We recently connected with Nick Cromydas and have shared our conversation below.

Nick, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

It was two of us co-founders at the start until we realized just how much there was to be done so we recruited another co-founder to join our founding team. Sure we would hire interns. We would hire contractors and part-time workers here and there, but the focus was on getting product market fit with the core team before we hired a full-time teammate.

The thing about founding and building a company from the ground up, you have to be careful about who you “hire”, which boils down to having to be careful about who you’re committed to spending 15-hour days with. If there’s not a tight culture fit to begin with, it just never works. You gotta love the people and have fun with who you work, AND want them to be great at what they do. You have to hit both factors. There are enough challenges in an early stage environment. The people you’re with can’t be one of them.

When it came time to hire beyond the founding team, what we did was simple. We would get a referral. Then we’d assess the core competencies of the role. So asking things like do they actually have the skills or, at least, the will to do what it takes? And then the final thing we did is just spend a ton of time with them. I’m talking 3-hour dinners, lunches, long walks, meeting their spouse, their family. I mean truly whatever it might be just to ensure it was compatible.

We led with hiring through trusted introductions. So not only were we building this recruiting model at Hunt Club, we were truly living it and testing it. And it worked.

Q: If I were starting today would I have done things differently?
A: Yes and no. I think we compounded a lot of learnings from other failures or other successes, and used the lessons to “soft launch” Hunt Club in what we thought was the right way. But that doesn’t come without making mistakes.

Something I’d change is, shortly after we launched, we built a ton of software for our customers to help them manage the recruiting experience, realizing at the end of the day that what our clients actually wanted was just a great candidate, driven by our technology. We invested a lot of time and money in the tech offering, and it ended up being something our customers didn’t really want or use in the beginning. We could have validated that better. Point blank.

Nick, 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 had a friend who worked for a large recruiting firm and kept winning tech and digital-oriented searches. The thing was, he wasn’t from the tech world so he would call me and say, “Hey, you’re in tech. Can you help explain what these roles are? What does greatness look like in this role?” And at the end of every conversation, he’d follow up with this: “Can you introduce me to someone like that?”

I ended up making maybe 15-25 intros and 5 of them were actually placed. This sparked a ton of curiosity as to what this referral-based business model looked like. And what if the search world was powered by referrals? And most importantly, why isn’t there a differentiated model doing that at scale?

We always believed the best talent comes from people who have worked in the job AND really have great networks in it. And so we built a better recruiting model to bring this to life, where there’s our own technology to help make the process more efficient and transparent, and then using the collective power of thousands of networks to help you find your next great hire.

I’m most proud of the team we’ve built and the customer experience that surrounds the team driving it. We brought something authentic and unique to an industry that’s pretty commoditized. That’s hard to do. We’re changing the rhetoric and the way people think about engaging with this type of service and hopefully doing a good job of that.

Bottom line is, we care. It’s hard changing the heart and the mind of a customer in an industry with a negative connotation. We’re really trying to do that through how we treat our customers, the quality, experience, and service. I think back to the early days with 3 people, and now growing to 100+ and I still feel like we have a very aligned company and culture where we’re all trying to do something special together.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I graduated college in 2009. Arguably the worst time in the world to try and get a business job in the last 20-30 years. So the only job I could get at the time was a women’s tennis coach. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great job but it just wasn’t what I wanted for my career. So going into the broader market to get into what I really wanted, I had to pivot pretty hard from, “Okay. I’m coaching tennis, the sport I played my entire life,” to “but here’s how I have some tangible business experience. And the leadership skills. And all these transferable competencies that’d make me an asset as a consultant.” That’s the sort of thing that’s most interesting and unique in all of our careers. What you do now isn’t defined by where you start.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

In the first year in the business, we had an opportunity to get one of the fastest growing, largest tech companies in the world to be a customer. It’s not every day that kind of thing happens for such an early-stage company like we were. We put our best foot forward, flew out to San Francisco, which is expensive for a company that’s bootstrapping, and spent probably 2 or 3 months in the sales process. We ultimately closed them and got to build up their sales team for 2 or 3 years. A huge needle mover for the company.

Another interesting risk that paid off was working with our second customer. We ideally only wanted to work with companies as an exclusive partner to them. But since we were still new, we played ball with 3 or 4 other recruiting firms on the account. We ended up succeeding amongst all of them and that really set the tone for us to grow the business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.huntclub.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cromydas/

Image Credits

All Hunt Club owned photos.