding part of the job when you can turn a candidate into new business. Well, I really appreciate you um sharing the story with me and answering some questions. Thanks again for joining me today.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Thank you. It was fun.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Thanks for listening to Recruiter Wins. This episode has been brought to you by Talent Hero Media, the digital marketing agency that works exclusively with recruiters to help them win more business and scale faster.