I had a client once say, “I need more hand holding. You guys have done this a thousand times, but I have never done it.” Then what she said next, turned on a lightbulb: “Think of yourself like the surgeon and I’m the patient. Please tell me what’s going to happen and help me relax over it.”
Wow. Ok, so I’m not saving lives directly – but I believe I am still enabling lifesaving connections somewhere along the line. I build teams that hire the next innovators, next product launchers, next hospital doctors and nurses, next pharma developers. Maybe, just maybe, I enabled the team that hires the team that cures cancer!
Now I’ve clearly never been a surgeon, but I imagine they go through lots and lots of training, and then they do some sort of rotational residency before they can practice.
I’ve been in RPO for nearly 20 years – we didn’t call it RPO back then, but we still managed the entire recruitment functions of other corporations to make direct placements within those corporations. I’ve been training for a long time.
And I’ve done my rotational. I’ve been an admin, a coordinator, a searcher or sourcer, a business analyst, a recruiter, a consultant, and a manager of ALL those teams. I’ve even been the technology SME and administrator and product developer. I’ve owned client P&Ls and County P&Ls. And if needed, I put on my janitor gloves and clean up. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients.
I’m not entirely unique. The most successful people in implementation have experience in multiple facets of RPO because we must know a little bit about all of it. But we don’t have to be an expert in everything. Just as the surgeon is expected to confer with other specialists, we do too.
I imagine every surgery has some similarities and differences. Building an RPO does too. No two RPOs should be exactly alike. If they are, we’re not serving our clients unique needs.
We have to understand our patient’s history, know what their desired outcomes are, and sometimes prescribe some pre-surgery medication that the patient isn’t excited to take.
When a new implementations person comes to me, they want to be trained. I tell them, “Great! Give it time and you’ll learn everything you need, but first, you need to be the understudy”. We work in gray and there is NEVER a client that went exactly as planned. I imagine surgeries are are more routine than building RPOs, but every now and again, I suspect something unexpected happens. How does the surgeon address it? It’s via years of training in other areas so that when the unexpected happens, the surgeon’s instincts kick in and they stop the bleed and move on.
MintROI 