Congratulations to Lora Lea Mock of Professional Recruiters (#6656) in Utah (USA) on attaining the Double Platinum level of our Recruiter Achievement Status program. Lora Lea has officially entered the NPAworldwide Hall of Fame with this achievement, which recognizes cumulative salary totals of at least US $10 million. She joined NPAworldwide in 1986. Professional Recruiters is a generalist firm that captures a client and offers soup-to-nuts recruitment from software and tech to hr, accounting, marketing and more.
I joined NPA in 1986. So, this award has taken a whopping 38 years to achieve. Guess that proves the old saying: slow and steady wins the race... or at least, takes the scenic route.
I stumbled into recruiting in 1978 purely by accident. I mean, does anyone really grow up saying they want to be a recruiter? I took a summer job with a recruiting firm just to pay next year’s tuition at the University of Utah. Back then, I had dreams of becoming an attorney. Thank goodness that dream didn’t come true. I would have made a terrible attorney. I placed Corporate Counsel at the local power company that summer. He was going to earn about the same amount of money working for a year as I made that summer. I thought, "Hmm, maybe I should consider this as a career." A year later, the company I worked for closed down. I figured out how to get a small business loan and took over their assets. I never looked back, but I did honor the promise I made to my Dad to finish my degree. When we started, the tech industry was so small that Steve Jobs was the guy I called for reference checks on three different candidates.
My favorite NPAworldwide meeting was my very first one in Las Vegas. I’m pretty sure Veronica did not do the site visit for this event. Heck, I don’t think Veronica was even with NPA back then. The casino we stayed at was under renovation. My five-year-old daughter asked, “Mom, why are there garbage bags all over the walls?” The place was taped down with plastic everywhere. We had to interrupt the meeting more than once because the hammering and sawing were just too noisy.
Walking into the room, I saw very few women. My first thought was, “This is just an Old Boys Club.” My second thought was, “How do I become one of the Old Boys?” I met NPA greats at that meeting like Dave Small, Ronnie Boyd, Jim Gifford, Chuck Marks, Paul Martin, and Gary Patton. This was the first time I fully understood the value of coopetition. I started my business at 20 years old in Salt Lake City. There was no one in Utah I could go to for business advice. They all considered me competition. Here at NPA, I made friends who would take my call almost any time and help me figure out a problem, whether it had to do with an NPA split or not. What I learned from those Good Ole Boys is probably the reason I’m still in business. Luckily, these days there are a lot more women at the table in NPA, and I found the Good Ole Boys club to be very welcoming.
If I could give new members any advice about doing NPA splits, it would be to treat your NPA partner exactly like you treat the person working in the office next to you. BCC them on every communication you have with or about their candidate. Be fully transparent every step of the way. Things don’t always go the way we want them to in this business, but I believe that our partners understand that once we have one of their candidates in process, we are a team until the check is cashed and the guarantee is satisfied.
Veronica asked if I had a superpower what would I want it to be. I would want to never age and go back and do it all over again. There is still a 27-year-old trapped in this 67-year-old body and she wants to come out to play more often.