We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Englade. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.
Sarah, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?
When I was laid off from my job as a recruiter during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, I knew that if I was to stay in recruiting that I had to do it on my own terms. After eight years of working in the staffing industry, I gained the knowledge and experience I needed which gave me the confidence to bet on myself and start my journey as an entrepreneur.
Recruiting is all about building relationships. When I was thinking about the name of my firm, I thought back to the first relationshipI invested time in building from the ground up. In 1992, when I was seven years old in Haverhill, Massachusetts, I was in my backyard searching for monarch butterflies. A new family had just moved in next door, and they had a little girl my age who was also playing in her backyard. When she saw me, she came over to the chain link fence that separated us and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was on a mission to find a monarch butterfly and asked if she wanted to help me, to which she quickly said yes. We have been best friends ever since. And so, with this memory in mind, Monarch Talent Solutions became the name of my firm.
I wanted to create a “feel-good” brand that people could relate to. Recruiting can be an icky word for a lot of people and the industry doesn’t have the best reputation for being transparent, and I was aware of that. So, it was important to me to start a company that was values-driven, stood for something I believed in, and that I knew other people would believe in. Our mission is to, “Put humanity back into hiring through transparency, honesty, and integrity,” and to keep relationships at the forefront. We operate at a slow and steady pace and believe in the process. By having compassion and empathy for our clients and candidates, we’re able to build long-lasting relationships built on trust and kindness, which have been the backbone of our success.
There are hundreds of recruiting firms in Houston that we compete with. Our differentiator is that we act as a true extension of the companies and candidates we partner with and are hands-on throughout the entire process. We keep our standards high and aim to make a difference by always delivering our best work.
If companies are reaching out to us just to increase the volume of resumes they’d like to see for their open roles, we are not the right firm for them. We are not “resume slingers” and won’t send resumes for the sake of sending them. We are methodical and care about placing candidates in career opportunities with companies whose values align with our own. Therefore, there is a lot of thought put in by our executive recruiters to provide not only the highest quality candidates, but also to treat their candidacy and time with the utmost discretion and respect.
At Monarch, we have fun and think big! We have proven time and time again that by not comprising standards and integrity, you can make a massive difference. We are excited to be a part of reinventing the recruiting industry and this is just the beginning for us!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
You don’t go to school to become a recruiter, so like most people in the industry, my opportunity to break in sort of just fell into my lap. In my previous life, before recruiting, I worked for medical spas as a Branch Director and Medical Esthetician. After almost seven years in the industry, it was time to make a change and I asked my friend, a recruiter, to help me with my job search. Within days of sharing my resume with her, she had me scheduled for an interview to meet with another recruiter to discuss my background and career expectations. About twenty minutes or so into the interview, she asked me if I’d ever considered becoming a recruiter, which up until that moment I had not. As I learned about the job duties and all that went into the role, I was intrigued and wanted to continue learning more about this line of work. After about five or six rounds of interviews with this company, I was offered an opportunity to break into recruiting by way of contract staffing for administrative roles in Downtown Houston.
After six years gaining experience and excelling in the role, I moved into the contract accounting division before accepting a new role with another global firm. In this position, I was responsible for streamlining processes related to their contract staffing division throughout North America. It was this role that gave me the confidence I needed to start my own recruiting company after I was laid off due to COVID-19.
Today, I help accounting, finance, and human resources professionals land career opportunities on a direct-hire basis throughout Houston, TX. We are very niched down in our areas of expertise and have quickly grown due to how “plugged in” we are. Business is personal to us, and so is finding a career and hiring for teams. Our mission is to put humanity back into hiring by leading with transparency, integrity, and honesty and by never compromising our values. People appreciate being heard and seen, and that is what we do for everyone who partners with us, regardless of what side you’re on in the hiring process.
