Red Seat Case Study

 Client: Nolan Properties Group

Position: Project Manager/Acquisitions

The challenge:

The owner of Nolan Properties Group has been a Red Seat client for over fifteen years. We've helped him hire a variety of employees from accountants to administrators to construction managers. This recent Project Manager/Acquisition position was one of our most challenging projects. It was a newly-created role in the company, and the person who landed the job would play an integral part in Nolan's strategic plan. The focus of the position was in the area of real estate development, an industry in which significant downsizing provided us with a deluge of interested candidates—939 of them, to be exact.

Our approach:

At 939 resumes, finding good candidates was not our problem—ranking them was. The person our client sought would need to have a detailed matrix of skills, industry-specific knowledge, and personality traits, so our first matter of business was to develop meaningful criteria and screening materials to help us narrow the field. Internally, we closely evaluated resumes, searching for those candidates whose backgrounds were similar to what the client had in mind. We also developed a comprehensive phone screen that covered the major points of experience and behaviors that the winning candidate would need to have.

How we found the winner:

Our screening process allowed us to narrow those 939 candidates down to the top 6, who then met with Nolan for interviews. Three made it to the second round, and the best of them received the coveted job offer. Believe us, the person who won the position was one talented individual. To float to the top of an applicant pool of almost one-thousand hopefuls, he had to be.