Saying Yes: Applying Theatre Skills to Building a Inc. 1000 Staffing Company, with Jared Coseglia, Ep #72

When 9/11 happened, Jared Coseglia had to give up his career as a theatre director and landed an admin job in a recruitment company. Twenty years later, he’s the CEO of an award-winning staffing business that not only survived but actually thrived during the pandemic. 

In this interview, Jared shares his experience of building a highly successful recruiting and staffing company. One of the keys to growing your recruitment business is identifying, recruiting, mentoring and retaining the best people.  Jared gave specific suggestions on how to recruit recruiters and then create an environment where they can achieve their potential.  He also revealed his secrets to building a brand through thought-leadership and PR. 

Jared is the founder and CEO of TRU Staffing Partners, an award-winning staffing company representing talent and opportunities in the data privacy, e-discovery, and cybersecurity verticals since 2010. Jared has successfully placed over 3000 professionals in full-time and temporary positions at the Fortune 1000, Am Law 200, and throughout the global consultancy, service and software provider community. His ability to identify, deliver, mentor, and help retain talent has given him the privilege of quickly becoming the globally recognized “go-to” individual for hiring managers and job seekers in need of staffing solutions or career guidance and management in legal technology and data protection.

Episode Outline and Highlights

• [3:16] From being a theatre director to becoming a recruiter.
• [7:54] Two valuable tips on candidate preparation - Jared shared how he preps his candidates from a director’s perspective.
• [12:13] Growing a business from scratch and becoming a market leader
• [17:56] The benefits of the contract staffing business model.
• [22:00] Temporary staffing and retained executive search - how to do both!
• [29:20] Leadership advice: painting a picture and being a visionary.
• [31:10] Hear two pointers in successfully recruiting recruiters. 
• [38:00] How sincerity and caring for people have contributed to TRU Staffing Partners’ success.
• [41:03] Mentoring your staff - making yourself available to your employees
• [46:30] How to respond when people in your organization make mistakes.
• [50:11] The importance of hiring agents and experts.

Transferring Skills as a Theatre Director to Talent Representation and Interview Preparation

Jared started his career in the theatre industry - which sadly became difficult when 9/11 happened. He then shifted to the recruitment and staffing business, which he started as a temp doing admin tasks. He eventually learned to source and successfully applied the skills he developed in the theatre. As Jared said, “I likened it to casting. Because when you’re a director you’re always casting shows. I do think there are quite a lot of similarities to being a theatre director where at the end of the day your mission is to harmonize the human capital of all the different disciplines that go into making the work of art.” 

Aside from the comparison of sourcing to casting, he also believes that clarity and articulation of thoughts, as well as appreciation and access of the human condition from the inside, contributed greatly to his success, which he gives credit to his theatre background.

Prepping Your Candidates

How do you prep your candidates to set them up for success? Jared shared a lot of commonalities with his previous career in the theatre. Some key pointers are:

• Know the audience
• Help the candidate shape his performance for that audience
• It is not just a knowledge transfer, but also creating a safe space for people to make mistakes. 

Jared explained, “Think of it this way, when you’re an actor, you have ideas. But mainly you don’t share those ideas or you don’t try those ideas out on stage without permission. So a good rehearsal process, when you’re a theatre director, is giving actors permission and creating a safe space for people to make mistakes, say the wrong things, try things that don’t work so that you could guide them to the ones that do.”

How to Successfully Recruit Recruiters

When Jared was scaling his business, he recognized the challenge in hiring skilled recruiters. He actually hired around one-third of his people through an agency. He also revealed some of his secrets to acquiring great talents. In his words, “You have to find great people to invest in at a young point in their career, not age, but a young point in their career in this space.” He backed up his advice by sharing amazing real-life examples of people he’s hired.

Jared argued that recruiting for your team is somewhat similar to doing improv. “You know there is a saying in theatre, that when you’re doing improvisation, you have to say yes.” He then elaborated on how saying “yes” applies to recruiting good recruiters.

Jared Coseglia  Bio and Contact Info

Jared Michael Coseglia is the founder and CEO of TRU Staffing Partners, an award-winning staffing company representing talent and opportunities in the data privacy, e-discovery, and cybersecurity verticals since 2010. 

Jared’s unique style of representation, a vast network of relationships, and subject matter expertise have helped earn him and TRU a host of awards including the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America rankings two years in a row, #1043 in 2016 and #1189 in 2017.

TRU has been voted a top three legal and/or litigation support staffing agency for seven consecutive years in both the National Law Journal and the New York Law Journal, winning first place for National Law Journal’s 2018 Legal Outplacement/Career Transition Coaching and Corporate Counsel Magazine’s Best Legal Outplacement/Career Transition Coaching in 2016. TRU was also recognized in 2019 as a Hall of Fame recipient in NLJ’s Best Legal Recruiter category.

Jared is an active member of the legal and cybersecurity community and, in addition to his role on the Board of Editors for Cybersecurity Law & Strategy (an ALM Law Journal Newsletter), he has authored over ninety articles, regularly appeared on a dozen podcasts and webinars, and spoken at over fifty conferences. Coseglia was awarded Best Reviewed e-Discovery Session at Enfuse 2017 for his lecture and Q&A on “Transitioning Your Career from ESI to Cybersecurity” and was the recipient of a 2017 ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) Publication Award for Outstanding Magazine Article by a Business Partner for the article “Moving into Management: What You Need To Get From Here to There.” Coseglia is currently writing a regular series on cybersecurity, e-discovery, and privacy certifications for Legaltech News as well as a bi-monthly column about Chief Privacy Officers for CPO Magazine which can be read, along with all his original content, at www.trustaffingpartners.com.

• Jared on LinkedIn
• TRU Staffing Partners website link
• TRU Staffing Partners on LinkedIn
• TRU Staffing Partners on Twitter @trustaffingpart

People and Resources Mentioned

• Amanda Brandenburg on LinkedIn

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