Our 5 Year Vision - Part 1: Growth
Recruitment is broken. We’re on a mission to fix it.
However, we can’t do it without our candidates, clients, employees, investors or business partners. And since we are all about transparency, we decided to share our 5 year vision in a blog series with you.
Let’s fix recruitment together.
Our vision is centered around these 4 points and over the next several weeks different members of our leadership team will focus on each point individually.
Growth happens through a network of remote but connected recruiters.
In part 1 Chad Lafferty, Managing Director and Board Director, talks about Growth.
Our San Francisco problem and how the pandemic solved it
Chad Lafferty, Managing Director and Board Director
It was mid-2019 when I realized that I had a San Francisco problem. I had only taken over the business a couple of months earlier when our star performer resigned. She was still new to the business and was very early in her career, but she was going places. More literally than I realized at the time. A tech startup swooped in and made an offer that was impossible to compete with. San Francisco problem #1.
It was also apparent that managing the business remotely wasn’t very effective. Our HQ in Japan was very office-centric, and so my ability to effectively manage people still finding their feet in recruitment half a world away was limited, to say the least. And without a clear leader on the ground in our SF office, the culture slowly eroded. San Francisco problem #2.
In late 2019, I made the hard decision that we would wind the business down, and close it completely within 2020. That decision was more than justified a few months later when the pandemic took hold, as my focus needed to be on the primary business in Japan.
During the final couple of months for the SF business, the few remaining staff worked remotely, which became an accidental template for March 2020 when we made the decision to go full remote and temporarily close the office in Japan during the early stages of the pandemic. This time though, I had two big advantages. An incredibly strong team around me that made everything possible, and the sense that we were all in this together.
We were essentially experimenting at a much larger scale, and since everyone knew it wasn’t going to be perfect, we were able to get through the bumps and bruises without any lasting damage.
Along the way, we doubled down on things like trust, flexibility, and psychological safety. This trust and flexibility will make things possible that weren’t before.
Growth happens through a network of remote but connected recruiters
We’ve already decided we’re not going back to the traditional office setup. We’re 100% invested in making remote first and a hybrid work style successful, and the early returns are positive. We still have a lot to learn about building and maintaining culture in a remote first world.
We’re learning more about asynchronous communication and how to balance team and individual needs. We’re seeing that people want to be a part of something bigger, but also want the freedom to decide how they exist within that larger something.
So while we clearly still have a lot to learn, the pandemic has given us a pathway to global expansion that we didn’t have before. It solved the San Francisco problem by reframing the discussion. Rather than trying to find a way to replicate a successful office culture in Japan to other markets, we just have to integrate people into an existing culture that provides them with a similar work experience, even if it’s half a world away
Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of problems to solve. It’s not the same experience, after all. The markets are different, hiring is different, laws are different. But the idea of international expansion through the painstaking process of opening a physical (and expensive) office that covers a specific location has been rendered moot.
For Wahl+Case, that means flexibility to go where our clients need us, or where market demands take us.
After all, recruitment is broken everywhere, not just in the US or Japan, and we aspire to be part of the solution.
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