Building a Successful IT Staffing Company: Ivy Podcast with Resource 1’s Anastasia Valentine

Our very own Anastasia Valentine, President and Managing Partner at Resource 1, was featured on the Ivy Podcast in 2021 with host John Carsey, where she discussed what it takes to build a successful IT staffing company as well as her perspective on the value of mentorship. The conversation is still highly relevant today –

You can listen to the podcast here, or read the transcript below.

John Carsey: Before we dive in and talk a little bit more about your current company and everything you’re building, give us a thumbnail version of your career prior to that.

Anastasia Valentine: Well, believe it or not, I graduated from Northern Illinois University with a biology degree and a minor in Chemistry.

My very first job was an invitation to be a technical recruiter. I had decided to stay at school one extra semester, not because I wanted that minor in chemistry, but because my parents thought I wasn’t quite ready yet to graduate. So I had a nine month lapse before I was planning on starting medical school. I joined a company called Advanced Resources at the time, under the helm of Leo Sheridan, who’s been one of my mentors throughout my career, and helped him open up the information technology consulting side of his personnel business. Then I moved into another company as a branch manager, opened up their national IT group here in Chicago, which was their pilot entity, and then moved over to Resource 1, where I have been here for 24 years.

John: Well, that’s exciting, and a very diverse background. Congrats on all the success. So, tell us a little bit more about what your company is all about. What are some of the competitive advantages that you have in your market?

Anastasia: Well, I was very fortunate when I started in this industry. The first company that I joined really had an interest in working with Motorola, which at that point in time was focused on telephony and cellular engineering. I was given access to a student at Northwestern who was obtaining his master’s degree in Information Technology. I used to meet with this tutor three times a week, tearing apart motherboards, understanding semiconductors, really received a solid education in that. And so, engineering became primarily my background.

As I’ve moved through my career at Resource 1 currently, that’s probably where we differentiated ourselves. We’re very much involved in the software development lifecycle, systems integration, administration, engineering, we do a lot of cloud work, Internet of Things, and quite a bit of work in database; everything from warehousing to administration to Business Intelligence reporting. That’s where we play. That’s where we do our best business—we really don’t do too much in networking or low-level operations. Most of the people who work with our firm are the primary breadwinners of their family.

John: Well, that’s very exciting. And with their current market conditions in talent acquisition, with the war for talent, especially in technology sector, what are some of the strategies or practical recommendations that you implement as you work with your client companies to really succeed in this space to be able to find very niche technology talent? What are some of the recommendations that really helped you succeed in that space?

Anastasia: Well, I truly believe to find technical talent, you have to have technology yourself. Nine years ago, I think Resource 1 really took the stance that we were going to start building an aggressive technology stack. I’ve been fortunate enough to speak around the country at several conferences as a leader in this initiative. Many of our colleagues are starting to adopt technology in its inception today, whereas we’re about nine years into the stack and gracefully moving through digital transformation. And the question is, how graceful can digital transformation be with the learning process and digital migration. That’s a whole separate issue.

But with that said, to find the best talent, I think you need to have the best technology. In our organization, we’re very lucky that we’ve invested a considerable amount of money in building a technical understanding with our employees. So they’re able to understand the requisitions, they’re able to communicate them appropriately to the talent, it just seems like it’s a natural, flowing process.

We really are mid-market. We stay away from any type of vendor management type of scenarios, and I think that helps attract better talent, because they don’t want to get involved in that hole. Who am I talking to? What am I talking to? Why didn’t someone call me back? type of scenario.

So we primarily specialize in direct. And the best piece of advice that I would ever give anybody is if you want to operate at a high level of technology, you have to invest in your infrastructure.

John: Right. Absolutely. And with the shifts in how the workforce collaborates and communicates, and just the overall future of work, we’ve seen extensive leverage of contingent workers, contractors, and consultants and overall freelance environments. What have you seen in that in that particular space in terms of trends and overall adoption of more agile, leaner ways to be able to scale up or down for organizations?

