My First Hire
I started this post thinking I was simply going to introduce my new mentee and first ever employee.
I quickly realized I can’t do that without first talking about my mentor.
I also remembered that I’m as ADHD as they get and you’re here for storytime, so just buckle up :)
This year will be 9 years recruiting in LA, the city I call Home.
Crazy to think I’m getting up on a decade of a career I never expected.
For me, this career has been so many things.
It’s mostly been a lesson in building relationships.
I grew up moving a lot.
I had long been conditioned to believe that relationships are acutely transitory. I spent the first half of my 20s waiting for the other shoe to drop in most of my friendships.
Aside from my marriage, my relationship with my mentor Annemarie Penny has easily been the most important I can think of. We’ve been through enough challenges together, it’s taught me how much a relationship can bear and still be renewed with more strength than before.
It’s taught me how wonderfully surprising people can be.
She’s a fantastic person, not just a great recruiter. She’s entertaining, engaging, brilliant, and brimming with a practically infectious sense of conviction. She’s someone who typically prefers her quiet vantage on the hill with her menagerie of animals and diligently kept garden, but who can be dropped in any room and bring both levity and acumen with her. For reasons that still feel strange to me, she took a chance on someone with no degree or experience, and imparted a series of practices and ideals that developed an amazing career. It would be hard to over-state how generous she’s been to me.
She helped teach me to close the chapter in my 20s where I’d regularly burn bridges, and taught me fundamentally about the value of mutual trust and long-term relationships.
What I’ve always loved about our relationship is that we have such stark contrast in our style and approach, and that we very regularly disagree, but that she’s always supported my convictions so long as they showed results.
Her support and encouragement is why I’m successful today.
She’s spoiled me rotten, because I got to have a mentor who I count among my best and closest friends.
She retired last year. I’ve been running my firm for a few, but she’s always had an ownership stake, and has always had a guiding hand in my work.
Fulcrum is, and will always be an extension of Apex.
The past few years have been an interesting and unexpected series of challenges for me.
One thing I read a lot when considering professional development or human motivation is the conversation about sense of mastery.
While my work is always interesting and challenging, (because people :) the people with whom I’m close and the help they offer me has made my career so much less brute-force effort than the status quo of my industry. As such, I’ve found myself regularly seeking new challenges… For anyone who follows my writing, you’ll know I lost almost all of my waking time in 2016 to Purchasing and Self-Renovating a property.
While that project turned out pretty great in the long-run, I burned out hard. I spent most of my holidays licking my wounds and gaming. I grew up gaming quite obsessively. I was very into 8 and 16 bit console, and Sierra/Lucasarts/Westwood adventure games, but was so busy in High School that I gave it up through most of my 20s. The nostalgia of playing Super Metroid, and going back through Megaman I-V via emulator was welcome solace while recovering from a year of mental and physical exhaustion.
For me, like most game folk, Elder Scrolls was a lot of fun.
So I downloaded their MMO… their impressive yet flawed, impossibly addictive yet highly unforgiving, satisfying yet ultimately pointless MMO. Oh dear how many hours I burned on the ceaseless learning curve of that game.
My first time playing an MMO. Two recovering alcoholic parents, and I find it amusing that I’ve never actually struggled with addiction before downloading an MMO.
How bad was it?
Bad enough that my wife and I eventually agreed I wasn’t allowed to play in the house or on my own machine. Thankfully it never really interfered with my work, but I probably logged way more hours in Steam than I did with any instrument while at music school.
Ultimately I ended up quitting.
It wasn’t easy, and I tried to do so multiple times over a couple of years. The learning curve of that game filled a sense of mastery and sense-of-community void that unfortunately didn’t really yield much long-term fulfillment otherwise. Part of what made it so hard was the completely random and unlikely group of friends I made while playing.
Taking a step back, online gaming communities in general are a horrid thing. I’m amazed I didn’t quit out of frustration early on. The amount of random hostility, trolling, and bullying was kind of stunning. It’s especially conducive to feeling inadequate, ridiculous, and and frustrated a lot of the time.
Had I not found a group of friends in the game, I would have definitely walked away… But it was interesting- I met a few people who enjoyed teaching others to improve. We spent a lot of time on voice comms in Discord, and got to know each other better than I’d say I know a number of my IRL friends. This was especially so due to the sense of security that friend group helped me feel against such a hostile environment. It yielded a sense of closeness and camaraderie.
