Leading Edge Executive Talent Search

Embracing old and new recruitment processes to provide only top-quality services that harbor long term partnerships.

Today, we’re speaking with Roger Hernandez, Vice President of Leading Edge Executive Talent Search. Having held executive positions for Recruitment Agencies and Headhunting Firms in the Philippines and Vietnam, he has a strong demonstrated history of building and empowering companies to grow their business. Experiencing various CRMs in the past, Roger has led his team at Leading Edge Executive Talent Search to use Recruitment Boost for its intuitive nature, high validity in parsing, and overall helps consolidate their tasks into one software.

Leading Edge is a boutique headhunter firm in the Philippines serving start-up and established local and multinational organisations across industries

ABOUT LEADING EDGE EXECUTIVE TALENT SEARCH

Leading Edge Executive Talent Search started operations in 2016, catering to many of the Philippines’ biggest conglomerates across the automotive manufacturing, fast moving consumer goods, food consumer, and advertising industries. The company is focused on providing Executive Search, Professional Staffing, Volume Hiring and end-to-end Recruitment Process Outsourcing.

At Leading Edge, Roger Hernandez fosters a collaborative environment and they embrace the traditional recruitment of thoroughly researching and building relationships with both client and candidate and complimenting this with today’s best technologies to make processes faster that boost the clients’ and their business’ growth.

HOW IS LEADING EDGE DIFFERENT?

Two things. One, our search methodology is traditional in a sense that we talk to the candidates. –We assess their profile, get their motivators, and not just what’s on paper. It’s our job to dig deeper into exactly what makes ‘this person’ move, what becomes interesting for them to consider the opportunity. We do our due diligence and we don’t do short-cuts. Next to that, which is of the same importance, is that we do research on our clients and their industry. –We sit down with our clients, understand their requirements. We don’t just post requirements online. Those are the two things that make us different from how the usual search firms operate. If you look at it, it’s like old school executive search when everyone else is already leveraging on technology, we still incorporate research skills because if everybody else can just get their candidates via LinkedIn, what’s the need for them to work with a headhunting firm? Also, you’d be surprised at how many exceptional candidates are not active on LinkedIn. –They don’t open their accounts for they are very happy where they are and thus not exploring. It’s those types of profiles that we hunt for. It’s that thorough research that helps us map out the industry for our clients. –That establishes our subject matter expertise per industry.

HAVE YOU ALWAYS USED A CRM/ATS?

No. We never used any CRM at Leading Edge Executive Talent Search, so everything was manual. We use Google Drive, MS Word, Excel for our database. I used to work for other recruitment firms, so I’m very familiar with ATS/CRM. I’ve used other softwares such as Taleo, so to me, when Recruitment Boost (then Octus) was presented and I saw the features and benefits of the tool, it just makes things easier for everyone when you can automate certain processes and serve as a repository for all of the database of profiles.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FEATURE?

For starters, the system is really very good. It’s able to house the CVs. I think one of the main advantages of the software, which I really love, is the parsing. It’s one of the major features because of its very high validity in terms of parsing the needed information and putting them in the specific fields. –Say the name, numbers, etc. Also, it integrates well with our email, so if we send emails via Octus (Recruitment Boost), it automatically syncs with Outlook, while it houses the profiles within the system. So, we don’t have to keep switching programs… and I think the repository of all the database that we have, because it’s cloud-based, the memory, in terms of the volume of profiles that you can house is way bigger compared to shared folders in our internal network.

HOW HAS RECRUITMENT BOOST HELPED YOUR BUSINESS?

More than savings (time, money, effort), it became the sole tool that consolidated all our processes and source files. Instead of having another separate folder for a client that we’re supposed to call, it’s the system that houses all information. Whether it’s client information or candidate information, instead of having a separate folder in Excel or on MS Word, or even MS Access, it’s all within the system. So, it consolidated everything which were pockets of processes that we’re doing on the BD, on the candidate, or on the client management side. It’s really just one tool that we go to if we would like to update information on a prospect, update information on a client, send candidate profiles to a client, etc. –It consolidated all our individual processes, which to me is a huge savings of time and effort, and eventually money, because we’re able to speed things up and get everything from one system.

Another big advantage is that it made our life easier because if a person leaves the team, and there’s a replacement, when we orient the new hire, in terms of client, background or history of the account, we just have to go to Octus (Recruitment Boost) and tell them that “these are the positions that we worked on for [Client Name]. and as you can see here, we’ve placed this and endorsed these profiles” so if that person goes to the system, he can just study it for an hour and then be able to capture the information rather than us asking the person to do it manually. – “Here are the hard copies of the CVs” or “You go to this network folder, and this one, and this one”. All is in the system.

WAS IT DIFFICULT TO GET

YOUR TEAM TO USE

RECRUITMENT BOOST?

No. That’s also one thing I’m very happy about Octus (Recruitment Boost). It’s easy. You know, a millennial can just sit down, take a look at the system for an hour, tinker with it, and then have an idea of how to use the tool. Even the way we do our orientation on how to use the tool is very easy because it’s easy to navigate… and the dashboard itself is easy to understand. For every action needed, like let’s say adding a candidate, you have many options to do this task. Other ATS, they are too boxed. Meaning, you can only do an action at a certain page, a certain button. The system is easy to understand. Any millennial, even at my case, is easy to look at the tool and understand it with very minimal walkthrough of how to use the features.

ANYTHING ELSE TO ADD?

It’s not just a tool. A tool becomes an investment to any organization when it enables the business to perform more efficiently. At the end of the day, it’s really a CAPEX to invest in Octus’ (Recruitment Boost) tool.