9:15 AM:

Rob opened Microsoft Outlook and replied to roughly ten emails that needed his attention. However, that doesn't mean there were only 10 unread emails in his inbox. Rob is copied on multiple emails on a "just so you know" type of basis. Event planning logistics, company announcements, case studies' logistics and findings are topics of those types of emails.

Rob's sent folder is mostly reserved for brand communications and negotiations.  A few examples Rob gave of emails he would need to reply to could concern, "a proposal that was sent out, a rates negotiation, a question about whether a [WWE] Superstar could be utilized in a certain element for a brand," things like that. 

9:30 AM:

Rob prepared for a 10:15 AM presentation around the launch of Coke Energy, a brand new energy drink initiative for Coca-Cola that will occur in early 2020. In preparation, Rob read through a PowerPoint presentation and made notes to discuss while at the meeting. Rob and his team are one of seven brands invited to present their ideas to win the launch dollars around the January Energy drink campaign.

"Launch dollars" is an industry term used to explain the prestige and exclusivity of the partnership. If won, it means the company will be the first to advertise with the product as soon as it hits the market also for the first time.

This isn't WWE's first rodeo with Coca-Cola and their new products' launch dollars—their launch of the Orange Vanilla flavor was an example of a time where Coca-Cola was requesting a proposal to advertise their new flavor exclusively.

Rob and his team for the Orange Vanilla proposal pitched the idea, the perfect pairings. Rob explained their past brainstorming session saying,

"because Orange and Vanilla is a great pairing for you to drink, we went back to the well for us and thought... 'what are the great matchups or tag-team pairings that we've had in the past and how is that relevant?'"

After hashing out the objectives and synergies from the soda to WWE content, Coke went with WWE's idea to advertise the new flavor and sweepstakes were made—that have now expired of course. YouTube content was produced and WWE fans were exposed to entertainment that promotes the message of the advertiser while giving the audience the content they desire. 

This is exactly the type of experience desired this time around for the launch of Coke Energy.

10:15 AM:

Rob took a 10-minute cab ride to Coca-Cola's media agency of record. After he checked into the building, he began setting up a laptop to present, with his marketing team, why the World Wrestling Entertainment audience made sense for the Coke Energy beverage launch in January of 2020.

Accompanying Rob to this meeting is the Marketing Manager who works closely with him to come up with the concepts for the brand pitches.

When asked if he gets nervous for presentations like these, Rob said he feels the opposite. "I get excited," Rob said especially when he knows what's at play and what's at stake.

He continued, "I have to step it up. I have to be articulate. I have to understand who's in the room and I have to pitch our messaging in a way that everybody in that room understands it and is captivated." 

"Getting away from the phone and the computer and actually being in front of somebody is what really makes advertising sales exciting!"

A tip Rob has to rock presentations like these is to, "think of the questions that are going to come about throughout your presentation before actually walking into the presentation." That's why his prep before is so important. While he's re-reading and reviewing the presentation before the meeting, he said he thinks to himself, "what could this person ask as a question?" What are areas of the pitch that's convoluted with in-depth information that needs extra explaining? Dig deep in articulating the answers to those questions in a way a layperson would understand and watch the nerves slowly fade away as you dive into the presentation.

Aspects brands like Coca-Cola keep in mind when looking for partnerships like this are:

1. Reach (how many people could the advertisement be exposed to?)
2. Demographics synergy (does the WWE's demo match the demo the brand is trying to reach?).

Rob and his team, along with the specifics of their creative pitch, leverage their data to try and convince the brand to land their business. Rob said the WWE's demo is interesting because it not only includes the consumer (children and teenagers), but the purchaser (parents), so that's a unique selling point in their arsenal.

The presentation took 30 minutes and a Q&A occurs from the media agency team that lasted roughly 15 minutes. Rob shared the questions asked were related to the specifics of a few scenarios of ideas mentioned in the presentation. In those scenarios, they talked about utilizing certain WWE wrestlers and one of the questions that came up was which of the wrestlers mentioned would be best to reach a certain demographic compared to others. A discussion ensued to try to nail down the right person.

Rob left the agency with his team to head back to the WWE office. While they didn't find out the decision on who won the launch dollars on that day, Rob shared by the time the interview for the article took place, his team won the business!

11:15 AM:

Rob arrived back at his office and jumped on a client call with the head of marketing for Mars Chocolate. The purpose of this call was to discuss renewing their title sponsorship leading up to and surrounding Wrestlemania 36 for the fourth year in a row. Wrestlemania 36 will take place at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida on April 5th, 2020.

The venues of Wrestlemania have changed throughout the four years Mars Chocolate has sponsored Wrestlemania, which brings interesting logistical challenges, Rob said, adding, "what can we do new and different," this time around? Rob and his team are ensuring their clients, not just Mars Chocolate, that the activation for each partnership will be new-to-market and never done before.

The call lasted 30 minutes and previewed some new ideas to bring to life the Snickers brand and their tag line, "who are you when you're hungry?" 

Wrestlemania, for those who don't know, is, as Rob described it, "the SuperBowl for WWE, it's where all the storylines culminate." It's a 4-5 day event—one the biggest events for WWE out of all 500+ events they schedule for the year—which also means, as mentioned, it's a big opportunity for brands to achieve high visibility and reach among potential consumers. To put the Wrestlemania fanfare into perspective, hundreds of thousands of fans from all 50 states and 68 countries attended last year's Wrestlemania 35. Again, big opportunities available for sponsorships and advertising.

12:15 PM:

Rob met with the head of marketing for Rovio Entertainment—a Finnish video game company best known for the Angry Birds franchise—for lunch at Haru Sushi in Times Square. The purpose of the lunch was to discuss the activities coming up in the days ahead which include an activation within Times Square to count down to the official 10th anniversary of Angry Birds in concert with its #BringTheAnger campaign. This campaign aimed to show how anger can be converted into positive action—who doesn't like to let it out once in a while?!

Rob said, "this is more of a 'thank you' type lunch where we've done all the hard work and now we're seeing it all come to life." This is also an opportunity to exchange more detail descriptions of what each respective company does to pitch a future partnership and to get to know each other personally. The more informed each leader of different companies are about their partners personally and professionally, the better they can serve each other in the future, Rob said.

2:00 PM:

After lunch, Rob walked over with the head of marketing for Rovio Entertainment to their Times Square activation. Rovio unveiled the Angry Birds Venting Machine. The idea behind this Venting Machine was to accept angry actions, like bashes, shouts or shakes, as forms of "payment" for special prizes.

Both parties thought to get the most use out of this furious machine, Rovio debuted the Venting Machine in one of the world’s most infamously agitating destinations: New York City’s Times Square.

To drive larger crowds, WWE's contribution to Rovio's Venting Machine idea was to provide WWE Talent, The Big Show (7'0 441 pounds) to drive awareness for the campaign through an appearance in Times Square to help fans shake the "venting machine"!

The Big Show showed up at roughly 2:45 PM which resulted in a long line of fans waiting anxiously to see the larger than life WWE Superstar. A few Instagram reposts later, the client, Rob and the fans were very happy with the successful outcome!

4:30 PM:

Following the Times Square activation, Rob traveled back to the office. The first thing he did was make a call to the Rovio social media team to let them know WWE's The Big Show has initiated his post on his Instagram allowing Rovio to repost and drive more awareness to the big event.

Following his Rovio call, he prepared for a discussion at 4:45 PM with the Universal Studio's theatrical marketing team. Their team discussed with Rob the 2020 schedule for theatrical releases and brainstormed on which titles would make sense for the WWE audience. 

A couple ways these movies studios and WWE can work together include inviting the stars of the movies to come to a WWE event and sit front-and-center, showing the trailer during commercial breaks/on the jumbotron, producing a mash-up promotional video with clips from the movie and WWE Superstars to air on the jumbotron, showcasing props from these movies for fans to take pictures with, among other ideas.

The objective for the studios to partner with WWE is to get tickets sold, Rob said, adding, "so it's my job to create awareness," using all of WWE's assets in their arsenal to promote these movies. Since the demographics for WWE fans span over generations and the studios want to target a specific age demographic, the promotional strategy will differ. For example, if they're working on promoting a movie geared towards a younger audience, Rob's team will focus on digital marketing vs. television marketing. These are the details that are hashed out on phone calls like this.

Ironically two of their major releases, Dolittle and Fast and Furious 9, will star WWE Superstar John Cena. "The inclusion of John Cena creates a nice synergy for a marketing partnership," Rob said.

5:30 PM:

Upon completing the call with Universal Studio's theatrical marketing team, Rob prepared an email to his internal WWE marketing team identifying the three best titles for us to prepare marketing ideas around. Materials attached could include any foundational information Rob got from initial calls, synopses of the movies, and/or RFP documents. He followed up his email brief with a meeting invite to discuss in person the next steps to aligning their marketing initiatives around the flight dates for the Universal titles.

Speaking generally about how meetings like this typically go, Rob's first step in thinking through these ideas is using his marketing background to brainstorm with the rest of his team. He likes to be involved in the creative process keeping in mind his sales expertise as well—what will be the best approach for the studio to get the best return on their investment?

After they've come up with the ideas, his team will flesh it out further and Rob will present the best ideas to the movie studios in person, similarly to the Coke presentation earlier in the day.

6:30 PM:

It was the end of the workday, so Rob caught a train back to Stamford, CT from Grand Central and arrived home at 7:45 PM. On the train ride, he could be answering emails, but only emails that require a quick response. For most emails, he prefers to use a laptop. If he's not answering emails, he'll check back in on the news that relevant to his industry, like finance and company developments, since he doesn't have time to during the day to do so. From there, he prepared dinner and answered urgent work emails mostly from West Coast brands.

11:00 PM:

Rob’s evening routine usually consists of relaxing by playing a few games of pool and pinball in his home game room before falling asleep by listening to an ’80s playlist on Spotify. What a day!

7:30 AM:

The first thing Karissa did when she arrived at the office was to make a cup of coffee with an extra shot of espresso. While she was waiting for it to finish, Karissa got a call from one of the Account Executives on her team. A candidate they had submitted for a UX Designer position was being made an offer! This was a quick turn-around in regards to the interview and offer process. Only two weeks from start to finish! In her experience, Karissa had seen candidates hired on the same day or it can take up to three to four weeks to obtain an offer. While on the call, Karissa discussed details like salary, start date, next steps as she headed back to her desk.

7:35 AM:

After completing this call, Karissa read through and answered various emails. She checked her calendar for the day's scheduled calls/meetings and sent follow-up emails to candidates that needed to submit resumes, portfolios, or questionnaires. Some clients preferred to use online job management tools to work with staffing agencies, so Karissa checked through updates as well.

Synergis uses an applicant tracking system, like Salesforce, to compile all of the data gathered by recruiters. So, once she had the relevant information, Karissa made updates on candidate profiles, logged where she'd emailed individuals, and updated her notes/progress on jobs. Finally, she looked at a collection of internal reports to assess which open jobs needed her attention that day, in order to set her priorities.

7:50 AM:

By now, Karissa was ready to call the candidate who interviewed last week to discuss the offer that had just been proposed. While on the phone, Karissa talked with the candidate about her other opportunities, discussed the offer, and explained next steps to take moving forward. The candidate chose to accept the offer, so Karissa emailed the Account Executive to let her know that they would be moving forward. The next step in the process would be to get the candidate paperwork from the client and submit that for hiring. Karissa logged her notes from the call with the candidate in ATS, the candidate tracking system, and got ready for the next event of the day. 

8:00 AM:

Next on the agenda for Karissa was a daily call with a remote recruiter/mentee on her team. Karissa and her mentee chatted and caught up about their weekend activities, and then discussed the mentee's progress on assignments from Friday. They talked about what coverage/submittals she had completed on these projects, different search strings that she could use for a Quantitative UX Researcher role, and what the mentee's work priorities should be for that day.

8:30 AM:

After getting off her phone call, Karissa headed to the weekly office-wide meeting, held every Monday. The meeting included announcements from the HR team, the Learning and Development department, Consultant Advocates, President, etc. After the announcements were finished, Karissa began a conversation on the priorities of the week, by facilitating a discussion around each Account Executive's open jobs, updates on interviews, and feedback from submittals. The discussion concluded with establishing each recruiter's daily priorities for both the creative and IT teams.  With Karissa's guidance, each recruiter now had clearly established goals for the day and the week. 

9:15 AM:

After the meeting wrapped up, Karissa left the office to head off site for a client meeting.

9:45 AM:

The client meeting began around 9:45. Karissa met with an Account Executive to tour a potential client's offices and meet their staff. For the next thirty minutes, Karissa met with members of the team and spoke with them so that she could better understand their current UX opening. During this discussion, Karissa asked questions to explore their need for creatives. For example, asking what would be the structure of the UX candidate's day to day job expectations, as well as what kind of portfolio and experience would the client like to see from the prospective candidate.

10:15 AM:

Karissa wrapped this meeting up by around 10:15 and left to travel back to the office.

10:35 AM:

Once she arrived back at the office, Karissa set up her laptop and began working on her first priority for the day, working on a UX Researcher position. She started by checking applications from where she'd had it posted online over the weekend. This process involves reviewing resumes and portfolios (if supplied) and reaching out to qualified candidates to schedule a time to speak further.