Enter Drakk the Berserker
Full disclaimer- i had been advised specifically not to tell people I met my new employee through video games. That said, if there’s one thing I find has brought me the most valuable friendships, connections, and opportunities, it’s honesty… Especially the awkward truth that I’d instinctively feel inclined to hide. *Especially* when the internet is such a whitewashed place where we all feel pressure to look formidable and flawless.
I feel this part of our story very much informs who this person is, and why I’m so excited about him.
One of the group members I grew to enjoy gaming with quite a bit was a man known only to me then as Drakk the Berserker. Initially, he struck me as casually brilliant at understanding and adapting to pretty challenging games. We got to know each other pretty well over about 2 years. He was always quick with a joke, and impressively responsive to any pop culture reference I’d reflexively make while usually assuming it would go unnoticed. Above all, he was welcoming and always in a good mood. I’d later find out that he was the original organizer of the group, and largely responsible for bringing people in and helping them find a place.
As we got to know each other, we’d talk more and more about our lives… Where we’re from, what we do for a living, etc.
Drakk the Berserker gradually became Ben.
Ben’s originally from Indiana. A Georgetown graduate.
He speaks fluent German, and originally studied to go into diplomacy.
He’s ridiculously smart, genuine, and seemingly always in a good mood.
When he wasn’t in a good mood, the only way you’d know is that he’d apologize out of nowhere and then very endearingly tell you about his day.
Turns out he was also a sales guy in San Francisco tech startups.
Late last year, he happened to have business with some clients in Los Angeles and I told him to meet me for a beer.
Anyone who’s worked with me knows unforgiving would be putting it lightly regarding my attitude toward other recruiters. Almost unnecessarily high levels of transparency, vulnerability, and a willingness to admit ignorance are practically mandatory qualities for me.
This is why it really caught me off guard when I almost immediately told my wife I would probably offer this guy a job if he ever decided he would move to LA. *Of course*, it turned out he’d wanted to move to LA for a while.
With that…
I’d like for you to meet Ben DeVoe.
Ben’s been training next to me for the past few weeks, and I’m really excited by how well he’s taken to my training. I have a great feeling about his ability to learn quickly and not make the same mistake twice. He’s consistently proven himself highly conscientious of others, hard working, and eager to learn.
Scaling my business has always been a difficult conversation for me. In one sense, I don’t want for much so I’m not especially motivated by more. Further, because I was trained by a close friend, I’ve never been keen on the idea of working with a random stranger and training them with the hope that my barely educated guess is right regarding their values. My ideal working relationships have always been driven by enthusiastic, opinionated high level discussions about how our industry works, and how relationships are built and how trust and reputation are *everything*
Part of why I started my own firm is because I felt I was lacking in peers who shared that passion and understanding for the work I do. That zeal is what the brand of Fulcrum was founded on.
On the other hand, while I’m selective about my clients, I’ve always been disappointed when I felt limited in my ability to take on a search I’m otherwise excited about. Further, since Annemarie and I stopped working intensively in the same shop, I realized that I was missing a lot of the banter and reflective enthusiasm that we had day in and day out. Recruiting, paradoxically, can be a really lonely job sitting in front of your computer all day.
Back to the conversation about sense of mastery as a motivator, I also acknowledge that I made a lot of mistakes as a lead at Apex. Never a partner or owner at the firm, I developed a ton of agency but lacked authority. I also hadn’t earned it. It wasn’t my show. In my desire for people to see my way of doing things, I alienated and discouraged a lot of my co-workers. While I stand by my own convictions, I knew on most days I wielded them like a cudgel to maintain boundaries with my co-workers.
Years later, It’s at once scary and exciting to have the opportunity to own a leadership role and face those challenges with full authority. It’s also a lot of fun to confer with my mentor and suddenly appreciate her perspective on everything she went through as I was taking my first steps. Half of my training tends to read “I’ll tell you exactly as my mentor told me”. It brings to mind the concept of sending the elevator back down.
One thing comes to mind very regularly for me- Something Annemarie has said countless times… She always referred to bringing on new employees as “tricking herself into working” simply by creating a firehose to drink from.
Having started down this path, I’m so far overwhelmed in the best possible way. The level of responsibility I’ve taken on has become the perfect motivator, not only for the new challenge of training and management, but in doing my own job more diligently in order to ensure the success of someone for whom I’m now responsible.
I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Ben to Los Angeles, into the Fulcrum family, and by extension the Apex family.
