Smash Notes
#1 Shauna Swerland
On the first episode of What Fuels You, Shauna is interviewed by executive coach, author and friend, Teri Citterman. Shauna Swerland, a Seattle native, is the CEO and Founder of recruiting firm, Fuel Talent. In just five years, Fuel Talent has been recognized as one of the Fastest-Growing Companies, Largest Women-Owned Companies and Best Places to Work in…
People
Notes
-
She is the founder and CEO of Fuel Talent.
-
Opening What Fuels You, Shauna Swerland, CEO and founder of Fuel Talent, says the part of her 25-year recruiting career she has loved most is the stories people tell. She lists stories of leadership, of career choices, of company ideas, and of team building. That curiosity is why she started the podcast: to ask what path brought someone here, which decisions produced the failures and the successes, who influenced those decisions, and what was learned. She describes herself as a connector who likes introducing people, which is why the work has rarely felt like work. The episode then turns to her guest, executive coach Teri Citterman.
-
She was curious about people's lives and wanted to help share their stories as far as how they arrived at a place, what decisions were made along the way, who influenced their decisions, and what they learned in the process.
-
She is an executive coach and author of the book "From the CEO's Perspective" who has spent the last several years asking hard questions and challenging CEOs in the Chicago region.
-
Fuel Talent founder Shauna Swerland jokes, on What Fuels You, that she was born a leader. The earliest memory she gives interviewer Teri Citterman is running for student council in second grade. She lost. A best friend reminds her of the next one: in third grade she persuaded the school to allow auditions on the playground because she wanted to cast Annie. She appointed herself casting agent, and that is what they did at recess. She tells it as evidence that organizing other people started long before the recruiting career, the New York offices, and the Seattle firm she later founded.
-
On the first episode of What Fuels You, Shauna Swerland says the biggest influence in her childhood was her grandfather, inside a family that ran its own business. She calls him the grand poobah and says she was raised to admire his qualities. She also names her mother, her father, and her brother, who is fifteen months older. The memory she has just told Teri Citterman is from third grade, when she got the school to hold playground auditions so she could cast a production of Annie. She was the casting agent. The grandfather is who she turns to when asked who actually shaped her.
-
Shauna Swerland tells What Fuels You that she grew up inside a family business and that her grandfather was the person the family looked up to. Asked for the biggest lesson from him, she says he was tenacious and fearless. He also took care of himself. He died at 101 and a half, and by then he was taking only an aspirin a day. From that example she names self-care and hard work. He came from nothing, she says, and built himself into a successful businessman. Those are the traits she points to when the conversation is still about childhood, before Fuel Talent and her own recruiting career.
-
On What Fuels You, Shauna Swerland says her first work was in the family business, selling clothes for years. Every summer she also worked as a tennis instructor. The first job that felt like a real job was cold calling, dialing for dollars, selling a product she can no longer name, and she says it was not for her. Teri Citterman connects that to the competitive tennis she played later. The family business is the same one she credits to her grandfather, who she says built it from nothing. Fuel Talent, the Seattle recruiting firm she founded in 2013, is many chapters after the clothing counter and the summer courts.
-
She was a competitive tennis player that grew up on the tennis court with her mom. She thrived in tennis, but would have enjoyed a team sport more.
-
She moved to San Francisco and became a recruiter.
-
Shauna Swerland tells What Fuels You that about a year into her San Francisco career, a Los Angeles recruiting firm contacted a colleague. The colleague agreed to open their San Francisco office if she could bring Swerland along. They flew down, met the couple who ran the business, and were hired to open that first office outside Los Angeles. Swerland says they quickly became the top agency in San Francisco, then opened a Silicon Valley office. She later moved to New York to open the New York and Boston offices. Growing up in an entrepreneurial family, she says, is why she realized she was not the lone individual contributor her colleague was.
-
She met her husband and had her first two children there. But, she kept wondering when she would move away as many 20-somethings often did. She wishes she would have started her business sooner, but she let fear impact her decision.
-
She was at work when her team went to the roof of their building and saw the second plane hit the twin towers. After 9/11, she connected with a company in Seattle and began working for them remotely.
-
On What Fuels You, Shauna Swerland says that by 2009 she was running the New York office of Glocap, the recruiting firm she had joined in 2003. About 50 people reported to her, across offices that included San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Greenwich, and the work was a multimillion-dollar business in private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital. When the financial crisis hit, those clients imploded. She names Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. She and her husband David, with two kids and their oldest about to start kindergarten, left their New York apartment and rented a house in Seattle.