After gathering several new candidates, Karissa considered individuals found via active sourcing—searching within the ATS database. In many cases, this meant reaching out to people she'd spoken with in the past. Lastly, Karissa would search for prospective candidates through platforms like Indeed and LinkedIn, to see if there were new individuals who were interested and qualified for the role.

11:30 AM:

It was time for the Annual Synergis Thanksgiving Potluck! The staff took a break and gathered in the kitchen. The President, Doug Ross, said a few words of thanks, and everyone dug in to eat some amazing Thanksgiving foods and enjoy some time together. At the end of the potluck, the staff passed around a box and drew names out—almost like a Secret Santa. However, in the version of the game at Synergis, after selecting a name, each staff member had to purchase a toy that reminded them of the person whose name they drew. These toys will then be presented at the Holiday luncheon. The rest of the company will guess whose name was drawn. Afterward,  all the toys are donated to Toys for Tots.

12:30 PM:

After lunch wrapped up, a new role came in that needed to be prioritized. Karissa cleaned and edited the job posting—in order to make it more attractive to candidates—and posted it on several job boards. Next, Karissa started sourcing through the list of candidates situated close to the job location, with relevant portfolios, and backgrounds. Once she established this information, she began cold calling/leaving voicemails, emailing, and texting these individuals about the role.

1:30 PM:

Karissa took a break to have a call with a candidate who had been actively interviewing with one of her clients. Karissa talked with the candidate about how her interview went last week, what her other opportunities looked like, and if the timeline for this role would work for her. While on the call, Karissa worked with the candidate to schedule her availability for interviews moving forward. After getting off the call, Karissa emailed the client to schedule an onsite meeting for this particular candidate to have a secondary interview. She made a note to add this individual's name to a to-do list for the next day, as this task likely wouldn't be completed today.

1:45 PM:

At this point in the day, Karissa pulled up the profile in the Synergis database for the candidate that had accepted an offer that morning.  Her next task involved completing the required documentation to inform the front office (aka recruiting, sales, and leadership teams) and accounting team that they'd made a successful candidate placement.

2:00 PM:

An interview request came in for another candidate. Karissa called and emailed to schedule the upcoming interview, confirming with the client for an on-site interview the next day.  Once this had been scheduled, Karissa continued sourcing on the hot new role that had come in that afternoon. Sourcing is a term used to describe the process of emailing and cold calling potential candidates for a job.

2:30 PM:

Karissa was pulled into a meeting with one of the Account Executives and a Sales Director, to discuss a potential position with a new hiring manager.

The three of them strategized what types of candidates to send, portfolio types and backgrounds, and two to three people already in the pipeline that they could recommend for the job. The team set a deadline of Wednesday to get the specific candidates written up and submitted to the AE and to do a live review with the hiring manager.

2:50 PM:

After this meeting, Karissa went back to her desk to do work. At this point, two junior recruiters from her team came by with questions about a specific client's rates and work agreement. As Team Lead/Mentor, Karissa coached them on how to pitch an idea to a candidate and what further information was needed from the client moving forward. She ended the discussion with next steps for them to complete and follow-up on with the internal team.

3:00 PM:

Karissa completed another candidate call. While on the phone, Karissa talked with the candidate about the UX market in Atlanta, the candidate's background, and relevant experiences. On each and every call, Karissa asks candidates what they are looking for in a position and career. After some consideration, Karissa pitched opportunities with two different clients for the candidate based on what the candidate's skill set looked like and what the client was looking for.

While on the phone, Karissa talked about the candidate's portfolio and made recommendations for some resume edits. They ended the call by setting expectations on interview timelines, walking through what it's like working with Synergis, and explaining what the steps would be moving forward.

3:20 PM:

Not long after that was completed, a client from earlier in the day responded with potential interview times for a  few prospective candidates. Karissa confirmed interviews for two of the candidates, sent prep emails, and documented the details in the ATS.

At around 3:45 PM, Karissa followed up with two consultants to document the hours that they worked last week. Consultants are people who are working on a contract basis through Synergis, that a recruiter, like Karissa, has placed. Once this was completed, Karissa went back to working on sourcing for the urgent role that had been identified earlier that afternoon - sending emails and scheduling calls for tomorrow.

4:30 PM:

At this point in the day it was time for Karissa to go home. Her commute home was usually 30-45 minutes. On that day it was about 50 minutes. To pass the time, she called her parents on the way home.

5:20 PM:

Once home, Karissa let her dog out and followed up on a few emails to get calls scheduled for tomorrow. Once these were confirmed, she logged back in to complete a write up and submittal of the candidate whose resume she had just received, and completed the required documentation in ATS.

10:10 PM:

Sometimes Karissa has to sit on a late supplier call (to qualify a role with a manager) or make an evening call with a potential candidate who isn’t available during the day. She added that frequently she will juggle work tasks while also doing household chores like washing dishes, cooking dinner, or feeding her cat and dog. Karissa usually checks emails and responds to important work things until about 6:30 or 7:00 PM, and then officially closes her laptop.

After this point, Karissa enjoys spending time watching TV with her husband or reading a book. The day after this interview she had the chance to work from home so as the evening wrapped up she took time to set up her computer, headset, mouse, and keyboard in her home office. Karissa did one final check of her email around 9:00 or 9:30 PM to respond to anything urgent. Then, after completing her nightly bedtime routine, she read in bed for 30 minutes to an hour.

9:15 AM:

Jason dropped off his bag, turned on his laptop and hit the floor for his routine walk through the office and plant. He said, "good morning," to each employee and checked for any urgent requests or questions that required immediate assistance. Recent software changes were the priority of the team, so problem solving, retraining, and redefining roles and responsibilities needed to occur as a result.

Jason lives in his role through a genuine and consistent leadership style. While walking the floor each morning, he nourishes the relationships he has built with each one of his team members. He inquires about families, each employee's well-being and how he can provide support to the various departments. Jason describes leadership to be comparable to, "tending to a garden or a plant." He continues to explain, "you cannot take the sum of all of the water a plant needs and throw it on every 6 months or so... you have to ration it and water it daily." The scale of a leader's actions matters less than the repetition of behaviors.

10:00 AM:

Jason called his sales manager and each plant manager at Buckley's other three facilities to casually converse, check for urgent requests or questions and to hear a general update of what their day/week looked like.

The plant managers oversee operations, personnel and health and safety of their respective plant. Jason boasts about these particular managers complementing their loyalty, work ethic, character and vision to be unrivaled. He views his relationships with his plant managers to revolve around providing service as opposed to management. During their frequent calls, Jason checks for operational challenges such as a truck needing service or any equipment issues. He also inquires about personnel details including the health and home-life of the employees and how assistance can be provided to address any concerns. One of Jason's largest efforts during his calls with the plant managers is to, "roll them into the folds of the overall corporate body." With quite a distance between the four plants, Jason extends efforts to ensure the other plants understand their value as an integral component of Buckley's overarching vision.

11:00 AM:

Jason opened his emails for the first time of the day and started to delegate, clean out and work through his inbox. 

Jason’s Executive Assistant, Jill, was introduced to him through some contacts in the local school district and he has admired her performance in the role from the start of her first day. Jason has recognized his habit of saying, "yes," to more things that can efficiently fit on his plate on a given day. In efforts to spike his productivity and control more of his time, he relies on Jill to be the gatekeeper of this calendar. She checks his emails for urgent requests, corresponds to customers and organizes meticulously to maintain an order to the chaos—allotting scheduled time to certain tasks removes the demand.

Before this, Jason would reply to emails as soon as messages would populate, keeping him attached to his devices and fulfilling other's availability expectations at a moment's notice. Since readjusting, he has improved his productivity and gained an ability to be fully present in his day.

Jason has both hands in any situation regarding personnel and delegates other prudent tasks to be handled by a respective manager. Not only does this allow Jason to remain focused, but it gives his managers opportunities to learn and evolve in their roles through experience.

11:30 AM:

Jason sat down for his lunch. 

He normally eats a quick lunch early in the day to avoid lines and because after a vigorous morning... he's hungry! Occasionally, Jason will eat lunch with one of the other executives or one of his managers but most often, he utilizes his lunch period for projects or personal development. He spends this time reading, watching TED Talks, or thinking through any current strategic projects/initiatives.

12:00 PM:

Jason sits on the Board of the National Association of Chemical Distributors and had a call with one of his contacts to discuss the new Sustainability Task Force, where he serves as Chairman.

The mission of the Sustainability Task Force is to improve the industry under the framework of people, planet, profit and progress. The Sustainability Task Force is focused on finding ways to become better stewards of their products and to the community as a whole while committing to constantly assessing where the chemical industry is and where it needs to be going.

To collect data and assess the current state of membership companies, the National Association of Chemical Distributors sends a survey for managers to report on the particular company's efforts of sustainability. Topics here include evaluating idle time of a fleet of trucks that affects emission gasses, community involvement and education initiatives. Jason and his contact dove into these survey results. Afterward, the two discussed Jason's upcoming presentation to the National Board in Park City, UT, during February 2020 and about a March 2020 workshop located in Long Beach, CA that Jason will be speaking in.

The scheduling of vendor, customer and miscellaneous calls between 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM is another intentional strategy of Jason's, aligning with his ultimate motive of maximizing his time and the efficiency of his day. Other calls he takes during this time include unannounced and casual check-ins or handlings a specific customer issue.

1:30 PM:

Jason took a call with the Midlothian Independent School District to discuss a meeting that he was unable to attend the day prior.

Jason serves as Community Co-Chair of the INCubator EDU Program. INCubator is an entrepreneurial curriculum that the school district will roll out in the second half of 2020. Jason's role is to help the district tie the entrepreneurial program in with the business community and to help design the workspace to best serve the students in the program. With an innate passion for both children and business, this project was a seamless fit after Jason asked the school district for initiatives he could become involved in.

2:00 PM:

Jason walked the floor and plant for the 2nd time of the day.

His goal is to walk the facility two to three times a day to check in with everyone; first thing in the morning, once in the early afternoon and once at the very end of the day. Jason doesn't believe effective management evolves from staying tucked away in the office all day. His walks are important to represent his leadership values and management approach.

Jason tries to reach as many of his people as possible and ends every interaction with a question of, "is there anything I can do to help you right now?”

At Buckley, there is an executive committee of four:

1. 1. Chairman
   2. President
   3. CFO
   4.  Executive Vice President (that's Jason)

The committee meets every Thursday for about two hours to discuss challenges, operations, new initiatives, personnel and financials. Decisions are made during this weekly meeting to set a framework for the committee and to remain aligned in vision.

Success can be evaluated by lead and lag measures. Lead measures correspond to behaviors while lag measures focus on metrics and finances. Jason is focused on lead measures to analyzes his success in his role at Buckley, as he believes lag results are byproducts of behaviors. 

2:30 PM:

Jason spent 30 minutes going back through his inbox to answer, delegate and clean out his inbox once more.

3:00 PM:

Jason spent an hour and a half making sales calls by phone to current or prospective customers. To compartmentalize his time, he will alternate between the two and focus only on one each day.

A previous mentor told Jason,

"A good leader has to keep their hands dirty."

Jason believes a leader needs to be willing to get in the trenches of their department and stay up to speed on the challenges and opportunities their team faces daily. He showcases this by spending time making cold calls in search of new opportunities for Buckley or by reaching out to existing customers. Priming his calls to prospective customers is ample research of the company. Jason will visit the website, check on LinkedIn for shared connections and scan relevant articles to support the purpose behind his call and better his chances of landing a new account.

Jason also spends 1-2 days a week in the field, making in-person calls or attending customer meetings and 2-4 days a month at Buckley's other facilities to spend time working with the operation's teams.

4:15 PM:

Before leaving for the day, Jason walked the office and plant one last time to say goodbye and to check in with each department including sales, logistics and accounting.

Jason builds and harvests relationships with departments that report to him and ones that don't! He does this knowing that partnerships across the entirety of a brand are incredibly valuable from a big-picture perspective of the health of the company.

Buckley's employees work the typical 8-5 workday and Jason takes it as a testament to the efficiency of the company that everyone can leave on time. He firmly believes that if employees cannot accomplish their responsibilities in a reasonable amount of time and during reasonable hours of the day, there is a poorly designed system in place that needs to be reevaluated.

"Leaders need to protect their employee's life outside of work!"    

4:45 PM:

Jason sorted through his emails for the last time and created a to-do list for the next day. 

Jill sends Jason any relevant calendar invites for him to add to his list, along with an overview of the following day to outline things to focus on. He also includes any self-reflective moments of hindsight to highlight individual opportunities and maintain accountability for his own personal development. 

Jason is diligent about leaving the office on time. He is in his truck and headed home by 5:15 PM at the latest. His day is a full marathon, with a wife and kids at home deserving of the same attention he provides to his career. 

5:30 PM:

Jason returned home from work and before anything else, spent ten minutes greeting his wife and kids. After that, he changed into workout clothes. The outfit swap helps him transition from a work mindset to one of a husband and dad. 

6:00 PM:

Jason and his family ate dinner together, as they do every night. He made the most out of this opportunity and dove into the details of everyone else’s day.

Jason's family plays a huge role in his career and his life. He and his wife are blessed with three, beautiful children; a seven-year-old son, a four-year-old son and a ten-month-old daughter. Jason is equally as intentional with his time spent at home, as he is in the office.

