“Legacy of Leaders” is an inspiring TV show featuring interviews with successful entrepreneurs and leaders around the world. The show focuses on business leadership, motivation, and success stories, with the goal of sparking inspiration and igniting success in the audience. Today our hosts, John Chappelear spoke with Sandra Lief.
Sandra Lief
President and Co-Founder of FairchildHR
Website Address: https://FairchildHR.com
Short company description:
Our belief is that few things in life are as important as meaningful work. Our passion is to play the critical role of bringing the best talent to the best employers at the right time.
We combine proven, old-school, face-to-face recruiting techniques, with the most sophisticated technology available.
In a world of chronic talent shortages our clients can’t afford to overlook top performers or to discourage them with cumbersome, antiquated technology.
What was the biggest obstacle you had to overcome in your business?
Time! Building a new business, which can become a big business, takes a lot of time. Long days and long weeks. We are now moving into a new phase where we have trained staff, written procedures, and lots of repeat clients. Now we’re spending more time planning the next phase.
Tell me a time you failed forward and what you learned from the experience
A few years ago a client let go of someone we placed at eleven months. We offer a one-year guarantee, which is well beyond the 30, 60, or 90 days most firms give. So we owed them a replacement for that role. But they told us they no longer needed the position, and asked us to fill a completely different one instead. I wanted to keep the relationship, so I said yes. I should have said no. Every search we run gets its own custom protocol. We build the assessments and the structured interviews around that specific role. A new role meant starting from scratch, and we did all of that work for free. The lesson was that a guarantee has to mean what it says.
What are your biggest obstacles and barriers to success?
Two things. The first is size. We’re a three-person firm going up against national search firms with a lot more people. I’ve stopped treating that as a weakness. Small business owners hire us because they get me and Keith, not a junior associate. The second obstacle is convincing an owner that a retained search is an investment and not an expense. When you’ve built a company from nothing, writing a check to find a leader feels risky. My job is to show them that the wrong hire costs far more than the search ever will.
What is the proudest moment of your leadership career?
My proudest moment was a search where a family business was being sold, and one of the partners was leaving with the sale. The buyer wouldn’t close until the right person was in that seat. So the whole deal, and years of that family’s work, came down to one hire. It was an operations role in a very niche industry, which meant a small pool of people who could do the job. We filled it in 60 days. The sale closed, and the family got the outcome they’d worked for. That’s the kind of search I built this firm for. It’s never just a job to fill. It’s someone’s life work
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