Working for the man every night and day. . .

So quite a few of you have been asking. ( I promise, evenutally this site will be far less personal and far MORE useful), but I wanted to mention that my new position, what it entails, how I think it will benefit my career overall and some key things I learned in the negotiation and role formation process.

My official title is CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). However, the title is pretty misleading since I have three major roles and a myriad of functions. I work for a financial services company (which owns three other financial services companies), where “the market” is also the majority of who we’re recruiting.

Departments where I stick my nose:

Marketing- This is my creative outlet, I design and brand the entire firm and its subsidiaries and I love every minute of it. Creation, design, copy, layout, distribution are all MINE. Web, print, multimedia, events.

HR- I am responsible for the small amount of HQ employees. By year end, that will be at about 20 or so. I deal with interviews, offer letters, retention but NO COMP AND BENEFITS.

Recruiting- Yeah, I finally get to use the skills I have been sharpening for the last couple years. We recruit an outside force. Much of my marketing comes into play for employer branding and retention, since I am in charge of the numbers I then have to run and distribute.

Okay, so when you write it out, it sounds like a lot. But this is a small firm and even more key, I have absolute autonomy to build and run the departments as I see fit.

Oh my goodness, I am just realizing that there are SO many posts that can come from this, but for the sake of brevity, I will discuss the hiring process. As many of you know, the economy is . . .not great. So as employers began to say “Thanks, but no thanks” (usually in the form of hiring freezes) to outside recruiters, I began to market product packages that including sourcing, employer branding or consulting on how to build a talent pipeline while they were. . .frozen.

I had quite a few happy customers and one company in particular contracted with me for a substantial amount of time. Virtually every week I would get offered a full-time position with the company, always I would say no thank you. Meanwhile, I treated the client with the utmost respect, I rounded down when charging hours, I ensured projects were completed on-time and under budget and I made several key hires that would have cost a lot more had I been charging a contigency rate. So when my now boss came at me with an offer I couldn’t reasonably turn down, I said “Yes, BUT. . .”

“Yes, BUT” can be a very powerful negotiating tool. I made sure he was aware that even if we could not come to an agreement on responsibilities, work schedule, further training and so on, that I would be happy to continue to contract with him at our agreed rate. We both knew there was no pressure and proceeded to go through a two week negotiating process that ensured we were both thrilled with the deal by the time the papers were signed. However, he was aware that I was not going to settle for anything less than what I received, in terms of compensation and flexibility, from my former employer.

I wonder if it’s a bad sign that we began negotiations on Black Monday?

So that’s it. I am now working for the man. However, I am also promoting my personal brand and consulting with all of my former clients (that I can reasonably take on at this point) with his full blessing (another stipulation). There is so much more to tell but I will leave it for another day, thanks for listening and thanks for asking (People asked!)