6:30 PM:

Jason relaxed with his kids while his wife ventured upstairs to ride their Peloton for her evening workout. Jason helped with homework, read with the boys, played with his daughter and performed all nightly activities (baths, brushing teeth, etc.)

7:30 PM:

Jason's wife put their daughter down for the night, while he tucked in the boys. After that, he went for another workout. He alters between lifting weights, riding the Peloton and rowing.

8:30 PM:

Jason took a shower and prepared his clothes for the next day. He and his wife drank a glass of wine and watched a TV show together to wind down.

Their frequented TV shows consist of a hockey game, which Jason promises his wife loves, a cooking show or a documentary.

10:00 PM:

Jason and his wife got ready for bed spent the next 30 minutes reading before they went to sleep.

Another book Jason is currently invested in, is Bob Iger’s Bio, The Ride of a Lifetime.

10:45 PM:

9:00 AM:

Melanie started the day by checking her calendar and email to see what was scheduled. On her agenda this day was training with a new colleague followed by an interview with another potential candidate to join her group.

Melanie received an exciting email from one of her clients expressing serious interest in a candidate she sourced for a role at a video game developing company for a Finance Management opportunity. The company was in the process of scheduling a final interview and trusting that all went well—an offer would follow.

Although eager, Melanie has learned through experience to postpone excitement until the end of the deal. She explains nothing to be over in recruiting until the hire's first day! Melanie relates recruiting to "carrying an egg in a spoon and walking over broken glass to get a deal to go through." In other words, recruiting is a delicate process needing careful handling. The many moving parts come with the industry and in order to remain steady, embracing the unknown is a crucial component to the role. 

She finally got the interview scheduled after a few back-and-forth emails between the client and candidate, which allowed her to move forward with other tasks.

9:30 AM:

Melanie spent the rest of the morning sourcing.

Matchmaking the perfect candidate to a respective job, or sourcing, is a huge part of the recruiting process and can fluctuate as business peaks. On this day, Melanie was sourcing candidates for a heavy 15 jobs. The lowest she will balance during one time is five with 15 being the max. To source effectively, Melanie sorts through current candidates she has already connected with while also scanning sites like LinkedIn. After viewing a fitting candidate, she will send a message, asking the individual if they are open to new opportunities.  

Melanie's approach here is important to intrigue the candidate, but overall, she is seeking a mutually-beneficial situation. Melanie is never pushy in her initial approach. Her strategy is to craft each message with information that would genuinely appeal to the candidate, while being honest about the role's location or unique details. Trying to bait a candidate on an unrealistic or accentuated first glance would end the deal short. Melanie is keen on transparent expectations and honesty with both the clients she sources for and the candidates. 

While sourcing, Melanie looks for candidates that are interested in making a move for the right fit as opposed to a hasty or short-term intention. She has connected with candidates and placed them upwards of 8 months later. The length of the partnership allows for a bond to form between her and the candidate while providing a pipeline of talent for future roles. In this process, Melanie relies on organization and OneNote to harvest and track these numerous relationships. The candidates Melanie remains in touch with usually strike her with their personality and stand out among the sea of other professionals. 

After spending the morning sourcing, Melanie reached out to roughly 500 candidates and scheduled three calls for the following day. While 500 appears to be a significant amount of individuals, Melanie explains recruiting to be a numbers game. Reaching out to just one candidate could be a win, if it's the right candidate.

12:00 PM:

Melanie attended a working lunch for the team to train, discuss best practices and bond with the new employees. In an industry that is continually evolving and saturated with competition, staying relevant through group training is crucial to succeed as one company. The team worked through collaborating success strategies and problem solving together. 

In training this day, Melanie and team focused on marketing to acquire new clients and jobs while utilizing OneNote as a tool. Melanie spoke to the team on the benefits of OneNote and a few key factors of the application. Marketing is 50% of the job and Melanie suggests cold-calling to be a vital interest and necessary skill for anyone interested in full-desk recruiting.

OneNote fits into the marketing strategy as the primary tool to organize the entire candidate tracking process. Once Melanie lands a job or finds a potential client, all of the related details are noted into the application and outlined to view throughout the life of the project.   

There are a total of 20 permanent placement recruiters sourcing for accounting and finance roles in the entire company. In the Dallas office, Melanie's group consists of three accounting and finance recruiters, including herself and one more joining soon. The group is predominantly males, while in the past, has been mostly female. Each individual balances fun energy with a  'work hard, play hard' mentality that drives their success as a team. There is no competition in the group, rather an understanding of working as one.

1:00 PM:

After the training session and working lunch, the Dallas group's potential new candidate came to the office to meet Melanie and the rest of the team as a formality to his interviewing process. This particular candidate was competitive, money-driven and a relationship-builder; all great traits to have in a recruiter although challenging to gauge someone's success until about 6 months in role. The recruiter has this time to build their pipeline and make something happen.

Melanie believes a few other traits make a successful recruiter. Some of which include being process-driven, having great time-management skills, being personable, enjoying helping people and maintaining a level head. Melanie's degree in education provided her with a significant amount, if not all, of these traits and made her journey connect from start to finish. She remains balanced while juggling and maintaining the composure of each step of the process. 

Melanie later discovered that her team will be moving forward with hiring the candidate they met and she hopes that he will be successful in the role!

2:00 PM:

Melanie made time for a workout at the gym in her building.

She values her afternoon workouts, as it gives her body the ability to move around after sitting for most of the day while simultaneously resting her brain to return to work and end the day refreshed. 

For the past several years, Melanie has been going to a CrossFit gym but has stepped away from the facility with a peak in her schedule. To compensate, Melanie has combined a bodybuilding routine that ends with a low intensity version of a CrossFit WOD (Workout of the Day). This day, Melanie worked out her arms, shoulders and upper back. She ended the workout with ten squats, ten V-ups and ten box jumps for as many sets as possible in 12 minutes.

She had a great workout and felt refreshed, fully ready to finish off the day.

3:30 PM:

This afternoon, Melanie picked up new clients and job orders. 

This is another vital, although not easy, component of the job as Melanie is responsible for finding companies who need help recruiting. Hearing “no” is common in this process, but understanding the business allows her to press on without becoming discouraged. 

One strategy Melanie implements is including a highlight of a few talented candidates that she has already connected with during the sourcing process that could spark an interest in the pitch. This strategy proved successful for Melanie on this day, as a candidate she highlighted caused an uproar of responses that she engaged with for the remainder of the afternoon. 

Melanie responded and scheduled calls with certain companies to discuss more details of what they were needing in the role.

4:30 PM:

Before she left for the day, Melanie received a call from a client that was interested in extending an offer to her candidate.

When Melanie sends candidates into a client, compensation has already been agreed upon and is typically within the client's range. This is to ensure that when an offer comes about, there are no surprises. However, unfortunately at times, the client will present an offer that is under what the candidate was originally presented. 

It is the job of the recruiter to return to the client and ask about the reasoning for the compensation difference. If the compensation is too low, Melanie will often push back on the client. On the other hand, sometimes, the candidate will come back and want more money. Melanie will then listen to the reasoning and return again to speak with the client.

Thankfully, the offer this day was a match to what the candidate had been initially presented with. Melanie called the candidate and gave him the verbal offer. He was ecstatic and promised to let Melanie know the following day. Later on, he accepted.

Although a candidate accepts verbally and even a signed offer, Melanie is not fully compensated until the candidates first day of work. This highlights again the fragility of the industry and showcases handling each process with attention and care, as Melanie does incredibly well.

5:00 PM:

Melanie left in a hurry to head to her son's band concert. She rushed home to her kids and parents, who had already arrived at her house to join the family for dinner and her son’s concert. Plans took a turn—Melanie's son left his pants at home. The family made a mad-dash back to the house, retrieved the pants from the floor and hit the road for her son's school.

11:00 PM:

Melanie returned home after the concert and took off her heels with a sigh of relief. She had a glass of wine with her parents and decided to go to bed early, anticipating another crazy, although totally different, following day. 

Melanie practices having a work-life balance by removing distractions and remaining focused in the present moment. While she is at work, she focuses on work. While she is at home with her kids, she focuses on her kids. She is intentional with her time, but is cognisant of remaining ‘on’ to be available for her candidates should something arise while she is out of the office. She has developed her own style of balance and is grateful for each component of her day.

Generally, Melanie’s evenings are seldom identical with the inevitable fluctuations that accompany teenagers. She frequently drives them to and from various places, attends a choir or band concert, soccer game, or school event. She tries to fit in time with friends, when possible. Melanie and her kids also decided to join service organizations this year and they spend a large portion of their free time volunteering at different charities. They love every minute of it!

8:00 AM:

Trey spent time producing marketing posts for his company where he speaks to his audience through LinkedIn and Facebook to discuss relevant, important and intriguing content for his clients.

His strategy around marketing posts relies on planning and consistency, often designing out his posting schedule a month in advance. For example, on Mondays, Trey will regularly post content that feels motivational to his audience. Or if his colleagues and company attend an event hosted by a partner, he will advocate for that through pictures and messages from the scene. He tags individuals and creates a wider name for himself as an expert and an embedded component of his organization, which in result positively impacts his company.

The primary objective here is to incorporate various messages that both drive the story of an individual while simultaneously enhancing the image of the brand as a whole. To do so, Trey posts on LinkedIn, his personal Facebook and through admin. abilities on the company's pages. "Essentially, people buy from people. If I build a brand around myself, people will be drawn to buy from me which in return impacts the brand as a whole," Trey said.

Trey's target demographic is "anybody and everybody" as he works to extend his reach to a wide group, with a goal of attracting key talent from a larger pool.

8:15 AM:

Trey focused on research and marketing calls. The day before, he had selected a handful of candidates to actively market out to potential clients.

Trey cultivates the top talent he recruited for specific roles with all the details ready to present to the companies needing to fill openings. Trey will prepare the passions, skill sets, goals and experience of each of his talent selections at the forefront of his mind to negotiate and display for the company. Trey makes calls to a vast array of companies, to better his chance of landing a spot for one of his candidates. 

He will also contact people based on their prior level of interest in working together. Meaning, if he had reached out to them in the past (with or without a role in hand) and they did not explicitly tell him, "no," he's more than likely back on the phone with them for another try.

Trey checks in with his candidates routinely to monitor status of efforts and maintain relationships. It's easy to lose track of everyone while handling such a large group of people during one time frame. To combat this, Trey said simply maintaining connections on social media can make all the difference while fostering healthy partnerships. 

9:15 AM:

Trey operated a strategy call, which he conducts on a weekly basis.

Strategy calls are scheduled by both Trey and by his candidates and consist of conversations with clients or potential clients, hiring leaders or basic leaders of organizations that need guidance with recruiting and retaining their own people.

These calls offer strategic solutions towards questions such as, "what are you doing now to attain talent," to "what exactly are you expecting from this (insert job title)?" After the topics are divulged, the individuals in the discussion narrow down resources and how to engage them to overcome the challenge.

11:00 AM:

Trey took a resource conference call. Countless recruitment tools enter the market and its important to utilize only the most efficient ones to remain ahead of the game, business-wise. Trey had a call with the founder of a new CRM (customer relationship management) tool devoted to full desk recruiters. This specific tool will help with outreach and improving business development strategies through incredibly detailed, customized sequences and uploading contact information. 

12:00 PM:

During this time, Trey conducted interviews with passive candidates, allowing them to speak freely during their lunch hour. Trey asked questions that honed in on the innermost thoughts of where these candidates wanted to be in their career and how he can be a resource to moving them closer towards that end goal. Trey also dissected their responsibilities in percentages of time spent on different duties to establish a strong sense of what they have been responsible for, what they have accomplished and how they can potentially impact a future company. This process in totality takes up the entire hour if not more.

1:30 PM:

Trey joined an exploratory meeting where he met with a potential client about their needs while learning more about their particular organization. This time typically consists of a plant tour, probing to gain clarity as to who the organization is, to what degree are they hiring and what their talent acquisition processes look like.

This ended with a discussion about a potential partnership but recognized it to be an unsuitable match. The turnover for this organization was above 50% and they had been using five staffing companies. When a few people try to do many things, it simply isn't sustainable for a healthy partnership. 

Trey is responsible for landing clients and he eludes to gaining about five clients for every 100 calls he makes.

3:00 PM:

Trey focused on the most time-consuming task... recruitment.

Although he has an automated recruitment system that works consistently—without disclosing full details of the particular system, Trey can collect the information of between 100-200 candidates per day after connection leading to about a 20% return with responses back from candidates—this is the time where he can focus on building relationships and actively engage in recruitment activities.

This includes sourcing for candidates online to calling companies and getting their organization chart to pinpoint who he intends to target for any open roles he is working on. Then, Trey moves forward to schedule interviews for the coming days.

While reaching out to acquire potential candidates, Trey focuses on the act of giving consistently. He vocalizes and fosters an open line of communication to possibly attract clients to become engaged in conversation for potential open roles. Through this process, roughly two interviews per day are scheduled by Trey for the present day or shortly thereafter.

4:30 PM:

Trey was on the road again, engulfed in the 30-minute commute to his kid's school before stopping to get a few things to make dinner. Once the family arrived home, they cooked and took out the dogs.