Anastasia: I think a lot of people think you have to hire more people to scale up, or, you know, lean your staff out to scale down. We have kind of a unique methodology in the way that we look at our business. Our goal is to have as many producers as we can at about a $7M clip per seat. So in our case, we have two directors of recruiting, one at $7M, one at $8M; we have sales people, one at $8M, one at $3M, one at $4M. Our goal is not to hire people, but it’s to bring in technology to make the producers we’ve invested in more efficient within their job utilizing technology.

So people always ask, Anastasia, how do you really understand what your ROI is in technology? And I can tell you, if you look at an average user seat on a Bullhorn or Avionte, maybe in our industry, it’s a half million to $1.5M. It’s very unusual to even have someone over the $3M mark. So our goal is to get our whole base up into that $7M mark. And then right around $3M mark, we start bringing in the next succession to follow in their path. It’s kind of how we do it here. That’s how we scale. It’s about getting our current team to what we would consider close to capacity and at 80% before we bring the next succession layer on. Right?

John: Absolutely. When it comes to talent retention, there’s another layer of complexity, especially in the current, highly competitive environment. In terms of the organizations that do succeed in this space, that are able to retain the top talent, what are the differences that you observe? What are some of the strategies that you deploy as you help your companies have that competitive advantage in terms of being able to retain the top talent?

Anastasia: Well, it’s kind of like we’re talking about the great resignation, right? It’s interesting, I just did a podcast regarding the great resignation a couple of weeks ago, so it’s fresh in my mind. And every day, I’m thinking about how I change this organization to not focus necessarily on our attrition but focus on how we can keep people interested in staying here and employed.

The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how good any leader is—we’re all going to get hit with the great resignation. And the question is, how fast can you restructure your organization to continue to attract millennials and z’s?

So in our case, I think we’ve changed our hiring process right out of the gate. We used to have the philosophy that we have time to spend with somebody so they don’t come to the table with maybe five out of five skills. See, if they got four out of five, well, they’re going to be here with us for a while, and we have time to train. Now I think what we’ve come back to is, I’d rather pay $5-10,000 more for the best talent, and I expect they’re probably going to stick around here for about one and a half years, if I truly give them a good career path. I can’t change the fact that these millennials will have 10 jobs in 16 years—I don’t know whether or not any organization is going to be able to break that trend. But we’re bringing in more resources, outsourcing, training, certifications, opportunities, and learning methodologies for these individuals to stay engaged with their organization. And my hope is, is that maybe we get three years out of those 10 job changes, and that’s yet to be seen. Flex work schedules. I mean, it is what it is.

That was never part of the culture of our industry. It’s really hard for legacies like myself to break a team and an energy of a team because we realize how dynamic it is when we work together. But it is what it is. And so we’ve done a better job at figuring out as a management team how we’re going to adjust our management style. Adopting a hybrid environment has been very popular. We have to manage more proactively. And so I guess you put in all of these factors, and you hope when the next year and a half comes by right that some of this new talent you’re bringing on is going to feel that you’re a worthy place to stay.

John: Right, absolutely. So you’ve been in this industry for quite some time, and you’ve seen it go through different iterations and cycles. Where do you foresee the market going next, as far as the trends that you’re researching and observing? What are the things that you are keeping a closer hand on the pulse in terms of where the market has a tendency to shift towards to?

Anastasia: Well, I think just starting with technology, it’s almost impossible today for any company to exist without technology. So I’m lucky that I’m sitting right in what I would consider a natural progression of business today.

I think that a lot of companies are going to have a really hard time shifting some of these methodologies and adopting technology to support a lot of these changes that are being mandated. You know, with little time, we’re very fortunate because we’re small enough that we’re mobile. So we can shift, we can change, we have a good technology backbone, we can retrain ourselves, how we look at the definition of success, through a different lens, and through adoptions of new ways of doing business, is where that’s really hard for some companies to shift.

