Leaders from Caldwell and IQ Talent Partners, recently spoke with Hunt Scanlon Media, on how the combination of Caldwell and IQ Talent Partners provides a complete, technology-driven solution for all talent acquisition needs. Read more in the excerpt below:
Two years ago, when Caldwell and IQTalent Partners first started working together, it was nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Toronto-based Caldwell was looking for research support when one of the firm’s partners recommended the technology-driven talent acquisition solutions firm in Nashville, TN. So it was that Caldwell enlisted IQTalent Partners to help augment its Caldwell Advance business, which focuses on emerging leaders, and for strategic assistance with some of its executive search teams. “We had a great experience,” remembers Chris Beck, Caldwell’s president. “The quality of work and responsiveness was fantastic. Six months after that introduction we started talking with founders Chris Murdock and Tom Milic, and then David Windley, the president, and one thing led to another.”
Caldwell had been looking to expand and diversify and saw in IQTalent Partners the potential to broaden its services for clients, particularly when it came to technological advancements for search. As fate would have it, IQTalent Partners had been rapidly growing and was looking for investment. “That’s initially when Chris Beck was introduced to me,” says Mr. Windley, a former head of human resources at Yahoo! “And, so, we started a discussion from that perspective. But then as we were working together and seeing the synergies, it made more and more sense to ultimately just merge.”
Caldwell’s acquisition last December of IQTalent Partners marked the beginnings of a technology-driven talent acquisition firm that joined the special strengths and expertise of each organization to provide recruitment, among other offerings, for virtually any level. From the very beginning, the synergy was undeniable: Caldwell provides retained executive search at the very highest levels, in addition to its Caldwell Advance offering for mid-level executives. IQTalent Partners offers research, sourcing, and recruitment at all levels on an hourly, on-demand augmentation model. It also offers substantial technological research capabilities that could apply across the combined firm.
A Complete Solution
“If you look at the combination of Caldwell and IQTalent Partners, we can go to a company now and say we really have a complete solution for your talent acquisition/recruiting needs, from the entry-level professional all the way up through the C-suite and the board,” said Mr. Windley. “From a talent acquisition recruiting perspective, we can be a partner for anyone that’s responsible for talent acquisition: We can augment their team; we can do executive search; we can provide IQTalent Exchange for passive-talent research. So any of their needs.”
Or, as CEO John Wallace puts it: “IQTalent partners does everything that Caldwell doesn’t do and Caldwell does everything that IQTalent partners doesn’t do, which is a rare circumstance.”
“In some ways we feel we are developing a new category,” said Mr. Wallace. “I’ve been in the business for 25 years, and I’ve never seen a firm like IQTalent Partners. The delivery mechanism, the amount of professionalism, the work they do is extraordinary. There’s an incredible alignment of our two firms – both cultures are wholly focused on excellent client service and quality execution, which will translate to extraordinary results for our clients.”
A Technological Innovator
For Caldwell, the biggest attraction was IQTalent Partners’ technological strengths, from its proprietary candidate and management process system as well as its nascent AI-driven passive candidate marketplace known as IQTalent Exchange (IQTX). “We’ve been doing a lot of searches; we’ve been building up our database,” said Mr. Windley. “We also take advantage of data aggregators, so we’ve got access to 300 million profiles. But the way we describe it is that we have access to anyone in North America who has a public profile. If anyone needs to find passive candidates, they can go to IQTX, drop in their job description, and then with some artificial intelligence and human curation we will produce a list of people who fit the qualifications and that have contact information and then we serve that up to our clients.”
Beyond continuously developing the product and its capabilities, the leaders also expect to find plenty of opportunities for Caldwell to integrate certain aspects of IQTX for their clients as well.
The leaders at Caldwell understand that while the high-touch nature of executive search insulates the industry a bit from the impacts of technology, the potential for disruption remains. More and more client companies, for instance, have been able to leverage LinkedIn and other technologies to run in-house recruitment operations, which have shifted assignments away from search firms. “So rather than fight that, our approach has been, ‘Let’s ride that wave,’” said Mr. Beck. “And that was when David Windley came along with IQTalent Partners, and that’s what they do – leverage technology to help augment clients’ internal talent acquisition teams.”
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