Recruiting!

As my last post indicated, I am now involved in the Human Resources Department assisting as a recruiter for both Equity Trust Company and Sterling Trust Company (which is located in Waco, Texas). For the past month I have had the opportunity to work closely with the Corporate Recruiter, Amanda Thompson, to learn the procedures and skills necessary to be a successful recruiter. Throughout the past month I have been interviewing candidates for a variety of positions for both Equity Trust and Sterling Trust. I conduct phone interviews with candidates for different positions on a daily basis. I also have been scheduling in person interviews and sitting in on those as well. I am learning a ton about the questions to ask, answers to look for and how to determine if a candidate possess the core competencies necessary to fulfill the open positions. As both Equity Trust and Sterling Trust continue to grow, there are many open positions that we have been looking to fill. Every day is exciting and fast paced. As Colin mentioned in his last post, I too remember job hunting and sitting in on interviews not too long ago. It has been a fun experience to get the opportunity to be on the reverse side of an interview.

I also have been finishing up on my strategic mapping project that was dealing with fee awareness and our competitor's fees. I have created a spreadsheet which provides an at a glance reference comparing our annual fees and service fees with those of our main industry competitors. I also made a coinciding PowerPoint to possibly be referenced or used for continued education training or new hire training. Fees are something that our prospects and clients seem to have many questions about and knowing how our company compares to others out there can help strengthen our competitive advantage.

Goodbye CST...

This past week, my rotation in Client Services came to an end. I am now starting a new rotation in the Human Resources Department assisting with the recruiting process. My four months in CST were very helpful and I learned so much from our clients. I will take the suggestions that our clients presented with me throughout my future rotations so that Equity Trust Company can continue to enhance our clients' satisfaction with our services. I thought this would be an appropriate time to recap on my experience in client services.

Throughout the first couple of months on the phone, I balanced taking incoming calls from our clients and working on projects. I would say that I spent about 70-80% of my time on the phones and the remaining time was spent working on various projects. In months three and four, I was probably on the phones about 50% of the time and worked on projects the other half of my time.

A typical call from our clients would usually be about a pending investment, how to proceed forward with an investment, questions about their account or questions about paperwork regarding an investment. Most of the answers to their questions could be found within in one of our information systems. Having this type of interaction with our clients helped me to gain information about what our company does, the types of investments our clients are pursuing and the company's internal processing of investments.

Some of the ongoing projects that Colin and I both worked on while in client services included monitoring our Facebook and Twitter pages, a process improvement project and our call volume project. I was also given numerous smaller projects from my supervisors to complete on an as needed basis.

I will miss the client services department but look forward to my new rotation. I will update this blog with my new experiences and projects as my time in Human Resources continues!