I think that the industry is really going to have a great shift. I think that companies that are adopting and have technology are really going to take the lead in some of this. Naturally I worry about small businesses having the ability to afford training, having the ability to have technology implemented rapidly. We really may start seeing a big, big divide here and how small businesses emerge in the medium businesses and into large businesses—are they going to have access to everything that the new generation of worker really is going to be demanding?

John: Right, that’s very interesting observation. The other area that’s fascinating to me, and it’s very complex, when I’m talking about interviewing, that a lot of hiring managers and myself included for a very long time, I found interviews to be flawed, in a sense, because a lot of that is based on your past personal experience. And instead of focusing on what’s the strength that’s missing on my team, there’s a lot of a lot more attention or focus on what is the weakness that I can tolerate in that particular candidate when the interview happens. So what are some of the strategies and recommendations that you deploy when you help your client companies when it comes to prepping for the interviews, setting the right expectations? And candidates as well, in terms of being able to facilitate that two way street conversation and improve your batting average when it comes to interviewing.

Anastasia: It’s interesting. You know, we would think with the level of engineering that we’re in that everybody would have command of Zoom or command of Microsoft. Just because someone’s an architect or proficient in programming or a project manager, a lot of these people are just as new to these various technologies as we are. So we see fundamental mistakes happen in interviews, like all of a sudden someone’s internet isn’t working or they can’t get into Office 365 or there’s something wrong with the link. So on the on the candidate side, we really have to educate our candidates how to properly interview with Zoom, and how to check their technology prior.

We had an individual interview with a client who was doing fabulously, but she was having a problem with her connectivity. She thought it would be in her best interest to turn off her camera to help free up some bandwidth. The client called us back and said, “she turned off her camera, we don’t know, was she reading something? Was she unable to answer these questions, and then looking at a cheat sheet?” The candidate’s thinking to herself, I just thought I was being courteous, that maybe this would improve our connectivity, right? You know, what if your kid comes in the room, do you turn off your camera? And how does the client perceive that? Does that make sense? We’ve had to educate our consultants, and it’s better just to say, “I have bad connectivity, how would you like me to handle it?” or “I have a child that standing next to me, can you give me one moment?” I think people react to the truth better than shutting off cameras.

On the client side, it’s speed to market. I think our most successful clients are proficient in getting the meeting setup, the interview setup, the purchase orders are already approved, they’re ready to go.

But onboarding today, is a good three to four week process. And that includes computers getting shipped or background checks being delayed. We’re dealing with marijuana, right? Just because it’s legal in states doesn’t necessarily mean a company has to accept it. But we’re starting to see a trend. We had our first company take marijuana off the drug panel. I thought that was very interesting. Companies are starting to adjust. And those are the clients that I think will get the best human capital.

John: Absolutely, yeah, those are definitely very interesting observations. And we could probably spend the rest of the podcast talking about this because it’s so interesting. In terms of your content, the resources that you consume on a daily basis to keep yourself informed on the state of your industry and the different trends and insights, share with us those.

Anastasia: So I’m an avid conference individual. I read my information from SIA (Staffing Industry Analysts), because I really believe the analytical portion of our industry is critical. I attend conferences because I believe that working with your peer network group, understanding what’s available, understanding problems people are having, it’s sometimes much better discussed over a glass of wine. Let’s not kid ourselves. You sit down with someone, you start talking about issues, you hear what they’re doing, you share what you’re doing, and then somewhere in there everybody comes out with a little bit more of information. I go to probably five to six conferences a year, and I most likely will speak at four.

My goal is that a every conference that I go to, I bring back a new business partner. At this point in time, we have 24 business partners in our technical stack, and I came back from ASA, and I have another one, a company that will help build API’s for the bullhorn marketplace.

John: That’s exciting. Yeah, I can definitely relate on the conference aspect of that. You’ve been in industry for quite some time, you’ve had a share of mentors and coaches and career advisors. Talk to us a little bit from that perspective. And more importantly, what is one piece of career advice, or maybe series of recommendations and advice, that you continuously share with others.