6:00 PM:

Trey went right back to work recruiting and followed up with his current and potential clients. He continued his research, reviewed his work and sent out follow-up messages. He also responded to people he had been in contact with earlier in the day, sourced different talent, planned out the next day, reviewed news articles or interesting tidbits and researched target companies.

Trey ended the day feeling accomplished after introducing a candidate to a client that resulted in an expected offer right around the corner. Trey reflected on his day saying, "it's a great deal of work, but I'm used to it! I like the hustle!"

10:00 PM:

Between the hours of 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM, Trey’s nighttime routine involves dinner, dogs, daddy duties, bath time and settling into the night time. While admitting it may be nerdy of him, Trey’s way to relax after a long day of work and parenting is playing video games. It’s a way for him to tune out the stresses of the day and focus on himself.

9:30 AM:

Denise believes firmly in acquiring mentors and she herself, maintains positive relationships with a few relating to different components of her life. On her drive home from the gym, Denise caught up with a particular female mentor of hers, who works independently and provides clarity for Denise in a professional sense. There are few females in the world of sports and because of this, Denise values her relationship with this particular mentor. They often dissect situations that Denise may be encountering in her career and work through solutions together. 

10:00 AM:

Denise had a call with her boss, Emmanuel, the CEO at Spinzo. They talk daily, breaking down the tasks of the day and detailing any outstanding projects that may need attention. Using various mediums, the two are in constant communication working hand in hand across all concepts. This particular conversation was in regards to an upcoming 2020 release that was set to tackle the challenges of group sales reaching new heights. Spinzo, as a whole, recognizes that people are spending money in different ways and understanding the market meticulously is vital in insuring the company evolves with their clients.

For example, Denise noticed Major League Baseball and the National Football League to be experiencing the most transitions, although the Sport industry as a whole is evolving. To explain her observation further, Denise said,

"Clients aren't viewing things like, season tickets, as status symbols quite like they used to. We have to get creative to continue to bring people into the buildings... it's a changing marketplace and we have to keep up." 

11:00 AM:

Denise had a scheduled call with Isaac, Spinzo's main contact at the Florida Everblades. They discussed the more complex promotions they had scheduled for December and Denise assisted with building those for him.

Spinzo recognizes that teams are usually stretched thin, with people working in many facets. Denise routinely acts as a support system to navigate and assist in building promotions for the teams on Spinzo's platforms. Details of seats, game times, group sizes and various components of a deal need to be outlined and Denise steps in to make the process user-friendly and smooth, as a personal troubleshooter and tech. guide. 

11:20 AM:

12:00 PM:

Denise had a quick lunch and got ready for the rest of the day. This mid-day check in is important to gauge her productivity and prioritize what needs to get done for deadline purposes. Lunch was leftover chicken, rice and veggies.

12:45 PM:

Denise serviced various client needs including answering emails about offer builds, platform features, customer inquiries and reporting.

She then took an impromptu call from her client, Nick at AHL's Tucson Roadrunners, where she assisted with a Kids club offer build.

Denise designs or helps her clients navigate through the promotional portion of Spinzo's platform to enforce an incredibly smooth process. During this moment, she sent a mass email to a database of kid's club buyers. Most teams, Denise observes, are understaffed and are maxed out through wearing multiple hats. Spinzo fills this void, as Denise serves as an extra player to aid in the completion of certain processes of the experience. She spot-checks, reviews and edits for her clients for accuracy. 

Afterward, Denise assisted her client, Allyson from PNC Arena, in building new offers for various concerts coming to the arena in Raleigh. She also proofed offers for the South Carolina Stingrays (ECHL) in regards to their Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.

Denise maintains close relationships with numerous teams to feed partnerships and drive her consumer experience expertise. On this day, she responded to messages from the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets, Arizona Coyotes, Carolina Hurricanes, and Detroit Red Wings and NFL's Indianapolis Colts.

During the relationship build and maintenance, Denise toggles between her service and sales hat simultaneously, as they are both one in the same towards fueling a cohesive end goal. The two work as the yin and the yang of the encounter and become interchangeable during the length of an interaction and for the entire life of every relationship. The more servicing Denise provides, ultimately leads to a greater stream of revenue through sales into the platform.  

2:00 PM:

Denise followed-up on her morning LinkedIn post and replied to comments. She spent time commenting on other pertinent posts in her feed and filmed a video for late afternoon posting. 

Denise is incredibly active on LinkedIn as she believes this to be a catalyst for further brand partnerships, deeper success in any company and for establishing a reputable name for herself as an expert in the role. Social media has allowed her to increase the knowledge of her current clients for Spinzo and how in-depth they utilize the platform. She also creates free content to brand herself and has from this, started to build a one-on-one coaching business to help individuals move into the space of Sports Sales. 

"Social media is free marketing for a company... why wouldn't you participate?"

Denise also has found LinkedIn to be a loophole for missing events that are unfeasible to attend because of location or time. Remaining relevant is crucial and commenting, offering insight or information and staying visible allows for participation in these profound events although not physically present. There is immense empowerment in having an online presence, for both expansion and as a voice. 

3:30 PM:

Denise took a late afternoon/early morning call with the Australian Football League.

Spinzo has partnered with the league for the past few years after Ticketmaster introduced the two in hopes of sparking a mutually beneficially agreement, which has worked harmoniously. This call was to recap the 2019 season—five of the teams utilized the brand's platform—and to discuss the results while sharing new features of Spinzo's services. A plan was established for rolling into the 2020 season, as well. Australia doesn't have the structure that the United States has established in regards to Sports Sales and with Spinzo, the league has been able to expand and promote tickets in a creative, impactful manner that continues to evolve over time. The only challenge with this partnership is the time difference! 

5:00 PM:

Denise began the after-school activities including picking up the kids from STEM club, having a quick dinner between that and Choir and then gymnastics. Sometimes homework on Tuesdays is done in the car, carrying Denise's efficiency habits right into the kid's schedule! While she waited at each activity, she spent time messaging her customers in her skincare business through Rodan and Fields to ensure their orders were correct for processing. She has been selling skincare through Rodan ad Fields for the past four years as an Independent Consultant and as the top skincare company in the World, it supply's a healthy stream of income for her.

8:00 PM:

Denise returned home and wrapped up a few final touches on her kid's homework, had a snack and began their bedtime routine.

8:30 PM:

Denise finished up loose ends for work by responding to Spinzo emails and any Rodan and Fields needs. 

She has grown a group of clients through this business and tonight, she contacted her customers, fulfilled orders and updated outstanding carts with product that would ship out over the next few days. 

Denise wears multiple hats and stays motivated to show her kids that anything is possible with hard work and dedication. 

9:30 PM:

Denise washed her face, brushed her teeth and crashed after her long days work. 

10:30 PM:

Denise usually winds down with some time to herself. She’ll catch up on a TV show, browse social media and take it easy to settle into the night.

12:15 PM:

Lindsay was having a working lunch in New Brunswick, NJ, using the time to follow-up on some Onward member inquiries and issues. One of those issues included coordinating a member move for later that week, which involved transitioning ConEd and Verizon services for a member. Then, she moved on to prepping a road map for a new intake from the day before. Speaking of member inquiries and road maps, who are the potential clients going to Onward and how does this process start? Potential clients come from all stages of the breakup phase from...

• People thinking about pulling the trigger & looking for advice on how to proceed.
• People who have recently gotten out of a serious relationship.
• People who are inquiring about services for a friend or family member.

  Lindsay said the on-boarding process for an Onward member starts with a short survey followed by a free, 15-minute consultation call that she conducts and manages. In these calls, Lindsay's trying to figure out how Onward can help with by trying to suss out what services he or she needs to determine which package fits best: the 10-day reboot, the 30-day recharge, or the 3-month recalibrate package.  For example, not all clients will need to hire a dog-walker or belong to a new yoga studio. (Fun fact: when Onward first launched, the co-founders thought the clients would be predominately women. Turns out, Onward has a good mix of male and female clients!)  

"Just as no two romantic relationships are the same, no two romantic breakups are the same." 

  In other words, This 15-minute phone consultation is what Lindsay calls, "a road-mapping session," to set up clients to navigate this tough time in their lives with their best foot forward. From this call, Lindsay puts together a road-map for clients from start to finish what needs to go down, when, where and how so that all the client needs to do is approve, sign the check and put it into motion themselves or let Onward take the reigns. Lindsay said the 10-day package is most popular because it really focuses on the relocation part. For example, what area of NYC do you want to move to? What type of living situation can you afford? Do you want a roommate? Things like that. The 30-day package focuses on relocation and logistics and the 3-month package focuses on everything mentioned with more curated recommendations, facilitation, and weekly check-ins.  

"We're kind of their trail guide to their new life."

  Now that you have the context you need, back to the day! Lindsay situated ConEd & Verizon services for one client and moved on to coordinating a full-member move, which this client did NOT want to be involved in the dirty details. Lindsay coordinated with the moving company—separate from the cost of Onward's services—to make sure they were only moving her stuff, nothing that was contested. With every move, there's a comprehensive list the movers are supposed to follow created by Lindsay and the client. Generally, once the truck's loaded, the movers transport the items to the new location, assemble any furniture and field any decor deliveries. The whole point is for all clients to come home to their new life, which requires A LOT of planning from the furniture, to the decor, to the utilities, to the food in the fridge. She manages from afar and keeps tabs with point people each step of the way. Then, she worked on a road-map using Trello for a new client looking at location preferences, financial means, functional services (water, gas, electric, cable, WiFi, etc.) & more. She also took two quick calls, first from Onward's SEO freelancer to determine what would be the best course of action for the site. Lindsay learned the site needed to incorporate keywords, improve the copy on the site, and create more content keeping in mind trending topics on the internet for higher website traffic. She said there comes a time in a small business owner's life when she or he has to make the decision to outsource or not, and she's grateful that she's in the position to be able to.  

"I could learn how to do all this stuff, it would just take a lot of time"

The other call was from her fiancé, Ryan, who was preparing for a video shoot the day after this for the non-profit he founded, Corporate Responsibility Rankings. CRR aims to make it easier to buy responsibly with labels of transparency on products. These labels tell you how the company stacks up in terms of fair and equitable employment practices, environmental impact, and charitable efforts. "When Ryan is not saving the world, he's helping plan our wedding next year," Lindsay said. On this day, they talked about selecting a florist.  

"It's nice to be with someone who knows that it's like to create something from nothing."

When asked about their relationship dynamic as separate entrepreneurs, Lindsay said it's great to be with someone that understands the desire to create something and also has the desire to help people. While Lindsay's more of a "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" type of person, Ryan's more methodical. She believes the ideal entrepreneur is a mix of both, but luckily they get enough doses of the two perspectives from each other. "No one was more supportive than Ryan," Lindsay said recounting when she quit her full-time job to start Onward, "what a dream champion."

1:30 PM:

Lindsay was on the train from New Brunswick, NJ back to NYC and one of those people talking on the phone. (Not the quiet car this time!) She was chatting with Facebook's Small Business advertising arm delving advice she wanted to share at a user conference that has since past. On this call, she shared all the ways Instagram and Facebook have been crucial to launching her small business, especially having the ability to target her ideal audience, millennials.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4NpiJeA-3q/

For Onward's Instagram, Lindsay said she repurposes content from their blog and member newsletter to feature on social media. The goal is to have the social media accounts work as an awareness tool, being on the pulse of breakup news—not breakup gossip—and incorporating themes of reinvention and self-love. She's found a lot of vendors and members through Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4NpiJeA-3q/

2:30 PM:

Lindsay arrived at The Wing's Flatiron location, which has been her home base for Onward since she started. The Wing offers all-female co-working spaces with locations all across the country and acts the perfect pit-stop for the early-stage entrepreneur on the go, from programming to food to fast internet.

Once upstairs, she pulled up a sofa seat next to her friend Rachel Charlesworth, who is a fellow Wing member and a branding expert also based out of the Wing spaces. She is launching a company and gave Linsday an update on how progress was going.

Lindsay got back to my emails and prepped a piece on divorce transitions. For the blog, what Onward tries to do is, every Tuesday, offer every Tuesday a different lens of breakups. Since Onward isn't presenting themselves as experts in the field, they rely on their vendors and other subject-matter experts to spotlight their expertise that relates to breakups on the Onward blog. Sometimes, Onward team members will share their own breakup experiences.

Lindsay also G-chatted a bit with one of her best friends, Stephanie about weekend plans. Being an entrepreneur can be pretty lonely work at times, and she's grateful to have so many literal co-workers, both at the Wing and remotely through G-chat/text/etc.

5:00 PM:

On this night, she was speaking on a panel with two other early-stage entrepreneurs in the health/wellness space at an OmniWomen event in midtown.

"It's always interesting to meet and hear from other entrepreneurs to learn what problem they are trying to solve."

The two other women on the panel spoke about launching a fitness studio in an underserved community and developing content to teach others to eat and cook better respectively. She talked breakups and how they can be a form of self-care—recognizing that you are in an unhealthy relationship (or one that no longer serves both parties) and choosing to move onward is an incredibly active, positive decision were the themes she hit.

The audience was mostly folks who work in advertising and marketing who were curious to know how the panelists promoted themselves and their companies as they've started out until now. She had a great conversation with the moderator from OmniWomen, an affinity organization to groom and retain female talent. It was neat to hear, Lindsay said, about a large company like OmniGroup with over 74,000 employees globally offering such cool professional development opportunities to their employees.

