Calgary, Alberta’s Hire Value offers recruitment expertise to business owners who are looking to grow their staffs with talented new hires. Part of Hire Value’s mission statement is to challenge employers to rethink their traditional hiring practices.
It’s all about focusing on the candidate experience.
Hire Value’s advice for hiring managers is to never overlook how it feels to be a job seeker. Growing company culture and making the job search experience a rewarding one for each candidate are keys to bolstering a staff with top talent.
Yesterday, we had the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing Hire Value’s Founder and CEO, Shelley Billinghurst. In 2014, Shelley took her two decades of experience in agency recruiting and corporate recruitment and decided to start her own company. Hire Value was born. And for the past six years, it has given Shelley an independent opportunity to provide expert recruitment solutions.
Shelley knew leaving her previous position of employment to go solo would be no easy feat.
“I know how long it takes a company off the ground,” Shelley tells us, “I knew that I wanted to be running my own show. If it took off, it would be 100 percent mine. If it failed, I could blame no one. That’s exactly the way I saw it. I’ve got nobody to blame but me. And I have nobody else to credit but me.”
Shelley knew, however, that she couldn’t leave the marketing of her new company all to herself. On the advice of her business coach, who had been taking advantage of MeloTel’s Commercial Phone Services and our Bloggers & Creative Writers For Hire, she decided to contact MeloTel to get some of the same assistance. Among her priorities was setting up a website through MeloTel’s Website Maintenance Services.
“I really needed to get my website built!”
“I was completely bootstrapped, meaning it was all my own money,” recalls Shelley, “I needed something that was cost-effective, would work for what I needed in terms of getting the word out about my business. So I worked with MeloTel to do everything from concept to content and the site went live.”
Shelley also took advantage of the value of having regular blogs posted to the Hire Value website. “One of the things my business coach told me was ‘you need to constantly be putting your take on things out there’,” Shelley remembers, “He was amazed with the blogs he received. The assumption is that a good copy writer has to know your industry. In fact, the opposite was true. The benefit is that you don’t know the industry. People who know the industry have an opinion.”
Shelley happily recalls working with our head blogger.
Noting that he “easily figured it out” after being provided with credible sources for blog posts, Shelley credits MeloTel for having helped to successfully get Hire Value off the ground.
“In my first five years, MeloTel made it so easy for me,” says Shelley, “Technology and running a website is the last thing I want to spend my time doing. But I still need it. It’s an important part of marketing. Being consistent with putting out a new blog every single Tuesday was really important. What I’m seeing now is I will go to networking events that are outside of my industry and I’ll meet people and they will immediately say ‘Oh, I know Hire Value’. What I know is that it’s because the blogging is consistent.”
Check out Shelley’s new podcast “The Recruitment Flex” on Spotify!
