Welcome all NPA Members! I am pleased to have been asked to write this Chairman’s Corner for this week’s Vignette. As many of you know, I am the EMEA Director for NPA, a role I have held for a couple of years now, following on from being the UK & Ireland Area Leader previously. Being based in the UK as I am, the topic I wanted to cover with you all is “Internationalism”. This, according to the dictionary, means a cluster of ideas derived from the belief that international progress is possible, where progress is defined as movement toward increasing levels of harmonious cooperation between communities.
NPAworldwide is absolutely based on this tenet. We are surely one of the strongest communities generating activity, peer benefits, and of course splits, via harmonious cooperation.
Who would have thought that I, from my little office near Manchester in the UK, would be successfully placing IT sales and tech candidates into roles with recruitment partners based not only in the UK, but in New York, and Pittsburgh, and Salt Lake City!
And these roles have often been with US companies that either already have an office in the UK or are looking to establish one. So, not only am I working internationally with partners, and sometimes finding candidates locally to them from over here; but other times finding their clients candidates local to me in the UK. And so on. Many other combinations exist.
We have members both in the UK (myself, David Kelham, Sidney Masters, etc.) and Tinashe Hove (my joint-chair of the monthly NPA EMEA Zoom call), based in Johannesburg who are doing a lot of their work in the USA. In addition, people like Melanie Johnson (my Area Leader for UK & Ireland) and Sarah Perrott, both UK-based, are often working on roles in Africa. This is before we mention our fantastic members in Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America etc.
A fantastic recent example is my Area Leader for Eastern Europe, Julia Tupchiy who runs Skillers based in Ukraine. Despite the horrific war going on there, she and her team are still working and recently filled a role for Laura Labine – and I have a couple of their candidates on interview this week for one of my UK clients.
As someone with 35+ years of experience in recruitment, I have seen many things – good and bad in recruitment. Since 2009 within NPA (as both job and candidate recruiter), NPA members that I have worked with have been consistently fantastic and I am proud to belong and to serve on the Board.
If you are not yet speaking to your existing (or new) clients about their hiring activities internationally, you should be! There is a whole world of expert recruiters out there within NPA waiting to help you help your clients. As a member of the global network of NPAworldwide, you are better placed to find them the key staff they need, anywhere in the world, than any other recruiter.
Do your clients know this?
The more roles (or candidates) you bring into the network, the stronger your NPA bond with your trading partners becomes. This will ultimately lead to more split placements.
Happy Hunting!
P.S. I would like to share a special shout-out this week to Steve Silvi with Datapath Search Corporation. Steve just recently earned his Platinum award from NPAworldwide - for placing candidates with cumulative salaries in excess of US $5 million. That's a rare feat in and of itself, but Steve has only been a member of NPAworldwide since 2018. That's one of the fastest leaps to Platinum in network history! It typically takes at least 10 years of steady production to reach Platinum. Well done, Steve!!