Lindsay feels these panel appearances are not only great networking opportunities but great ways to practice public speaking and to refine your pitch.

7:30 PM:

As she was exiting the OmniWomen panel, Lindsay discovered she was too late to make it to her rap class downtown. Once a month, she attends Rap Recess which is an extension to the Freestyle Love Supreme Academy, a workshop in freestyle rapping she completed in the summer of 2019. Lindsay loves rap and hip-hop and has been at it for a few years now.

Lindsay's also done the musical theater #Bars workshop in 2016—a workshop taught by folks involved with Broadway's Hamilton—and improv at  Upright Citizens Brigade.

Lindsay said, "it's a lot of fun to practice spitting and creating rhymes. I'm a pretty terrible beatboxer but it delights me to work other parts of my brain."

"I've never wanted to paint myself in one box."

When starting your own company, it's easy for it to encompass every component of you. Lindsay finds inspiration and joy from doing other things outside of Onward. There's something about tapping into a previous version of yourself that revitalizes your spirit and breaks you out of your current perspective.

Her previous work experience in theater and event production makes her miss the creativity of that world, "there is nothing like it." Even though she's not professionally involved in a creative field anymore, attending classes like Rap Recess and others keeps her connected in a way that's inspiring and fulfilling.

Unfortunately, time wasn't on her side so she slunk home on the subway.

12:00 AM:

Lindsay got home between 9:00pm-9:30 pm on this day.

She likes to cook, but this night’s dinner was falafel from Seamless with Ryan. They chilled together and pressed play on the final season of Friday Night Lights (her third watch, by the way). She also tries to read a little to wind down. She’s presently reading the Golden State Killer book, which was too scary for her for pre-bed reading on this night.

8:05 AM:

Ryan meditated for about 5 minutes or so, to just sit and think. Ryan said, "it’s still hard to sit still without doing or creating at first but just as soon as I chill and let my mind roam, ideas and inspiration emerge." He added sipping coffee helps too.

8:30 AM:

Ryan quickly reviewed his daily “blueprint” script for the day, 2019 goals, and money playbook. He likes to look at his daily and yearly goals each day to remind him to work towards staying on track. He told us his 2019 goals were to improve finances, read 120 books and get to a certain body fat percentage. His money playbook is a practice his business coach has him do where he actively updates every account he owns on one spreadsheet, so he knows exactly where his money is going. After quickly reviewing his goals, Ryan dove into my first work time block—8:30 AM-10:00 AM— spent on sourcing candidates. Ryan said, "as a recruiter, sourcing candidates and new clients are tied for the most crucial thing we can do," so he makes sure to start his workday with one of those. On this day, he targeted ‘digital strategists’ for a boutique ad agency in LA. When he's looking for candidates to fit the 'digital strategist' role, Ryan said his clients are looking for digital strategists who have worked on specific accounts close to accounts of his clients or more established than theirs.  Speaking generally about his sourcing strategy, Ryan said, "most of my business lives on LinkedIn," so that's where he starts when he looking for the candidates to fill particular roles. At this point, he's spoken to the client hiring for this role about the skills and qualities needed to fill this role and it's up to Ryan to find the most qualified people. A strategy of his is to look at other companies where he'll find employees/potential candidates who are working the same role he's hiring for and approach them with a new opportunity. Sometimes, Ryan said, sourcing isn't necessarily finding completely new people every single time—he taps into his network.  

"I like to play the long game."

  "My goal to approach anyone that's good is to engage with them in a real, authentic-type way and see if I can just jump on a call with them," Ryan said. The keyword there was "authentic." Ryan said he loves that the industry is moving away from greasy-car-salesman tactics and more towards fostering true, genuine connections. It takes a while to see those efforts come to fruition, but it's worth it, Ryan said, because you learn more about the industry, crowd-source potentials candidates' feedback on the interest behind the role for the clients, all while meeting new people. More on this later on in the day.

10:00 AM:

Ryan took a standing break. He went to the kitchen and made a green smoothie and a salad for later. He started intermittent fasting—only eating in an 8-hour window and fasting for the other 16 hours of the day—about 3 years ago as an experiment and just kept it. "Skipping breakfast has the added benefits of saving time and money on groceries too," Ryan said.

10:30 AM:

This time block, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM, Ryan typically reserves for sourcing new business. For him, this looks more like trying to help people out or engage people with content on LinkedIn. Ryan said that’s because the sales landscape has changed. Since there's so much information out there, Ryan said, "nowadays, companies looking to hire people who are better informed and will let us recruiters know if and when they need us." As a result, companies are doing more homework to determine if services like Ryan's are needed. Ryan told us that means his strategy is more marketing than sales.  

"The customer drives the business."

  "My goal is to stay top of mind to the niche that I can help and forge actual, genuine relationships with people. A lot of times it feels like I’m not accomplishing much but the long play I’m describing creates win-win scenarios for everyone," Ryan said. That's where his LinkedIn activity comes in. This same mindset applies to source and keep tabs with potential candidates on LinkedIn. No one wants to feel like they're being pitched, even if they are.  

"As much as I am a people person, I don't like to sell or persuade. I just like to help people."

When asked how to not *sound* so sales-y when approaching people with opportunities, Ryan said he tries to answer questions and help where he can. "If it makes sense, it's usually pretty obvious that I can help and that's when I ask if I can help them out," Ryan said.  Imagine this process, times the eight to ten roles he's sourcing for. That means there needs to be some organization on his part to keep track of all the people he's contacted. Since he's a one-man team, for now, he uses the Google Chrome extension, Streak, to keep track of his contacts cross-referencing from his LinkedIn conversations as well. Can't let anyone slip through the cracks!

12:00 PM:

Ryan broke his fast and had lunch with a centenarian smoothie, aka a green power smoothie, with a big, protein-rich salad and toast.

12:30 PM:

Another ritual Ryan adopted was taking a power nap in the afternoon. On this day, he did it at 12:30 PM. It may feel like you're losing out on prime productivity time, but Ryan said, the opposite is true. Ryan said after a 20-30 minute snooze, he feels like "a new person," and more "posed and clear."  

"It's really hard to force yourself to get to sleep, until you make it a habit, kind of like getting out of bed."

1:00 PM:

On this day, Ryan conducted phone interviews with candidates. If not that, he'd also make "discovery calls," with prospective clients. If you haven't noticed by now, Ryan reserves his mornings for administrative tasks he needs to get done, but that's when he feels the most productive. That work he does then is what makes his business. The afternoons are for calls. This particular Tuesday, Ryan spoke with a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Specialist that looked great on paper—or LinkedIn we should say for this day-and-age—but ended up not being the perfect fit for his SEM Specialist role.  This conversation Ryan had, he said, reminded him about why he loves his job. They wound up talking about her life goals and what she wanted to accomplish in her career—a genuine conversation. "It's just nice to talk to people," Ryan said, and after speaking, Ryan let her know she wasn't going to be considered for this role. Ryan, in this role, his loyalty at the end of the day is with his clients—he makes money by sending them the best candidates he could find for the roles they're looking to fill. In terms of his business model, one of his payment structures Ryan implements is a retained-search policy, meaning he'll get money upfront for the time he's spending sourcing and sussing candidates plus a percentage of the candidate's annual income if the candidate he provides gets hired. Ryan does offer a money-back guarantee for clients’ peace of mind but he said, "it’s never come close to that." With that said, his reputation is truly on the line, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want the best for potential candidates. Their needs and desires out of a career matter to him as well. It's a collaborative effort. That being said, when asked how he breaks bad news to candidates, Ryan said being "direct and transparent" is the best way to be, but he said he tries to "let the candidate figure that out for themselves as the conversation goes on." Ryan does this by asking the right questions to get them to reflect on what they truly want out of an experience in a low-stakes manner.  

"Turn it into a conversation, not an interrogation."

Aside from technical questions, like salary requirements and skill sets, Ryan likes to get them talking more to feel them out and open up. At this stage in the interview process, Ryan is trying to figure out the candidate, so he or she should be as honest as possible. Ryan's go-to question that he said is the most revealing is, "what is it about your current role that you would like to change moving forward into your next role?" That question sets the stage and gets to the root of the reason for the call in the first place he said. This candidate didn't end up empty-handed though. Ryan connected her with a recruiting friend of his that has roles available that are more in line with her goals. When asked about the degree of collaboration in the recruiting industry, Ryan said, "maybe if you ask other recruiters, this answer would be different, but to me, I like to put my other recruiting friends on." Because he truly wants the best for those candidates, Ryan will refer his candidates to recruiters who have more roles in their Rolodex. That conversation he had with that candidate inspired him so much, he wrote a rough draft that he eventually posted to LinkedIn.

2:30 PM:

Ryan took a half-hour break, grabbed a handful of almonds and hydrated. 3:00PM on this day, Ryan went back to work calling more candidates and sourcing for more candidates for "urgent roles" Ryan has. Ryan juggles filling 8-10 roles on average at a time, and the roles labeled as urgent are the ones where the company paid a retainer. The payment plan when a retainer is established, the percentage of the annual salary he'd get for filling the role will be less than if they didn't pay a retainer. To get even more specific, for the payment structure just described, Ryan said the percentage of the candidate's annual salary will be between 20-25%. Without a retainer, Ryan's price range is between 30-35% of the hired candidate's annual salary. These are all details Ryan hammers out with potential clients on "discovery calls" mentioned at 1:00 PM on this day, which Ryan said normally go a little something like this. Earlier in this article, Ryan referenced the industry landscape shifting from the company acting as the passenger on recruiting strategies to now becoming the driver. So it's very important in these "discovery calls" that Ryan's getting to the root of their needs so he can then offer solutions to give them exactly what they want. That means he's asking specifics about the role, the skillset they desire out of candidates, the company culture and the overall mission of the project or business as a whole. On this day, he spends this hour sourcing, but sometimes these calls take place at this time!

4:30 PM:

Ryan said this is one of the most important things he does with his day—he spends the time to script next-day tasks based on the progress he's made on this day and future deadlines. This practice is another habit his business coach has him do to visualize goals and gain a clear sense of direction. He has a sheet where he captures his wins and losses for the day. The wins from this particular he shared with us were finding five great candidates, and an A+ gym workout. If you've noticed, some of his wins are non-business related, which gives you a glimpse of what his work-life balance is like. More on that later on in the day. He also notated, as he usually does, his accomplishment status of his top three missions for the day, his challenges, his gratitude and the biggest takeaway of the day, which was the fact that he needed "bulletproof substitutes." Ryan said what that means is he needs to find substitutes for desirable, but unrealistic things. The example he used was having a piece of cake. He wanted a piece of cake, but given the fitness goals he has for himself, he can't. So instead of salivating over the piece of cake, he could bake his own healthier version of that cake. Feel free to think of your own "cake" in your life, professionally or personally, and think of what your bulletproof substitute would be! Ryan also scores himself in certain areas like "emotional agility, healthy eating,  exercise, avoiding vices, made it look easy, aggressive learning and breathing management." He also spent this time tying up administrative loose ends like emails and such. On this day, he booked a flight to France and Spain for next year, which is another big reason why he wanted to work for himself. When he worked for another company, he was allotted PTO days, but the nature of the job and the culture of the firm hindered opportunities to travel and heightened his anxiety whenever he did. Ryan needed his set-up to do his job properly and without that, he couldn't for the most part. Hence the constant, unsettling feeling of professional FOMO he got. Now, with his own set-up, he can virtually work wherever he wants, giving him the freedom to go wherever, whenever. However, we all know the Spider-Man phrase, "with great power comes great responsibility," and that responsibility Ryan bears working for himself he said is to hold himself accountable to be productive.

5:00 PM:

On this day, Ryan had a meeting with his business coach, Niyi. Ryan said his program and consultation has helped him "innumerably both in work and in life."

6:45 PM:

Ryan ate dinner, salmon to be specific, caught up with friends over text and scrolled through memes on Instagram. After dinner, he took a quick walk on the beach. Ryan described his work-life balance as "through the roof." Ryan recognizes he has a life outside of his work, but he said the fact that he's his own boss has proven to be a challenge to make sure the "work" part of his work-life balance is just as fruitful as the "life" part. The reason being is he's never worked for himself before, so while he's doing what he needs to do for his business to thrive, he's also learning how to be the best leader and businessman he can be. That way Ryan and "Ryan Recruits" can grow. With so much to accomplish and learn, Ryan admitted that at the end of any day, when he's wrapping up and reflecting on the progress of the day, he always asks himself, was that enough? "The answer to that question is always going to be 'no' because you can always do more," Ryan said, but it's not productive to dwell on that fact.

7:45 PM:

Ryan watched an episode of “Succession”on HBO.

9:00 PM:

Ryan started his nighttime routine, which started with laying his gym clothes out for the morning. He gulped down a magnesium supplement mixed with water, flossed and brushed his teeth, and started to read. This night, he was reading "Money is My Friend," and fell asleep a half-hour later.

9:30 PM:

8:45 AM:

Jamy usually has a staff meeting on Wednesdays for the entire Personal Lines Insurance division, but this week, it was canceled. Normally, this would be a time for Jamy to absorb information and understand the team dynamics, but today, he had a little extra time to catch up on emails and voicemails.