-
Shauna Swerland tells What Fuels You she was afraid to start Fuel Talent even with a business sense from her family. She did not know how to read a profit-and-loss statement, and she was not confident with legal documents. For about ten years her dad, her brother, and her husband David told her she could hire those people. Her own capital had never been on the line, so the fear stuck. What changed is that she stayed in the lane she trusts, the firm's reputation, and hired out the rest. Income, she says, became secondary to building a company that reflected her values.
-
The income is completely secondary. Seeing her vision and brand that reflects her values has been incredibly satisfying. She is able to handle people vs. money as she wants to.
-
Make sure that there is a viable idea. Once confident in that, don't overthink it and go for it. Sometimes you must place yourself around people who are encouraging and motivating and ask the "why not you?" question.
-
She collaborated with a few friends. While many names were already taken, she loved the name "fuel" and "what fuels you" came really organically and has become their slogan for nearly everything they do.
-
Fuel Talent is a holding company for lots of smaller recruiting firms. They specialize in the technology and marketing sectors along with finance, HR, personal assistants, and household managers.
-
CEOs sometimes don't know themselves well enough. If an assistant isn't strong enough to ask the necessary questions, they might not be the right fit. Onboarding of the assistant with the executive must be taken seriously.
-
She believes that 80% of life is showing up, following through, and executing. She does a lot of "doing" and taking care of others. Shauna is good at picking up on her environment and isn't into the numbers/science side of some recruiting philosophies.
-
Shauna Swerland says Fuel Talent, her Seattle recruiting firm, wants clients who treat the firm as a partner rather than a vendor. They should not score the recruiters by resume volume. She wants companies whose pay is in line with the market and whose story is easy to sell and close, or who can offer candidates something else if the story is thin. The best clients give her team time with hiring managers so the trust is real. Most of them, she says, are Series A and Series B startups, with or without an internal recruiter, and they let Fuel Talent headhunt instead of posting a job and hoping.
-
A lot of companies do not take into the consideration the comps, metrics, and systems that must be looked at in each industry. It is tough to partner with companies that have not figured out the pace of their markets. Also, some companies do not have a system for funneling resumes and/or an applicant tracking system that allows for an overall game plan.
-
Fuel has added to their business and is not only working with startups, but also larger enterprise clients. The hiring managers within those larger clients are the ones who may not know what Fuel Talent has to offer.
-
Shauna started listening to podcasts within the past year and has become obsessed. She has interests in so many areas and wants to be a part of that.
-
Shauna wants people to email in about what they want to hear about. Topics like networking, interviewing, assessing equity, when to walk away, when to negotiate, etc. will all be discussed. She also wants to go deep with others and challenge them.
-
On the first episode of What Fuels You, Fuel Talent founder Shauna Swerland says a piece of career advice she did not believe early on was that a CEO or founder must understand every part of the business inside and out. She has since decided that was a false belief. She says women in particular have a hard time delegating, and she includes herself: she is not as good a negotiator as she wants to be. Convincing herself she had to master every function was the idea she had to drop in order to run Fuel Talent from the seat she is actually good at.
-
Invest in one another.
-
It takes a village of people to allow Shauna to be a mom and to run her business. She did not realize how satisfying it would be for her to see her kids become self-reliant. She sees it as a gift that she has given them because of her time restrictions and does not want to smother her kids.
-
She admires his mind and his abilities as well as his attitude. Shauna tends to be a Type A personality whereas her husband likes to "stop and smell the roses" which is a good reminder for her.
-
She would love to be a dancer or in something related to sports or entertainment. She likes to be "front of the house" versus "back of the house" as she is extroverted and loves people.
Related notes
- What Does Jonathan Sposato Say Fuels Him?
- What Kind of Discussions Should Listeners Have as a Takeaway From This Podcast
- Why Did Josh Wolfe Warn Shane About Control Freaks?
- What Metrics Do Early Startups Need to Track to Succeed
- What’s Some Advice for Wannabe Entrepreneurs
Related episodes
- #4 Chad Robins
- Jonathan Sposato
- #21 Alissa Leinonen
- Matt Oppenheimer of Remitly
- #12 Fran Dunaway
- Silicon Valley Does Not Care About Female Founders (Guest: Lisa Fetterman, Founder/CEO, Nomiku)
- Bryce Roberts. How Indie.vc is change the startup funding landscape for the better!
- How Dana Severson created a Beef Jerky Subscription business From Home.