Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dana Neiger. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dana, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?

lol so much. In all seriousness, the corporate style of interview process, in which a candidate enters through a recruiter they may or may not start to develop a professional relationship with, to get this person coordinated and scheduled for an average of a 5 step interview process averaging again around 4-6 weeks, is just insane. No one has time for all that commitment these days nor should they make that kind of time. we are in the war for talent and that process is not respectful, you will lose top candidates to other shorter and faster interview processes. The key is efficiency in your line of questions, utilizing virtual platforms and paneling in as many people into one to two virtual interviews as you can so that at most, the final interview is the third one, with an offer following it, hopefully. Feel the pain, agony, anxiety of your candidates, how would you feel going through 6 rounds and 6 months of interviews only to be told at the end, we are done, thanks anyway. Corporate America is lacking in true Talent process and efficiency and the Executives are far too removed from their team’s concerns to assist these days. Too much wasted time.

Dana, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born and raised in LA, CA, relocated to GA and finished high school here, graduated from Agnes Scott College, the private women’s college in Decatur, GA with a Business and Economics Degree. That year was 2002 and it was a recession, I was senior class President so I knew what all my ladies were doing, most of them were going to grad school, a few of us were able to secure positions. I fell into HR and Recruiting by accident, and never looked back, it was literally a situation where I had taken two years off after failing miserably at attempting to become a certified financial planner, oops, couldn’t pass the tests, I took off to backpack through Europe for a couple years and came back to Atlanta. A girlfriend of mine had landed a recruiting job and said they were hiring and it would be fun to work together. We owned that firm! We were rocking and rolling it out there and then her Uncle recruited us to work for him in his privately owned Franchise of MRI at the time. We started his legal support staff recruiting division, placing legal secretaries, paralegals, etc. We did so well with it he promoted us, she actually left for an entirely different industry, I remained with that firm for 5 years and grew into a Manager, Leader, and VP and it has been recruiting ever since.

My business partner, Veronica Jenkins and I met years later, sort of, technically we met as kids at Pat Summit Tennessee basketball camps but I digress lol, that was a hilarious realization for us both. But Vee and I met while both working for the same very large, international company in merchant services, recruiting for them directly. We hit it off right away and became quite close. I ended up having to resign, I’d gotten pregnant with my child and suffered severe hyperemesis and was on my back for the next 6 months. When I came to, Vee and I started discussing creating our own thing. HIVE came to be very organically, Vee and I knew we could do this better than what was out there, we were specific and intentional with our decisions down to the industry specialty of Transportation Engineering.

We are black owned, women owned, a DBE and a government contractor for one reason, to help small businesses win bigger chunks of work from GDOT. Our clients are women owned, black owned, minority owned, DBE’s as well trying to navigate human resources and talent waters that don’t make sense to them. We are here to help them organize and be successful by attracting and maintaining top talent, while servicing various HR consulting needs: Salary assessments, employee handbooks, safety manuals, compliance, trainings of all kinds, JEDI (justice, diversity, equity, inclusion), Covid and every other policy, employee relations issue, you name it we do it. We also do this nationally and hope to grow to internationally work.

HIVE also offers individual services, resume rewrite, create, reformatting, cover letters, interview preparation, best practices on free LinkedIn and job searches training, dressing for success and various consulting practices.

Finally, we have a tremendous intern program called The Swarm Society, TSS, founded by a former intern of HIVE”s who grew from Intern, to Recruiting Coordinator, to Sr. Recruiter with us. We place interns with an interest in wanting to become part of the future workforce of company xyz. Likewise we work with client companies who want their interns to work for them. We train on feeder system styles so companies don’t have to stress about succession plans.

All of this is intentionally embedded within diversity and inclusive structures and behaviors.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Such is the life of a small business owner, yes. The best advice I can give any entrepreneur would be to not let the small things get you down. To utilize your network and let the experts do what they do. So if your goals don’t have anything to do with your payroll or your HR, then you should outsource that! Can’t afford it? Maybe you’re not quite ready to start the biz. I can’t tell you how many times clients abuse you, boundaries must be set ahead of time as far as communication needs. Large companies have very convoluted internal payroll teams and receive thousands of invoices a day, never assume anything. We have missed payroll without a care or a sorry from clients. Having to tell your team, I’m sorry payroll is going to be a day late, or three days later this pay period breaks my heart, and cash flow is an issue with small businesses. Staying on top of when your invoices and payments hit your business accounts are key.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Great pivot story, COVID. When the world shut down for 6 weeks due to the pandemic in 2020 our entire recruiting book fell silent within three weeks, all the money we thought we had coming in was gone, all the contracts we’d won, gone, all the work we had secured, gone. Everyone was suffering and no one knew what would come of anything. HIVE pivoted HARD and our business revenue did a 180 degree turn. Before the pandemic we were about 75% recruiting revenue and about 25% HR revenue, but Covid was new, scary, and our clients needed us, we started consulting from the compliance and HR perspective on policy updates, new policy and procedure around PPE, benefits, time off, etc. This kept the lights on.

We were fortunate to gain the first and second round of PPP funding and it has all also been forgiven. HUGE, grateful. We would be out of business if not for our loyal customer base and those loans. We did have to Furlough a few employees, but we were able to bring them back. It was a scary time and our employees were more like our family than anything so it was difficult from all perspectives. Having to tell your talent you understand they have to do what is best for them and their families is hearth wrenching. But we survived and have busted out far away from those woes.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.hivetaf.com
• Instagram: @hivetaf
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-neiger-0a9700/
• Twitter: @hivetaf

Image Credits
Images by Ben Lipford of Ben Lipford Photography