Generally, these messages are just employee questions about PTO, benefits, or general performance-related information from managers. Jamy also spent some time congratulating and thanking a few employees on celebrating their DSI work anniversaries. On this specific day, 2 employees were celebrating DSI anniversaries!

Finally, Jamy spent some time prepping for his meetings later in the day. Usually, these meetings are just touch-base and employee performance reviews, so, to prep, he would check out any performance reviews and anonymous peer feedback for those employees. 

10:00 AM:

This is when Jamy sits in on any new employee 90-day touch-base meetings. Jamy always tries to sit in on as many of these performance review meetings as possible. At DSI, they do 30/60/90 day self-assessment and touch base meetings with all of the new employees. Jamy started this program to ensure that there was a formalized process to have these conversations, aiding in the transition of new employees to the company. Jamy said, "this gives us a great chance to talk with employees about the good, the bad and the ugly during their first 30/60/90 days with us."

Today, Jamy sat in on an employee's 90-day touch-base meeting with her and her manager. He loves these meetings because he gets the chance to hear first-hand how everything is going. These conversations are two-way, and when he sits in on them, he spends the most time asking for feedback from the new employee on their overall experience with DSI, and ways that the company can improve to ensure that they are being fully set-up for success. These conversations are exploratory and individual specific. They generally focus on what DSI can do to ensure that the employee's experience is both positive and beneficial. 

Today's meeting was very positive, fun and motivating—a great way for Jamy to continue his morning!

11:00 AM:

Then it was time for Coffee & Culture Videos—Jamy's own video series creation that he started at DSI about 2 years ago. In each video, Jamy sits down with an employee for about 10 minutes, where he spends time learning about them personally and professionally, along with their thoughts on what it's like to work at DSI. He created this video series to help their current employees get to know each other better since they have a dispersed workforce, and for candidates that are interested in working at DSI to learn about the company directly from their employees. These videos are sent out internally and are uploaded to DSI's YouTube, Facebook and Linkedin pages. On this day, he did a video with Ashley who has been with them for almost a year, and recently received her first promotion!

Here is a link to the entire video series playlist on Darr Schackow Insurance's YouTube page.

12:15 PM:

It was time for lunch! Jamy pushes DSI's employees to make sure that they take a lunch each and every day. He wants them to get out of the office and shut work off for an hour, promoting a healthy work-life balance. Jamy believes that we ALL need that time during the day to take a step away from work (and especially today, since he didn't eat any breakfast)! On this day, Chipotle sounded great, so that's where he went. 

"One constant in life is that work is never going to go away." 

1:15 PM:

Normally, Jamy would have an early afternoon meeting scheduled, but today Jamy had a free hour and 45 minutes to work on the upcoming company Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. Jamy also had to work on the internal implications affecting compensation structures from the upcoming Department of Labor Overtime ruling.

Then, Jamy spent some time reviewing online applications for a few internal roles that they were hiring for. While Jamy looks at every single application that comes through, what makes an application stand out to him is the candidate's answer to the question: "What makes you unique?". He thinks that however an individual chooses to answer these questions gives him a bit of insight into who they are as a person. Similarly, when it comes to the interview stage, his go-to question is always: "What are you passionate about?"

Finally, Jamy spent some time meeting with their CFO on miscellaneous employee paperwork, internal employee and company-wide topics. While Jamy's role puts him at the head of people operations, he technically works under his other C-suite coworkers. 

3:00 PM:

Then it was time for some conference calls. Jamy and his team were experiencing lots of change and some challenges within their Trucking Insurance division, so they brought all of these employees together on a conference call this afternoon. This was a chance to discuss the current and upcoming changes and challenges, along with their plan of action. They also wanted to give everyone the opportunity to voice concerns, recommend ideas, and ask questions.

"Complete transparency and over-communication is always the right decision!"

4:00 PM:

Every week Jamy has meetings with DSI's Director of Training and Operations—another member of his HR team. This is when they would discuss various topics around employee training, development updates, and other HR and Talent management topics across the organization. This gave them time to connect and brainstorm ideas that help to better our organization from an HR, Training and Company Culture perspective.

One hot topic that keeps popping up in HR and Talent Management has to do with the types of individuals interested in a career in this industry. Individuals either get into HR because they are really good at detail, want to run reports, and do the back end administrative processing of HR or because they like the softer side of HR, where they get to create employee events and make everyone happy.  However, Jamy thinks that it's important to note how successful employees in this industry are a balance of both. 

4:45 PM:

This is when Jamy touched base with their COO. He spent the majority of this meeting discussing different things going on within the organization and catching up on some miscellaneous topics.

5:30 PM:

This is when Jamy spent some time responding to more emails and prepping for tomorrow. Today, he also needed to book his hotel for a work trip to visit a few more offices later in the week. 

5:50 PM:

Time to head home! The drive home for Jamy was quick, which is good because he had 5 fur babies anxiously awaiting his arrival!

6:10 PM:

It was dinner time for the fur babies and Jamy! Tonight was leftover homemade chili that he had made earlier in the week.

8:00 PM:

Now it was time for Jamy to pull out his laptop to do some more work! This night, he responded to more emails, updated items in the HR system, approved PTO requests from employees, reviewed some online applications, sent out assessment links to interviewing candidates, and organized some electronic files.  Despite the fact that Jamy was working well into his evening, his passion for his job makes it enjoyable. 

"If you enjoy what you're doing, it could be 11:00 at night and you're content."

9:15 PM:

It was finally time to turn it off for the day and have some time just for himself. Since he loves college volleyball, Jamy settled in on the couch with his dogs and watched some volleyball on the SEC Network. 

11:00 PM:

Before he goes to bed, Jamy made sure he walked his dogs before doing a little more work on his laptop and catching up with friends over group texts.

8:10 AM:

The first order of business for Lily was to hop on a 30-minute call with her new virtual assistant, Imani.

Imani isn't a full-time assistant. Instead, Lily and Imani work together on a project or case-by-case basis. The reason Lily hired Imani is that she needed assistance with a lot of organizational and admin tasks. She needed someone to take feedback from clients and help synthesize it for her so she can improve Brazen, faster.

On the call, they talked through this week of tasks and Thursday’s upcoming online masterclass.

The master class was a part of a larger "Create Your Best Dating Profile" challenge, that she was running at the time. It was an online, hour-long, webinar where she shares a 3-step framework that she developed to create a better dating mindset.

Imani helped Lily with the behind the scenes work that comes with the promotion of this Masterclass.

9:30 AM:

Lily's next call was with her coach, Susan Blackwell. Susan had been helping Lily put together a book and a Ted Talk. 

11:00 AM:

Lily had her first client call of the day for Brazen. This call was a "Dating Profile Lab", where Lily and her client talked through some of the challenges with dating apps and strategized how to change her mindset around her dating life. She also does one-on-one coaching!

One of the main challenges with dating apps that Lily sees across the board is that these apps are being relied on really heavily for finding dates and this creates problems for boundary setting. Because of this, Lily and her clients focus a lot on setting boundaries and changing their swipe habits. Lily wants her clients to flip the numbers game on its head, have more control over the dating process and adopt the mindset: "What is meant for me, won't pass me by."

11:45 AM:

Lily had a check-in call with Lindsay Meck, her partner in crime. That is, her accountability partner in crime! 

Lindsay is the founder of a company called Onward which is a post-break-up concierge service in NYC. Since Lily is in the dating space, and Lindsay is in the break-up space, it's the perfect professional and personal match!

As for what the term, "accountability partners" means, the pair support each other personally and professionally. Lily made it very clear to us that anyone whose starting and operating a business of their own, it's extremely important to surround themselves with people who support you.

12:00 PM:

Continuing with the check-in calls, Lily then connected with her partner, Chris. Another example of how important it is to surround yourself with people who support you, but on the personal and business side!

1:00 PM:

After the call with Chris, Lily found herself updating the website. She needed to prepare the sales page for opening enrollment for her signature program, The Brazen Breakthrough.

The Brazen Breakthrough is a 3-month experience to kick start your dating life. So whether you are burnt out of the dating scene, just broke up, or ended a marriage and don't really know about too much about online dating, the program will give you all the tools you need transform your experience and put yourself in the driver's seat of your dating life.

The program begins with "taking inventory" of your entire dating history and past relationships. Lily works with her clients to understand the story that they believe is holding them back from having a successful dating life.

She and her clients then use that reflective information to build a concrete strategy and plan of action so that they can know when, where and how to swipe and search online and offline to find the best results. She wants her clients to use their time in the most effective way and understand how to set boundaries.

3:00 PM:

A late lunch for Lily. She made a guacamole-and-turkey wrap.

4:00 PM:

After lunch, Lily took some time to answer emails. In particular, she sent follow up notes to her clients in regards to their sessions. She told us it's very important to follow up with clients in this business, especially after sessions that tug on the heartstrings, to reassure her clients she's:

1. Listened to their fears and needs
2. Here for them
3. Strategizing a plan to move forward in the process

5:00 PM:

She then had a client call. Sorry, this is confidential!

5:30 PM:

While others were finishing the workday, Lily took a shower and began preparing for her live stream class on Instagram tonight for a 5-Day Challenge. Follow her on Instagram for more dating tips & content!

6:00 PM:

Sometimes you just have to start something and come back later to finish it. Lily spent this time finishing The Brazen Breakthrough update she started making to the sales page of her website. It goes to show how much patience you need to have—not everything is going to be done in one day. Also, how much creativity it takes to create a cohesive, clear process for potential clients to sign up. It takes time to get this right, so spend it!

7:00 PM:

Lily hosted a live stream for the Create Your Best Dating Profile Challenge.

One of the best parts of Lily's job is getting to teach her dating framework to new faces! She loves answering all of their questions.

BTW, her group sessions always include a dance party and confetti, so it's definitely a good time!

7:30 PM:

After live streaming, Lily needed to set up emails that will be sent out next week in accordance with her program launch strategy.

She also took this evening to outline a new blog post.

8:00 PM:

Lastly on the agenda for the day, Lily updated her website for challenge participants.

She told us it was a full and very exciting day to watch her email list grow and gain new challenge participants who are eager to learn her intentional dating framework!

12:00 AM:

7:30 AM:

Once he got to the office, Inesio checked and responded to any emails that required immediate attention in addition to catching up on his voicemails. Once that was out of the way, he read through some newsletters and any relevant articles on LinkedIn. The newsletters Inesio chooses to subscribe to are not necessarily recruiting specific. Some of his favorite newsletters are from CNN and The Hustle—anything that will help get his brain started in the morning. 

On LinkedIn, Inesio begins to delve into more recruitment-relevant materials. Specifically, he follows many “Recruiter Influencers,” who regularly post industry-specific articles, and articles that keep him up to date on the latest technologies. 

For Inesio, utilizing technology for recruitment is an amazing way for him to create opportunities to talk to individuals. However, at the end of the day, he just wants to “have the opportunity to start a conversation, whether that’s through technology or just picking up the phone and going old school.” 

“I don’t want to blame technology for not filling a position when I have a phone sitting right next to me.” 

He believes that while times have changed, and the internet can expand a recruiter’s network, there’s a great deal of substance lacking from a candidate’s online persona. Therefore, he believes that talking on the phone is the best way to get a sense of what someone is looking for.  

“You’re not hiring their resume, you’re hiring the person behind it.”

8:00 AM:

At this time, Inesio was on the phone returning voicemail calls from internal managers as well as candidates. For the majority of the time, this leads to additional voicemails.

When this is the case, he will provide a specific time when he is available for a return call or asks them to provide a specific time to return their call if he is unavailable. Unfortunately, phone tag is a game he plays daily, so he will also email the individual he’s reaching out to if he is unable to coordinate a time to speak over the phone.

8:30 AM:

Inesio met with the recruiting team—a Recruiting Coordinator and another Recruiter that he supervises—to go over current needs, status updates on any open positions, and to see if or where he needs to step in to assist filling any positions. 

 “A good recruiter,” however, “is not always a good supervisor,” Inesio noted. He believes that some individuals lack the desire to be a manager, wanting to focus on their own work. However, for him, Inesio’s role is more so helping other recruiters strategize than focusing on their numbers. 

“It’s easy to get caught in a rabbit hole with recruiting,” so Inesio will “help them mix up and expand their search to see new candidates.” Whether this is by suggesting a different title to search or speaking to someone more experienced in the field and asking them for a referral. “I want to be able to help in regards to getting out of the rat-race,” he said. 

9:00 AM:

For the next half hour, Inesio called managers and candidates to obtain feedback on interviews that were conducted either earlier in the day or the day before. For calls like these, Inesio will reach out to the candidate to discuss their perspective on the interview and any feedback or concerns they may have had. He then will take this information with him into the conversation with the manager, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. If feedback is all-around positive, he will then coordinate the next steps in the interview process. 

A lot of the times, constructive feedback that Inesio offers in this process deal with having the candidate better prepare for subsequent interviews. He believes that it’s important that candidates know who they’re interviewing with, and he recommends looking them up ahead of time to find a commonality. Another common piece of feedback that Inesio provides is ensuring that the candidate knows what they want at the end of the day. 

“If you take this position today, where can it take you in your career? Have a plan. Have an idea of how this organization and position can help you achieve that.”