I’m most proud of taking a bet on myself and taking the leap into entrepreneurship during a time when everything was uncertain. I don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs, so the entrepreneurial drive was not organically pumping through my veins. I’m the first one to choose this path and have had to learn everything as I go. Even through the challenges of being a new business owner, I have never once regretted my choice to start Monarch Talent Solutions. I finally get to be myself and represent a company that I am passionate about and that I know stands for everything I believe in. Transparency is the backbone of my company’s success and I’m incredibly proud of that.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
The social media platform that took off for me is LinkedIn. As a recruiter, I use LinkedIn for everything from finding new clients to finding candidates to place with companies I’m partnered with. So, I knew that I needed to start capitalizing on this platform to help get the word out about Monarch and our mission to reinvent the matchmaking process through transparency, honesty, and integrity. However, I was also insecure about putting myself out there and felt an immense amount of imposter syndrome since I was a new business owner and had next to no business development experience. But I also understood that if putting myself out there made me uncomfortable, I had to do it to grow personally, which would be the springboard to my professional growth. So, I decided tht I was going to start storytelling on LinkedIn and would use real-life conversations I was having daily with job seekers and hiring managers as my inspiration.
It was a slow process and felt discouraging at moments by the low engagement my posts were getting. However, I believed in the process and with a little more time and patience, my posts began to get a lot of attention because people could relate to them. The comments started pouring in and the support grew from there. I made it my goal to post seven days a week for as long as I could keep up with it. Now, I post about 3-5 times a week and have grown my personal followers to over 10,500. I’m also referred to as a “micro-influencer” now, which is exciting! By staying consistent, LinkedIn has been a huge part of my success and has helped me tremendously with brand recognition throughout Houston, TX, and my online network.
My advice to anyone just starting out building their brand on social media is to just go for it. If you’re worried that someone may make fun of you or talk behind your back about what you’re posting, let them talk. What they have to say about you behind your back is none of your business. But what is your business is the success of your company and social media plays a huge role in that. You will learn your online voice over time and will make posts that get very little engagement at times. However, it’s about showing up and doing the work, and over time with consistency, you will get noticed, you will have a strong online presence and you won’t even care anymore about what other people think. It starts with one post, and that is it. And from there the rest is up to you.
Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
My favorite marketing story is the story of how I landed my first client six months into starting Monarch Talent Solutions. I had been keeping my head down, making new connections throughout my network, posting content on LinkedIn daily, following through, and completing daily business development tasks for six months without hardly getting a bite. This all changed the day that I emailed a hiring manager about a job ad I saw online for their company that said they needed a Senior Accountant. The hiring manager emailed me back, which alone was a huge success. But she basically said “thanks, but no thanks” to me, and that was that. I went on LinkedIn and sent her a request to connect and to my surprise again she accepted the request and we were now in each other’s network, which was another success. Just one day later this hiring manager slid into my DMs on LinkedIn and asked me if I filled Controller level positions because she needed some help for that role. I quickly responded with a “yes” and she asked if I could jump on a call the next morning to discuss the role. I had a flight the next day, but there was absolutely no way I was missing that call. We agreed to chat at 7:00 am the next morning, and so I spent the evening studying the company she worked for and going through my network to see if I had any Controller’s that could be an option for her.
The next morning, we spoke and she flipped the script and started asking me about who I was and what drove me to start my company. She asked me about my values and my purpose. In almost decade in the industry, not one of my clients started off an intro call like this. Most of the time I only get asked about my fees, so this caught me off guard a bit. But I told my story and she said that it aligned with their story and that my values aligned very closely with her company’s. She then asked me how many Controller positions I had filled since starting Monarch Talent Solutions, and with my heart beating a mile a minute, I said “At this point, I haven’t had an opportunity to fill a Controller position yet. But I hope this opportunity to partner with you changes that.” She liked my honesty and told me that she was giving me the role and looked forward to working with me. She added one last detail before hanging up. She said, “By the way, two other recruiting firms have been working on this position for about six weeks now. I just wanted to be transparent with you.”
Having competition didn’t scare me. I was also familiar with who my competitors were, and I used that as motivation. I recruited for this role for a couple of weeks and was able to set up three interviews with candidates to meet with her and the VP of Operations. Two rounds of interviews later, we had a signed offer in hand. It was the best feeling in the world knowing that someone who didn’t know me took a chance on me and I delivered for her. This is proof that consistency and patience do pay off.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.monarchtalentsolutions.com
- Instagram: monarchtalenthtx
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-englade-856b2259/
Image Credits
I own the images