To share more of our personality with our clients and candidates, we launched a blog series called “Recruitment Origin Stories”. If you haven’t read the previous installment, you can read about it here.
In this post, we caught up with Tim Spindlove, an experienced recruiter who has played a pivotal role in the Construction & Development Department at DMC Recruitment. If you have any questions or want to make a connection with Tim, feel free to send him an email at [email protected] or connect on Linkedin, he is always keen to share one of his many dad jokes.
What was your background before recruitment?
Before recruitment, I was in many sales & business development roles where I was the tip of the spear from an outreach standpoint. I started my sales career with Backcheck, which was a pre-employment screening company (now Sterling BackCheck). I started up their inside sales team and grew into a Director of Sales role. From there, I moved into a couple of different positions from a sales and marketing perspective, a lot of business development, cold calling, networking, and those types of client presentation type activities.
It came to a point in my career where I needed to do something else and was going through interviews and recruitment companies were calling me for interviews for their clients. At one point, I was thinking to myself, “well, recruitment sounds interesting. I could be on that side of the desk and asking these types of questions.” So, I saw a consultant posting with Hays and applied. Introductory conversations led to in-person interviews, and that’s how I started with Hays as my first recruitment opportunity.
I started with Hays in 2014 and worked my way up. I started a brand-new desk there and built that business from scratch. From there, I went to a group called Telemetry, which was a recruitment marketing software firm, this was much more of a sales position and wasn’t for me. Back into recruitment with TPD, which is like an RPO recruitment outsource company. Then from there, I worked as a national sales executive, working with enterprise clients across Canada, driving their recruitment business again. I was then headhunted to go to Ranstad as the Director of Recruitment for their engineering line of business in Vancouver. I led the recruitment effort for that group and then I got headhunted to DMC.
What type of recruitment do you specialize in?
I specialize in recruiting professionals across real estate development and construction across Canada and typically focusing on all the pre-construction activity, mostly on the development side with real estate developers that build multifamily residential, mixed use and commercial type properties.
What do you enjoy about recruiting in this space?
I think working with real estate developers, you really get a sense of the excitement around cloud to concrete. Someone has an idea for a master plan community with all sorts of different amenities and you go through that process with them. So, you can see how their projects come together. They’re a great group of people, very creative, very organized, and they’re nice people to deal with. They’re very forthcoming when it comes to what their needs are in the industry and what the current market trends are. So, they’re very easy to work with. It’s exciting to see when you place a candidate, you place them at a certain point in the construction process, and you get to see them follow their journey through to project completion.
What makes you a good recruiter?
I think I’m a good recruiter because I ask a lot of questions. I’m very intrigued by someone’s story. I want to understand, not only the person professionally, but I do like to get to know them on a deeper level so that I can understand what their career path looks like from a personality and personal standpoint. There’s a lot more that goes into the career life than simply what the resume says.
What helps you succeed as a recruiter?
Well, I think the environment that I’m in helps me succeed. I’ve been in other recruitment situations that haven’t been as supportive as we have here at DMC. I think we’ve got a lot of good systems when it comes to sourcing and outreach to passive candidates specifically, helping find candidates quickly is obviously the name of the game. I have a good support network both internally and externally if I ever need assistance with a role. Being able to develop relationships early in the process and bring value to those relationships is imperative to being successful in recruitment. So, I think that’s one of the things that I’m very good at and translates to the success that I’ve had throughout my career.
What’s your favorite recruitment memory?
I mean being recruited by DMC was an interesting one because I had just been let go from Ranstad, and I got this call from Stephen Borer, who I didn’t know anything about. I’d never heard of DMC Recruitment either. It was an interesting time, I’ve never been a part of a start-up type environment, which was scary and exciting all at the same time. So, going through the recruitment process with DMC was interesting. It’s a great place to work for myself. I love it.
But aside from that, I will always remember my 1st placement that I made back in 2015. It was a director of HR with a manufacturing company. The recruitment process was still fairly new and I got my 1st placement within the 1st 3 months, which was awesome.
How would you define recruitment in three words?
Fast paced, exciting and time consuming.
If a recruiter was an animal, what animal would a recruiter be?
My initial thought was a beaver. Beavers are known for their industriousness, building intricate structures like dams and lodges. Similarly, a recruitment consultant is constantly working to construct connections between job seekers and employers, creating a network that benefits both parties. Additionally, beavers are meticulous planners, carefully selecting materials and locations for their constructions. Likewise, a recruitment consultant meticulously evaluates candidates and job openings to make the best matches.
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As we conclude this interview with Tim, we learnt about Tim’s vast background in sales & marketing, understanding of the industries he works in, and much more. Tim also has a short biography and a continuously growing collection of testimonials which can be viewed on our website.
If you’re intrigued by the world of recruiting and aspire to learn more about carving a successful career path in this dynamic field, reach out to Stephen Borer at [email protected], a partner at DMC Recruitment Group.