9:30 AM:

At this time, Inesio was reaching out to potential candidates. This entailed calling applicants, who already applied to a role, as well as passive candidates. During applicant phone calls, Inesio will go over the specifics of the role as well as an overview of his company and their culture. He uses this time to help him determine whether or not their previous experience and future career interests align with the needs of the role. 

If Inesio is contacting a passive candidate, these calls are more so an exploratory conversation to help him understand what they may be looking for to consider a new role. At the end of the day, if he can provide a higher salary, better title, or shorter commute, he can turn someone who was not actively looking for a new role into someone who didn’t know that they were. This is also a great way for him to network with professionals that may lead him to someone for a role that he has available. 

A large portion of Inesio’s phone calls—around 80%—are speaking with people that he has never spoken to or interacted with. Inesio appreciates this “opportunity to talk to someone who doesn’t know they’re looking for a job.” He enjoys enticing them as to why they should be looking and why that job should be with his organization. Inesio believes that many successful people in sales enjoy telling people about their triumphs. “If you can get a salesperson to talk about themselves, they’re more willing to have that conversation,” Inesio stated. 

But while Inesio enjoys the interaction, cold-calling is inevitably difficult to navigate at times. Since Inesio doesn’t know where a person is when they take his call, he emphasized the importance of reading tone and playing the crowd. To differentiate between a “now is not a good time” response when a candidate is with their boss, or “never call me again” tone takes practice. “You have to make those phone calls to learn those skills.” But, the way he looks at it is, if he does call, at least he has a chance.

11:30 AM:

At this point, Inesio met with the Executive team to provide them with an update on current openings from immediate needs to passive recruits. This meeting includes a summary of interview activities, candidates in the pipeline, as well as status on offers and background checks. This meeting also allows him to learn of new potential openings that he should be expecting as well as keeping up on the inner workings of the organization. 

The internal process at Inesio’s company for hiring a new employee generally lasts around two weeks. The multi-step interview process requires candidates to meet with various levels of professionals—ideally all on the same day. After the interviews, Inesio always tries to reiterate to the hiring managers that “[the company] is not the only show in town,” emphasizing the importance of acting quickly or risk losing a candidate.

12:00 PM:

Inesio usually leaves this hour slot open for any follow up calls with currently employed candidates, who can only speak during their lunch break. On this day, he was able to speak to one sales candidate in the Bay Area and discuss a few openings. From their conversation, he was able to align him with a role that met his needs and preferences. The same candidate would be coming in to interview the following week.

1:00 PM:

Inesio spent the next couple of hours sourcing LinkedIn, Indeed, and other outlets. He utilizes this time to search for additional candidates based on position titles, keywords, skills, previous experience, as well as competitive or similar companies. This is the time he spends being proactive in searching for candidates that may not be actively looking or may be unaware of their current openings. 

For Inesio, LinkedIn is a great way for him to expand his network, whether it’s with sales professionals, recruiters or simply people who have connections that he may want. Sometimes his connections are strategic, but the rest of the time, he’s just clicking that connect button. On any given week, Inesio aspires to attain 100 new connections. While LinkedIn is an important part of his job, the profile is his own. Therefore, he enjoys being himself on the platform, whether that’s posting business articles or memes to brighten someone’s day. 

3:00 PM:

At this time, Inesio went through their internal database to review candidates from positions that were closed earlier in the year to see if any would be a good fit for their current openings. Some of the candidates may not have had enough experience in early 2019, but have now had nearly a year to gain experience. His hope is that they are still interested in their company and may be open to exploring a new role. He sent out emails reintroducing himself and his company and requested a time for them to speak the following week.

4:00 PM:

Inesio spent the last hour of his day preparing for the next week—he wanted to ensure that he has a game plan set up for Monday. He analyzed which positions needed candidates versus which ones he had in a good place. This was also his chance to review responses from messages that he sent out earlier in the day to see if he can get a passive candidate on the phone before the day ends, or at least early on Monday morning.

5:00 PM:

Finally, it was time for Inesio to head home. 

While on this particular day, Inesio didn’t send out an offer. However, when he does, Inesio helps organize a compensation plan and salary before composing and forwarding an offer letter to the candidate. If necessary, he will forward and specific questions to the manager, and once signed, he begins a standard background check. 

11:00 PM:

While Inesio rarely follows a specific evening routine, he likes to utilize this time to try to detach from work. While sometimes this entails playing catch with his two kids or participating in various sports, Inesio is also a passionate screenwriter. 

While this hobby originally started as simply helping a friend with his script, his passion grew and Inesio dove deep into the process behind screenwriting. To learn, Inesio consumed books on writing screenplays and purchased movie scripts which he would alternate between reading and watching the movie. Together with his friend, Inesio even came in second out of over 700 scripts submitted to the LA Independent Film Festival.

8:30 AM:

Lou spent time checking messages from candidates and clients, scheduled calls for the day and accepted various calendar invites from his team. Organizing his agenda each morning allows for a smooth overview of his schedule to prioritize and work efficiently. 

9:30 AM:

Lou sourced and searched for new candidates for the current open roles of his clients. This includes reviewing resume databases for leads and crafted initial messages to potential candidates. 

Lou routinely handles between five and eight clients during one period of time, with each client seeking to fill about three roles on average. Lou utilizes various platforms such as LinkedIn Recruiter and job boards to source talent. Boards like Indeed, Monster and Glassdoor often store candidate resumes and sell their access to recruiters. 

If Lou finds candidates that appear to fit the expectation of the role, he will reach out with initial messages. 

On a typical day, Lou sends between 35-100 messages to potential candidates for the relevant and current roles. During these initial messages, Lou represents his brand values of honesty and transparency with clear inquiries. His approach with candidates is genuine. Without being pushy or selling the role, Lou will illustrate details of the company and job expectations to the candidate to receive a straight-forward confirmation of interest, in return. 

In recruitment processes, nothing should be taken personally; a mutual interest is crucial to ensure time is protected and not wasted.

11:00 AM:

Lou took time for a snack break; a bowl of veggies with fruit on the bottom—the reward for eating the veggies, obviously! 😉 During his snack, he checked the news. 

Lou maintains knowledge of relevant industry information. He often browses news about tech., startups, layoffs and largely impactful companies like Google and Amazon. Understanding his and other respective fields allows Lou to make informed business decisions with his ear to the street.

11:15 AM:

Lou spent the next few hours of the day taking candidate calls. He took a break for lunch and then returned back to the phone. 

His sister is a full-time employee of Basima Tony and is responsible for scheduling candidate calls. Lou can have between five to ten each day, lasting from 15 to 30 minutes in duration. Lou spends anywhere from 30%-80% of his day on the phone, however, seldom feels tired from the interactions. 

Before the calls, Lou browses the candidates resume and looks for an organized flow to the content. Education, job history, dates of employment and clearly defined responsibilities are necessary to stand out for a strong portfolio of work. During the calls, Lou breaks the ice with the candidate with information about his firm’s culture followed by details of the client’s role. 

He remains consistent with his straight-forward approach to discussing the role and probes into the candidates experience background while assessing skill set. Lou looks for a proven history of meeting sales quotes, driving revenue and propelling relevant metrics while speaking with a candidate.

2:00 PM:

Lou spent an hour and a half cold calling clients and looking for new business. 

While scouting for clients, Lou focuses on series A-C technology companies that are on a growth trajectory. He targets businesses that are actively seeking candidates to propel their success and increase company headcount. He sets a goal for himself to make between 25-40 calls on a particular day. 

Before the calls, Lou prepares by researching the company and employees. He will review LinkedIn, company articles and browse their website to gain pre-established insight into the brand's goals, values and mission. He believes in Basima Tony and selling himself to clients comes from the heart with a genuine passion for his work! Speaking with these clients is something Lou thoroughly enjoys, but that it took a while for him to feel this way. 

Looking back at the beginning of Basima Tony, the power of time and experience played a favor in his company’s growth. The more you do something, the better you get at it, right? When he first started approaching companies to partner with, Lou was a pile of nerves feeling insecure and unsure of how to best portray himself and his services with no track record to prove his success. 

But, he never let go of his motivation to succeed—he didn’t give in to the imposter syndrome he was feeling. Lou leaned on his sales experience he gained at his previous job and was laser-focused on how he could solve the problems his potential clients faced to gain their business, and most importantly, their trust.

It paid off—as time progressed, he became more comfortable with putting himself out there and pitching his services. He approaches new business with much more confidence and advises others in recruiting to forget the fluff in your pitch and get straight to the point, the who, what, where, when, why and how. Lou is concise, clear and stable in the foundation he has built for himself with plans of growth in the future.

3:30 PM:

Lou had a client call with a company he landed the week prior. 

During client calls, Lou chats with sales managers, hiring managers or CEOs to discover the company’s particular hiring needs and overall tasks at hand. As mentioned, his approach is natural, inquisitive and to the point as he avoids sugar-coating or using buzz-words to dilute his motive. He is respectful of time taken and prefers to let his work do the talking.

4:00 PM:

After his client call, Lou spent the remainder of the day cold calling prospective clients, responding to candidates and scheduling interviews. 

Lou recognizes the numbers game involved with recruiting. There will be numerous clients declining services and only a few who accept… and this comes with the territory! Lou is balanced and focused during his processes. He keeps his eyes on the clients that he connects with and always moves forward.

6:00 PM:

Lou hit the road for home on his bike; another five and a half miles to end the day. 

To remain productive and efficient, Lou stays intentional with his time. He balances his agenda by stepping back to relax and turn off, but recognizes that he feels the best while on the go. He is in a time of prime motivation, with a hunger to grow his firm and a genuine fulfillment from helping his clients and candidates. He works well with structure and staying busy.

11:30 PM:

Lou put his child to sleep and finished up responding to evening emails that were lingering from earlier in the day. 

To wind down at night, he settles in with a book. His reading varies from autobiographies and biographies such as Phil Knight’s, Shoe Dog or content of Silicon Valley. 

To take a break from the professional world, Lou enjoys Fiction works such as his current read of John Steinbeck’s, East of Eden. After reading, Lou falls asleep to begin again the following day.

9:15 AM:

Anne followed up with attendees from a September event they sponsored in Dallas where Business Development was the key focus. 

Events like these are inundated with client leads in roles of both Chief Human Resource Officers and Vice President of Human Resources. Anne crafted personal messages to various attendees of the events, where she introduces or reintroduces R3 Strategic Search and how the company could help these roles in any possible hiring challenges or succession planning obstacles they face. Anne is the connecting factor between these individuals and her firm, providing a clear and concise message of why R3 Strategic Search is a necessary component for growth. 

11:00 AM:

Anne joined Eric and took a call with a close client of theirs to button up the remaining details involved in extending an offer for the role of Director of Talent Acquisitions. During this conversation, the timing and salary details of the offer were locked in.

R3 Strategic Search is unique in their involvement in the recruiting process, as they are present until the start date of the offered candidate. This allows for Anne and Eric to foster rich relationships with clients and understand individual pain points and expectations for each search. A majority of firms are removed from the final periods during a hiring process, but Anne and Eric remain an integral component from start to finish.

For this particular role, Director of Talent Acquisitions, the client and the firm were looking for a candidate with outstanding leadership experience. Other qualities include at least 10 years of experience in the Talent Acquisition space and a track record of leading and developing other recruiters while overseeing all pillars from the executive level down to administrative roles. This individual needed to have a history of hands-on experience, not only leading the recruitment processes but moving through each facet successfully, as well. 

11:45 AM:

Anne's former Nanny had a baby, Brooklyn and Anne left for the hospital to visit with her. 

Owning a business is no easy feat, however, it allows Anne to craft her schedule and maintain closeness with her family and friends. She can design her days and take time away from work for moments like these! Perks of owning a small business 🙂

1:15 PM:

Back home from the hospital, Anne spent time sourcing candidates on LinkedIn. 

In the saturated world of recruiting, Anne implements a quality, client-focused mentality in her search strategy to stand out from other firms. She utilizes client referrals and shared connections to follow the talent chain all while keeping the specifics top of mind. Finding candidates for niche markets is easier, Anne believes, as the pool of talent becomes smaller and direct.

She also sources candidates by leveraging knowledge of outside industries that may have individuals seeking alternate work. She strives to attract candidates that will be advancing, straying away from lateral moves and focusing on growth. In a time-frame of three hours, Anne can reach out to upwards of 30 candidates, which then is filtered down to about five conversations and ending with one individual that will be pitched to a client.

3:35 PM:

Anne picked up her youngest son from school and spent time with all three kids. They conversed about their days, homework for the night and other evening activities that needed to be prioritized.

When Anne left the startup company she began her career with, her move to Milwaukee included plans of starting a family with her husband. Switching from development to the recruiting side of things enabled Anne more flexibility and control of her schedule. Anne values the time she spends with her family and sees her ability to do so as a huge motivating factor in continuing to drive her business.

4:00 PM:

Anne conducted a phone interview with a candidate for the role, Director of IT, for a client. 

During interviews, Anne hones in on the experience and skill set of candidates. She frequently asks questions like:

• What are you proud of? 
• Tell me about your experience leading others? 
• How do the people who report to you, describe your leadership style? 

The two main objectives during Anne's interviews are to evaluate the candidate and sell them on the opportunity. Anne believes in finding a genuine fit for both the candidate and the client, building trust through a genuine interest in establishing a cohesive partnership. Not only does the candidate's experience have to match the role expectations, but alignment with company culture plays a factor as well. If this candidate passes the interview, Anne then creates a summary of relevant information to present to the client for review. 

