In this series, WeWork’s director of digital community selects a WeWork member to get to know better, sharing her fun findings with the rest of the community.
Recruiting is a business all about relationships, and no one knows this better than Matthew Santoli and Chris Myers of WeWork City Hall-based business Bespoke Search Group. Their job is to help clients fill crucial positions with the right people at the right time, and as a result of their holistic philosophy, they’ve grown and thrived. Read on to learn more about finding the perfect candidates and the success they’ve found in going back to basics and using the phone.
How did you get started?
Santoli: Chris and I quickly realized that our approach to recruiting differed greatly from the larger recruiting firms, where things are much more transactional-based rather than that of building long-term relationships. So back in August 2013, we were one of the first residents of WeWork Fulton Center. We started exclusively in finance and accounting recruiting, working across industries and companies, and found quickly after getting into WeWork and meeting other members, we started to develop a deep network not just in Fulton but in all WeWork locations—we have at least a dozen clients in various WeWorks across NYC!
And we’ve been able to help people not just in accounting and finance, but by focusing a large part of our business on startups. We help them make that key first hire all the way up to CTOs or CFOs. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Human Condition Global—they are a great example of a true startup success story and a great client, and we helped them build up from three to about 40 people. And they just received a very sizable multi-million Series A round. We placed one of their co-founders, one of their CFOs, their chief of staff, many staffers. So our clients run the gamut. They are awesome.
When did you discover you had a knack for executive recruiting?
Myers: We both have different stories. The interesting thing with executive recruiting is that you don’t say you want to do it as a kid! I started my career in one of the big four, Ernst & Young, and realized my skill set was better in communications than in spreadsheets. And what I found was when I went to a recruiting team that helped me find a job as an accountant, I wanted to find a job that was very conversational, and they said, “That job doesn’t exist unless you want to come work for us.” So that was my first job, and I transferred up to the NYC area. So I’ve been recruiting almost since the get-go. My whole career, after that first year of accounting post-college, has been in recruiting.
Santoli: Again, it’s something that I just fell into. My previous career—I graduated college at the end of 1999 with a finance degree, and I went into real estate and mortgages in California for 10 years. I worked there, and then quickly post-recession, I had to find something else to do because my previous job didn’t exist anymore in that industry! So I fell into recruiting.
I got approached by a bunch of different recruiting firms. I first started working for a large, publicly traded recruiting firm. I didn’t like it—it was too large for me, all about numbers and transactions. Then I made the move to where Chris and I met, a much more relationship-oriented environment. And after being there for 1.5 years, we realized we could do this on our own, so that’s when we started Bespoke. And we haven’t looked back since! So it was happenstance.
What does your average day look like?
Myers: As a business owner, we are still four people! So a lot of the hands-on aspects are taken care of by Matthew and myself for now. My personal day consists of business development—reaching out to find new connections here at WeWork and in the NYC area—and the other half of my day would be recruiting. One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we recruit differently. We are old-fashioned. We pick up the phone and directly recruit. That being said, it takes a lot of time. So I’m one of the individuals that heads up those efforts. Because you’re not looking for a standard type of hire—you want to go for individuals that are willing to start from scratch. We’re good at identifying that kind of talent, and I spend a lot of my time trying to find those individuals across the five boroughs.
Santoli: I’d echo most of that. I’d also highlight the fact that the way we approach what we do is from a networking standpoint. And that’s different than a lot of recruiting firms out there. Most recruiters, anybody they talk to, it’s about what they can get out of them. We are happy to take a phone call from anybody and utilize our network so we can help them. And that’s where we get a lot of our business from in the end, and passing that along, making introductions for people. And to be quite honest with you, that’s been a great success story for us: not focusing on the money aspect of business and what we do, obviously that’s part of it, but approaching it from the networking aspect. And it makes more sense, since we can tell people that we are happy to help in any way. With three years of having that approach, it’s really come back to benefit us tenfold.
Photos: Katelyn Perry