When did you join NAPS and how long have you been a member?
I honestly don’t remember, but I am sure it was before the invention of the fax machine! I do recall a NAPS affiliated afternoon meeting in Atlanta during my first 12 months in the business, so that would been in the 80’s.


What have been the biggest benefits you’ve realized come from being a NAPS member?
Talking with other recruiters and listening carefully to trainers. Considering new ideas, approaches, and techniques always renews my curiosity about the people-problem-solving parts of the job. I like the challenges of being a recruiter.

In the NAPS community so many good ideas bubble up to the surface. Often with one of those ideas, I have challenged and broken through the assumptions that my clients or candidates have let stand in the way of their success. I like to think that it is usually clients or candidates who benefit from having assumptions challenged, but frankly, most often it is me. NAPS people do that for me. They are biggest benefit to my professional growth.


What is your involvement with NAPS today?
Going to conferences and interacting with other recruiters. I love hearing recruiters talk about breakthroughs with clients, candidates, and themselves. It always involves careful listening, and then it is often articulating their hazy intangible desire into a practical concrete solution. And finally, professionalism when executing on the plan.


What would you say to someone considering joining NAPS?
If you are going to do this job, join NAPS. Ask questions. Learn from those people who have travelled this recruiting road before you. In truth, I have learned my most important, lasting lessons in this business from my failures. And I firmly believed that much of whatever success I have had has come from humble admissions of mistakes by those recruiters and trainers who have been willing admit to missteps in order to teach me.


What upcoming plans, initiatives or events are you most excited about in 2021?
Attending any virtual events that I can during this time of difficult travel and talking with those recruiters who have become wonderful friends through the years. They are the ones who are willing to share their perspectives with me when I get that uneasy feeling that my thinking today is not quite offering me the solution I need. NAPS people are there for me when I need a new idea. Or, as Greg Doersching once said to me, “Vickers, here is an old idea that you just overlooked!”


Anything you would like to add that we have not covered?
NAPS has made a difference for me. In a commission-based job where success and failure seem just a hair’s width apart, having people in your life who share that same challenging reality day after day can make all the difference in keeping an optimistic outlook. Our clients and candidates need us to be optimistic. It is most often when they are losing their own optimism that we usually hear from them.