Anastasia: So I would say through my career, I’ve had four individuals, and each one has served their purpose in my journey. I’ll start with my largest mentor, or really, my most influential mentor, who I met coming into this company at the age of 27 as a director of recruiting and then becoming the president. The mentor that I worked for owns about 30 companies, his father was the LBO king of Beatrice foods, a very well-known family and strong credentials. When I first started here, he used to come into my office, and he’d sit down and he’d say, “what’s going on?” So naturally, I would just word-vomit, saying whatever it was, however it was. And then in the middle of a conversation, I noticed, at about three minutes, he’d get up and he’d walk out. And I’d be like, what the heck, I wasn’t done. For three years, he did this to me, and he’d get up and he’d walk out, get up, and he walked out. And then I finally realized, am I really telling him what he wants to know?

So during this time, I had this fabulous executive coach for about 15 years. And I learned very quickly, when someone asked me an open-ended question like that, “what’s going on?” they already know what’s going on. So my question to back to him became, “what is it that you want to know?”

So you start changing the dynamics of how you communicate to people who are really established? These aren’t long conversations. So what is it you need for me, let me tell you what you want to know. And then everybody goes on their way. So I’ve learned to be better at not getting sucked down that rabbit hole.

Also, having four major male mentors, I also learned very quickly, that, as a woman, being busy and doing everything for everybody isn’t necessarily the definition of a leader. I’m the type of person who everybody will come to—I could solve a problem; I can close any piece of business. I’m like the cleaner, right? A problem happens, you go to the cleaner, cleaner comes in and cleans it up, buries it, everybody moves on. But what I realized through my career is that I was great as a cleaner. But was I really a leader? Was I capable of really coming up with a creative concept, being a visionary for an organization, bringing in resources and talent to really shift what it was that we were trying to accomplish and build? And that was a humbling journey for me. Throughout my career, I almost had to start over and start rethinking how I valued what my contributions were to a team. It was a great learning journey.

My executive coach John Cundiff probably was one of the most sobering people I had ever worked with in my life. And I encourage it, because it’s really hard when you get to a very successful level to take a step back and realize, you might not be what you really think you are or want to be.

I had another manager who was a great mentor. When I started I had to learn how to make decisions. I’d call and call and call my manager to help with a decision and then I’d get offended when he didn’t answer. So a day or two goes by, and I had to start making these decisions myself. Finally, after a few months, another one of my mentors comes to me and I said, “Steve, why aren’t you taking my calls?” He said, “Because if I take your calls, you’re not going to make the decision.” So, that’s how I learned to make decisions, by somebody forcing me into that uncomfortable feeling of making decisions. That was a huge one.

Another one of my mentors Leo Sheridan, who I still get mentored by today, worked with me at my very first job. I learned that if I worked hard, I could wheel and deal for anything that I wanted. It wasn’t uncommon when we were building Motorola, that I’d go over to him, and he say, “Come on, Anastasia, you can do this. Get five this month. What do you want?” And I’d say, “All right, if I get five this month, will you get me rollerblades?” Absolutely. So I’d hustle and hustle and hustle. And I remember back at that time, we had rolling paper fax machines, you had to get your ad in the newspaper by Friday by five like, the internet was non-existent, you know? It was a 70-hour work week, but I got those rollerblades! I found that if you work hard, and you wheel and deal, you can move, you can move your trajectory in business. And so it was a lot of fun to be able to apply the training that I was provided through him and work my way through becoming a president and a business partner and owner 20 something years later.

John: I appreciate you sharing all these very deep and thought provoking recommendations, it definitely resonates on so many levels. Thank you for your time today. It was a very insightful conversation. What I love doing with a lot of guests on the podcast is do a follow up recording in about a year where we revisit the conversation from a year ago and see if everything we’ve discussed still applies, still make sense. So I definitely looking forward to doing that with you as well.

Anastasia: Well, I hope that I’ll be able to keep some millennials and Gen Z’s here for that time period. So now we’ll have a good measurement period of all these changes. We’ll see if they actually work. That sounds like a plan. Definitely. Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you so much, John.