Unfortunately, the interview conducted by Anne this day did not pan out and an offer was presented to another candidate. The honest approach is the best approach! 

5:00 PM:

Anne drove her son to hockey, ran a few errands and made dinner for her family. There is not much downtime in the length of her day! 

10:00 PM:

Anne explained there to be no set time to “close the laptop.” She does the work until the work is done. From a client-driven perspective, her schedule often operates around the lives of others. She needs to be available during times when candidates might be getting off of work, or have made it home at the end of their day. This comes with the territory of being a business owner, as you have to be ready to seize an opportunity at any given moment. Anne embraces it!

In Anne’s household, no two days are the same and she stays busy. Once the kids are settled down and the dog is quiet, she turns in for the night.

9:00 AM:

The beginning of her working day started with some admin work. When running your own business, the scheduling, the follow ups, the organizational work is all up to you.

Perhaps these types of tasks can be outsourced eventually, however, at the early stages of the business, don't underestimate the time you may need to budget for this type of work.

11:00 AM:

Now it was time for the fun stuff. Neela needed to begin working on a custom wedding invitation for one of her clients.

She has a process for wedding invitations where she being with the initial custom illustration. This is simple a black and white, hand-drawn sketch. Next she'll work with the client to decide on a color palette and bring the illustration to life with custom water colors. In this case, her clients opted for a neutral palette and floral illustration. In the "Final Design" phase, she adds the typography and the details of the wedding.

She likes to flex her creativity, however, she understands that in the wedding business, it is all about what the client wants. It's their day. Because of that she makes wedding branding an extremely collaborative process.

12:30 PM:

Remember that lunch she packed? Well it was time to cash in on that. Neela always makes it a point to log off of everything and take at least a half hour to truly enjoy her meal. On this day, she enjoyed her lunch in the park.

1:30 PM:

She had a client call scheduled that stemmed from a business inquiry. This was an email inquiry, but sometimes these come from channels like Yelp or Google Business.

A lot of times, potential clients will ask for a price, and Neela finds herself needing to educate them and explain that she really needs to dive into specifics to really understand the full scope of work. Only then can she propose a price for her service. Because of this Neela takes these inquires, and schedules calls so she can learn about the clients' needs and get the details she needs to draft a proposal.

In this case, it the inquiry was about a new web design and site build out project. Using all the details she got from the call, she was able to then draft a proposal and send that along to officially kick off this new business project.

3:00 PM:

Another part of Neela's business that she's trying to nourish and grow is services around Bachelorette weekends. During this time, she focused on work for a Maid of Honor who reached out and asked if Neela could help with branding for their weekend in Nashville. It started off with designing the itinerary, but quickly evolved a logo and swag design that really gave the weekend a unique and personalized experience for the bride and her bachelorette party.

As with her other services, she makes it a collaborative process with her clients. So on this day she revised a draft of the itinerary and sent it back to the client for comments.

For design work, she uses various apps included in the Adobe Creative Suite.

4:00 PM:

In a career where Neela is constantly working on other people's brands, she can't forget about her own brand.

She posts biweekly articles to her blog about business and wedding branding.

Check some of her posts out:

What Kind of Bride are you?

Creating a One-of-a-Kind Save the Date

Your Business Brand Guidelines

5:00 PM:

Another part of working on her own brand is to build a community and get conversations going about topics where she has expertise and can add value to people's life. She does this through her Facebook Group: Wedding Tips for Bride & Tribe.

6:00 PM:

After she concluded her work day, Neela headed to the gym for 45 minutes of weights, 15 minutes of cardio and a 10 minute stretch.

7:00 PM:

After the gym she headed to the grocery store to stock up for the week.

8:30 PM:

She ate dinner and caught up with her roommate.

After dinner, Neela made it a point to relax WITHOUT her cell phone.

10:00 PM:

To cap off a her productive day, Neela laid in bed and re watched Grey's Anatomy until she fell asleep.

11:00 PM:

8:30 AM:

Greg always starts his day reviewing the to-do list he made the night before and making any necessary changes. If, for example, a candidate needed to reschedule an interview, or a member of his team needed a bit of coaching, Greg would adjust his schedule accordingly. Afterward, Greg checked in with the other senior recruiters to see how his team could support them. Greg is the "middle-man" for the company's entry and executive recruiters, and he always tries to be well-informed on the company's initiatives so that he can delegate and coach as needed.

Finally, Greg spent a few minutes with each member of his team to catch up on their lives and ensure that they were set up for the day. For Greg, team rapport is everything. "From a recruiting standpoint, communication is the basis of what we do," he said. This attitude reflects Greg's management style—he believes that teamwork is the key to success.

9:00 AM:

Greg's morning consists of four calls spaced out on the half-hour. He tries to schedule calls as often as possible to ensure that he doesn't waste time with voicemails or playing phone tag with candidates and managers.

Up first was an interview prep call with a candidate. This prep call was for a second-round interview and the first face-to-face interview. In preparation, his candidate prepared information on the main product she would be selling and assembled a "brag book" of her accomplishments. He answered a few questions the candidate had about the company's culture and reinforced some of the traits the hiring manager wanted for his team. This hiring manager was looking for someone with a "hunter's mentality," or someone who was willing to make cold calls, and he valued creativity and problem-solving skills.

Therefore, Greg advised that the candidate spend some time thinking about how she could separate herself from any other candidates. He encouraged her to pull from her background and have a variety of success stories in mind. Finally, Greg wrapped up the call by reminding her to close for next steps and wished her good luck!

Greg's second call was a pitch call to a candidate that he was speaking to for the very first time. Based on this candidate's Linkedin profile, his background and experience seemed to be a great fit for the opportunity. This particular role was a sales position selling a product in the neurotrauma and rehabilitation space. Greg's third and fourth calls were for the same position, and each person was interested in interviewing for the role.

For pitch calls like these, Greg always likes to start broad—is the person actively looking for a new role? Or are they just curious about what opportunities are out there? Depending on the candidate's response, Greg will adjust his conversation strategy to match the candidate's situation. 

11:00 AM:

After Greg finished all of his scheduled calls for the morning, he took a quick moment to check in with his team and answer any questions that may have arisen.

Then, he caught up on some emails, updated the company candidate database, and proceeded to source additional candidates. LinkedIn is Greg's primary tool for connecting with candidates. When sourcing for a role, Greg will send out about 30 personalized messages those of which he generally expects around ten responses. Greg believes that candidates in medical sales are more receptive to speaking to recruiters about new opportunities because their career requires them to stay up to date with an evolving industry. 

12:15 PM:

Finally, it was time for lunch! Greg always tries to shut everything down for a couple of minutes, but depending on the day, he doesn't always get to take a full lunch break. Due to the nature of his job, there are many days when he has to work through his lunch hour. During this time, Greg took a quick trip to the store before he called to check in on his girlfriend and the plans they made for the evening.

1:00 PM:

At this time, Greg called one of his recruiters into his office to talk about her workload and offer some advice. For Greg, coaching and mentoring are some of the most rewarding parts of his job—he loves seeing recruiters succeed and grow both personally and professionally. During this conversation, Greg talked about adjusting certain aspects of her process to become more efficient. He believes that he is lucky to have worked with some immensely talented individuals, this woman included.  He ended the conversation with a few quick words of encouragement before she went back to making calls to candidates.

Greg has always had a passion for leadership—he loves to see people succeed. His leadership role within the company is one that he asked for and was subsequently created for him. He believes in a hands-on leadership style and ultimately he wants to help his mentees limit their distractions.

For example, if he can take a problem off their plate so they can focus on other time-consuming things, he's happy to help out.  However, Greg encourages the associate recruiters at his firm to develop their own style rather than simply telling them what to do. When dividing work amongst his team, he always tries to split up the work as best he can while ensuring a good balance across the various healthcare industries to optimize their experience. 

1:30 PM:

Greg's firm was currently working on two large sales force expansions and this was when they had their weekly conference call with one of their clients. BEC is well known for handling these types of expansions and placing a large number of candidates in a short period of time. They covered a variety of topics during the call and received updates on territories that remained open.

To avoid making any assumptions, Greg always likes to have the hiring manager lay out their expectations and ideal candidates ahead of time. One of his go-to questions for the hiring manager is, "if I have a candidate on the fence, what can I give them? What's the one line that can put them over the edge?" Following the conversation, Greg condensed the information down and informed his recruiters where to focus moving forward.

2:30 PM:

The remainder of Greg's afternoon was filled with more phone calls. He started by checking in with his hiring managers and getting feedback on his candidates that have interviewed over the past few days. The good news was that he had some candidates moving forward to the next round, but the bad news was that he also had to inform others that they wouldn't be advancing. These conversations are never easy, but delivering feedback from interviews is a critical part of his job.

It helps the candidate learn about possible mistakes they made and become better during any future interviews. Greg also wants to ensure that he maintains a positive relationship with the candidate so that he can try to work with them in the future. After delivering interview feedback, Greg had two more interview prep calls and another pitch call to make before the day ended. Despite the fact that Greg is making these calls throughout the day, for him, these conversations are the fun part of his job.

"The willingness to talk on the phone and interact with people is a lost art."

5:00 PM:

Greg ended his workday by beginning his to-do list for the following day and doing one final check-in with his team. He always does his best to make sure that he has a clear plan for the day ahead so that he can maximize his time in the office. The majority of Greg's work is during normal business hours, however, depending on the season, he may have to extend his hours beyond the normal 9-5. Once everything was all set for tomorrow, Greg was ready to head home.

11:45 AM:

After Greg gets home, he always tries to get in a workout to release some stress. Running is also a great way for him to reflect back on his day and brainstorm ideas for some of his more difficult searches. After a shower, dinner, and catching up on some TV with his girlfriend, Greg checks his emails one more time. While the majority of his work is done during normal business hours, he always tries to remain available for managers and candidates. Greg then makes any final changes to his schedule for the following day before calling it a night.

10:00 AM:

Shiloh began his workday at a Training Steering Committee meeting. This committee is composed of senior representatives from every department in the company, including Shiloh, and their primary responsibility is overseeing the company's training initiatives. These training initiatives are vital to new employees and span from traditional onboarding courses to the core curriculum for every technical discipline.

At this particular meeting, they spent an hour and a half reviewing the accomplishments of 2019, refining the goals for 2020, and finalizing the job description for a Director of Training position that will be hired in the first quarter of 2020. 

11:30 AM:

At this point, Shiloh completed and emailed out the agenda for the upcoming 401k Committee meeting. In their 401k program, Shiloh works with a team of 2-3 consultants, who make important investment decisions for their company. At the upcoming 401k meeting, part of the agenda involves reviewing the performance of these advisors and of the individual mutual funds. 

12:00 PM:

It's rare for Shiloh to get a whole hour to unwind for lunch, so on this day, Shiloh only took 30 minutes to walk to his favorite lunch spot: The Veggie Grill. During this time, Shiloh likes to take advantage of the break to get outside and check his social media and personal messages. 

12:30 PM:

After lunch, Shiloh finished up his notes for his annual formal review and emailed it to the President of the company. Every employee at PAE gets a performance review, and Shiloh is no exception.

1:00 PM:

Then, it was time for Shiloh's weekly one-on-one meeting with the President of the company. They always begin these meetings with the most important subject on the agenda, followed by a conversation on the company's performance in the areas: people, profit, and the planet. Then, they discuss PAE's performance concerning the company's projects and initiatives for the year, ensuring that they are both on the same page for all important matters. 

2:30 PM:

Shiloh took this 30 minutes to respond to some emails.

3:00 PM:

Then, Shiloh reviewed the draft for their new organizational charts for the upcoming year. These charts are updated annually and focus on the management of the company. PAE is privately owned—this means that employees both work for and own the firm. In turn, these individuals are placed into management positions throughout the firm so that they can effectively lead the company. In addition to ensuring that managers are effectively placed, Shiloh works with these members to make sure that they get a say in what their management responsibilities are internally.

4:00 PM:

Then, it was time for Shiloh to complete his annual healthcare open enrollment meeting.

4:30 PM:

At this time in the day, Shiloh met with his team to assign a few "triage" tasks. In his position, Shiloh spends a lot of time dealing with various issues that bubble up, sometimes unplanned issues, and he triages these issues as they arise. Depending on the immediacy and gravity of a problem, Shiloh would either delegate the action to his team or take action himself. 

On this day, these tasks were related to his morning phone calls to assist the Region Leader in California and the President. While Shiloh works most closely with his HR Manager, Jessica, his team also includes a Talent Acquisition Manager, a Training Coordinator, a Culture Specialist and a couple entry-to-mid level HR employees. 

5:30 PM:

At this point, Shiloh reviewed the draft for their 2020 budgets for Training, Human Resources, Benefits, and all of their Committees. When he was reviewing these budgets, Shiloh was looking at historical spending data for a particular department. Generally, he was taking a macro-level approach to determine if there was enough money allocated to each department to operate properly. 

6:30 PM:

Finally, Shiloh wrapped up his work day with one last email check. 

9:30 PM:

When Shiloh doesn’t have a scheduled evening phone call, he listens to music on his way home to help decompress. When he gets home, he typically grabs his personal laptop and reads sports and news updates for the day before sitting down for dinner with his wife.