Small World Recruiting

Small World Recruiting provides the expertise to match companies with the best logistics and supply chain employees. By Russ Gager

Most companies’ human resource departments are charged with finding candidates for a wide variety of jobs. More often than not, that department’s personnel and even those at many general recruiting firms are not as familiar with the transportation, logistics and supply chain functions of companies as a specialist such as Small World Recruiting will be.

“The human resource departments or general recruiting personnel fill tons of different positions – they attempt to do logistics and supply chain, but they don’t do it very well because they don’t understand the industry,” Managing Director and owner Denise Montrose asserts. “I spent 10-plus years in logistics and supply chain before I started Small World Recruiting, I understand the business. I can have a shorthand conversation with a client who’s interested in partnering with us because I understand the industry and the positions they’re trying to fill.”

    Instead of a client spending a lot of time explaining to an HR person or a general recruiter what a U.S. Customs Import Broker does, Montrose knows, so she can go straight to questions about the company culture and benefits. “It’s a very complicated industry and the talent shortage is real because we can’t necessarily reach over and find somebody in another industry,” Montrose declares. “And even if those skills are transferable, the people are lacking the independent knowledge of logistics and supply chain laws, regulations, procedures and technology. It’s not something that is easy to get somebody up to speed on.”
When Montrose founded Small World Recruiting in 2014 – so named because the logistics and supply chain industries are a small world – she resolved to do better than other recruiting firms. “A lot of recruiters, if they don’t have a fit right at that moment for a client, they basically won’t even return a candidate’s call or emails,” Montrose declares. “We take our time to get to know our candidates. We try to understand what their career goals are. If I can’t place somebody right now – if they’re a good candidate – we’ll place them down the road, or they will get a job someplace and they might be a hiring manager. They will remember that we were the recruiter that treated them well, and we’ve had that happen, where candidates became hiring managers, and we helped the candidate get a new job, and now they want to use us as their recruiter full-time.”
Montrose and her daughter, Abby, keep in touch with the company’s candidates through a newsletter featuring job search tips and industry news as well as a hot jobs list.    Having a person on staff from a different generation helps maintain the company’s rapport with younger job candidates.
“Abby works much more with the candidates,” Montrose says. “She does a lot of the candidate interviews, sets up the video interviews and skill-based reference assessments and gets that all packaged and ready to present to the client.” Small World Recruiting also employs a third person whose main focus is sourcing the talent and bringing people to the recruiter’s attention.
Small World Recruiting uses a number of innovative methods to match companies with the right candidates. One is Spark Hire video software, with which candidates make videos to present themselves while answering a company’s questions on video. This enables companies to see the candidate in action and get a more accurate feel for how that person would fit into their organization. Sometimes, several candidates will answer the same question by video so accurate comparisons can be made among them.
The company also uses Pre-Hire 360®, a program that automates feedback from a candidate’s references by having them fill out job-specific surveys that cover at least 20 critical behaviors and skills that are said to correlate with success in a given job.
Montrose is the only recruiter she has been able to find who is Lean Six Sigma-certified, which helps streamline Small World Recruiting’s processes. Montrose attributes her company’s success to being flexible and adaptable to a client’s needs. For the future, Montrose plans to keep refining her woman- and family owned business’s relationships with companies and candidates. “We know we can only get so big,” she says. “We’re focusing more than we have in the past on marketing and on growing the business.”