One of PGS Worldwide’s most seasoned and successful recruiters, Lisa Hill is resilient; with interpersonal skills honed by 10 years of hiring experience. Driven by the hunt for the perfect fit, she’s found a way for someone to always benefit from her competitive edge.
“I’m very competitive in a sense,” Lisa said. “I love the joy of having someone else be rewarded as well.”
Before her decade’s worth of talent acquisition experience, Lisa gained her drive for helping others and giving them new opportunities in life as a parole officer for 16 years. She’s seen hundreds of people try, and sometimes fail, to come out of terrible situations, and consistently stood by them to give them opportunities for success. Lisa sticks to the rules but was always rooting for her cases.
“I could’ve been the only person that believed in them,” she said. “I always told them I would try my best to help them, but it’s a devastating situation. It’s not just putting one person in prison because they were doing something bad, it’s punishing their whole family.”
After a few too many cases with heart breaking endings and while raising a family of her own, Lisa focused on her need to help families and her love for connection to catalyze a career pivot towards Human Resources.
Throughout her career, Lisa has performed a variety of roles in Human Resources including her least favorite, payroll (because no one is as serious as when they’re talking about their money), but the idea of building relationships always drove her to want more.
“I’m a recruiter for a reason,” she said. “I love talking to people. That’s what I missed about being a parole officer. Working with people and helping them.”
As a recruiter, Lisa scours hundreds of resumes to match the perfect candidate with available roles, acting as an advocate even after each candidate is placed in their new job. She is a consistent and fierce champion for the candidates she represents.
Lisa had just gotten the opportunity to deliver good news to a candidate who had been patiently waiting for months to receive an opportunity with Lockheed Martin as a Printed Circuit Board Conformal Coater. His experience made him perfect for this role, and Lisa spent those months working hard to make sure he got the chance he deserved.
“That’s my favorite part about being a recruiter, that relationship and the joy that someone has when they find a job, especially when they’ve been struggling.”
In her opinion, recruiters are tough. They have to be. It’s their job to cut to the chase. However, Lisa has seen how important it is to make connections and invest in candidates’ success. She’s heard it in previous experienced being recruited herself, working with recruiters and hiring managers that didn’t seem eager to make these personal connections and invest in their candidates’ success.
“I hope they know that I’m real, that I’m genuine,” she said. “I represented a past recruiter from Raytheon that said she had so many people reach out to her, but she was going with me because I cared.”
Not only does she care about the people she’s helping, but her success is supported by a deep love of truly understanding their vocational skills and dreams.
“I love talking to engineers because they want to teach people about their careers. You can learn so much and you can hear the excitement in their voices,” Lisa said. “You can only view so many YouTube videos to know what they’re going to be doing, but they want to tell you what they’re working on.”
However, she knows that the work can be tough, and she’s seen new recruiters struggle with rejection when they think they’ve found the perfect candidate and it is not working out.
“I hear new recruiters excited about finding the perfect person. They’re so excited, but they haven’t contacted them and keep calling them, and calling them, and [I say], ‘I don’t think that’s your perfect person.’ You’re wasting your time when you could be finding an even better candidate.” Lisa said. “Even having over 10 years of experience, you’re going to get down. You’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to have a lull to get out of. I had one for a couple of months, but then all of the sudden you get offers and today is a good day.”
Lisa is happy to use her skills to cheer on her fellow recruiters. As much as she champions her candidates, she also loves to act as a mentor to those newer to talent acquisition, and wants to watch the next generation of PGS recruiters share success the way she has.
“Just keep grinding,” Lisa said. “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that they’ll get that perfect offer, and that’s what makes it fun.”