About
A little secret: I'm not really a recruiter.
At least, that's not how I spent most of my career. For 22 years I was a sales leader. I hired people, built teams, and managed them day to day. I lived with the results of every hire I made, the good ones and the ones I got wrong.
That's the lens I bring to this work. When I'm helping you fill a role, I'm not thinking like a recruiter trying to place a candidate. I'm thinking like the manager who has to make that person successful, because for most of my career, that was me.
I started at Paychex in the mid-90s and spent 15 years there, working my way from sales rep to leading a region of 70 reps and 8 managers. After that I ran go-to-market as a VP and president at a handful of growth-stage companies in HR tech.
In 2018 I made the terrifying (for me) decision to leave my VP of Sales job and start The Jovanis Group. By then I'd seen recruiting from every angle. I'd hired through recruiters I trusted and got burned by more than a few bad ones. I'd been the candidate who got treated like a product to be moved rather than a person to be helped. I thought if I simply treated people in a genuine way, it could work. So far, it has.
The Family Business
In 2020, my amazing wife Jen Jovanis officially joined the business. With over 15 years of sales and leadership experience herself, she brings another layer of perspective and quality for our clients.
We take on a handful of clients at a time and turn down work that isn't a fit. This approach isn't for hiring 50 people at once, and it isn't meant to. It only works if we stay close enough to every search to really understand what you need, and close enough to every candidate to know whether they'll thrive with you.
That's about it. No big agency, no account managers, no handoffs. Just us, doing work we care about, for people we're glad to know.
If that sounds like the kind of partner you've been looking for, we'd love to hear what you're working on.