Recruiter of the Week featuring Jeff Smith

Well, this is going to bring us to what has become easily our favorite part of the Hirewell update: the recruiter of the week. We are going to bring in a crowd favorite, a fan favorite. He is close to LinkedIn famous at this point behind one of our other LinkedIn famous colleagues. So without further ado, let’s bring in Jeff Smith.

Hi Jeff! Jeffrey! Crowd goes wild. Good morning. Emily if you pull any sort of me standing up and doing anything – I’m tired. I know that he’s serious. I’m not going to pull anything. I absolutely promise, but we’re so excited to have you here today Jeff. You are going to crush this rapid fire questions before we start our rapid-fire questions,

will you briefly just introduce yourself? Who are you and who are you to Hirewell? Yeah. I’m Jeff Smith, a partner here. Closing in on my six year anniversary, which is exciting. I run the managed recruiting and on demand recruiting practice as well as heading up the sales practice here at Hirewell. Well, we’re lucky to have you on here.

Do you know how our rapid fire question games work? I’ve watched them before. So I’m very curious to see what you have for me. Well, if you’re just tuning in for the very first time, rapid-fire questions, I will set two minutes on the clock and we will rapid fire ask Jeff Smith as many questions as we can. Jeff, your goal is to answer as many questions as possible, as quickly as possible.

Are you ready? Ryan’s going to ask the first question in three- get that stretch in Jeff- I didn’t do that. In three, two, go Ryan. Jeff, what’s your favorite thing about working at Hirewell? I feel like everyone says the people, but it’s totally the people. I feel like I have like a bunch of professional friends, and that’s a very warm feeling. I love it.

If you weren’t recruiting, what would your dream job be? Oh, I mean, I’d be like growing tomatoes somewhere, like on the side of a hill, you know? A thousand percent. I’m not surprised at all by that answer. But Jeff, obviously it’s been a super tough past year and a few months with COVID. What’s the one thing you’re looking forward to most in a post COVID world? Copious amounts of food indoors at restaurants.

Yes, I am looking forward to a team meal again. Jeff is king of taking his team out to the best meals ever. Okay. What is your favorite Chicago summer activity? Ooh! Well as everybody knows, I’m an avid concert goer, so I like love going to northerly island and getting to shows and I’m a little old from Lollapalooza now, but when I was a young and I liked doing that, it’s a little overwhelming for me now.

But now that I have a kid, I like bringing little guys down to the city and seeing all the sites. I thought it was going to be your post COVID answer. I did too, to be honest. To keep it in the music and concert kind of theme. If you could attend any concert right now, whose concert would be? I mean, do you guys want to answer that for me?

Ready? One, two, three… Phish.

We know him. We know him well. Okay, I need to know cause this is like a big question for you. What is your favorite Chicago restaurant? Oh, you’re going to make me go bougie? I mean, I’ve been to Alinea more than once. It’s Alinea, it’s Alinea and bust. It absolutely is. Ryan hit him with the last one. What was the highlight of last year for you?

Well, I have two. I mean, in early 2021 was the birth of my second son. So that’s a highlight, but watching us kind of together as a business, like fight through what should have been potentially our demise. So it was really cool to see us come together and, and fight through it and come out the other side

looking way better than we were before. What an honor to be close second to the birth of your child. I know. I mean, I feel really honored to be honest. I have to say too, none of Jeff’s questions surprised me. He is an open book, so I feel like I kind of answered most of these questions for him. Same. We kind of did too.

We kind of did. Okay. I have to, even though the rapid fires over, now I’m curious about one more question that we asked the people. Well I guess two. Oh gosh. Because with the Don Effler banana flavoring, Jeff really like backed Don up, which I was kind of like a little bit shook by. What’s one food you could not live without? I’m a bad food junkie.

So french fries. I mean, yeah like- for sure. That’s the big vice. Banana – I mean mindblown. But at the end, like we just feast. It’s like, this is great. Y’all do you. Yeah. I mean, without you Laffy Taffy probably would have retired the banana flavor years ago. I think there’s plenty of us sneaking around. You guys keep a low profile, but we love you.

Well, thank you so much for joining us Jeff, our fierce leader and you crushed it. Like Ryan said, I feel like I knew what was coming, but it was still exciting. Well, thanks for having me. Thanks Jeff. We’ll see you later.