The IQTalent Partners Story: Our Top 3 Lessons Learned Over 9 Years

9 years ago, IQTalent Partners was born from the belief that outsourced recruiting didn’t have to be complicated. The founders, Chris Murdock and Tom Milic, formed IQTalent Partners because they saw how talent acquisition could be simplified by creating augmented recruiting teams that integrate with a firm’s existing capabilities. They started with a simple idea. Issues like speed to hire, reporting on recruitment activities and true research have real, tangible solutions. The trick was creating a new model to solve them, and, over the past 9 years, that’s exactly what IQTalent Partners did.

Starting a business from scratch is an uphill battle no matter the industry, genre or concept. It’s like playing the classic arcade version of Pacman. But, you’re stuck in slow motion while all the ghosts are set to normal speed. The real kicker is that there are no resets or extra lives because the success of the venture rests solely on your shoulders. With all those challenges, you’re probably thinking to yourself “how can you win?” Here’s how IQTalent Partners did it:

1. Do What Most People Don’t

In order to be truly successful at what you do, you have to do more than just think outside the box. Dive deep. Pull inspiration from experiences, role models, idols and maybe even some competitors. Use everything at your disposal to spark that brain into generating every possible creative thought. Achieving success you’ve never had requires thinking and acting in ways you haven’t tried.

For IQTalent Partners, that meant shedding the assumptions of outsourced recruiting to provide services that stand apart from the rest. It’s not about providing better services than competitors. It’s about providing better quality services that make your clients feel like a part of the team. Sure, it can be easy to fall down the deliverables pit where you only work to meet deadlines. But, caring about the success of your clients is what ultimately fosters success in your own firm. Why? Because you’re working hard to provide an experience they’ll remember. Actions are the true test of character, and that’s what helped IQTalent Partners stand out. IQTalent Partners isn’t an RPO because they do more than an RPO.

When we bring our knowledge base into an organization, we’re not just providing a service, we’re helping them build and improve their talent acquisition function. For many of our clients, the list of names and completed interviews or placements are almost secondary to the deep learning we provide when we work alongside their internal employees. For us, that’s a value-add, but for them, it’s invaluable.

– Chris Murdock

2. Give to Grow

The fastest way to achieve growth is by building relationships with your team. That includes your partners on the client’s side. After all, you’re all working together, right? Collaboration is at its most powerful when the talents of everyone involved mesh together to accomplish the task! At the end of the day, success for all parties involved is the bottom line. This is best achieved when everyone is working together without holding back.

For IQTalent Partners, that means allowing you to keep ownership of any or all candidate research conducted while with your team. Most staffing firm or recruitment agencies take their records with them when they exit a partnership with a firm, so IQTalent Partners decided to do things their own way to make sure to do everything possible to simplify the talent acquisition process, even after things are wrapped up on the IQTalent Partners side.

3. Be Transparent

Transparency is trendy – that’s a fact. While it may seem like an obvious lesson, treating candidates and clients with respect goes a long way for building the reputation and expertise of your firm. Both candidates and clients want to know what’s going on, so keep them in the loop.

When it comes to informing candidates that don’t fit, let them down easy. Also, let them know the door is always open. Who knows! They may not fit a current position but may happen to be perfect for a vacant spot down the road. If there was miscommunication along the way, maintaining transparency will help you identify what fixes need to be made and how you can improve the process for next time.

Additionally, IQTalent Partners team stretched itself to meet both client and their own needs. They have grown and to meet and exceed the expectations of not only their team but their clients and candidates too. IQTalent prides itself on sharing the wins with their team, as well as the challenges. This helps encourage the team to collaborate and ultimately be more effective.

Transparency with our clients and our team has been an important part of our process and structure the last 9 years. We better understand how to engage our candidates by gathering and sharing information about the number of candidates who were identified and contacted, who’s interested or not and why. This information helps us provide a great experience to both our candidates and hiring manager and work through challenges that might come up. 

–Tom Milic

There’s no right or wrong way to build a success strategy for your business because every business’s experience is unique. For IQTalent Partners, the focus was on standing apart from the crowd and building relationships with clients and candidates. At IQTalent Partners, skilled recruiters don’t chase transactions because they are focused on making our clients successful by finding the right talent for you. Learn how you can get started with IQTalent!