Q&A

Hiring the right people for your business

Tips from staffing agency founders on how to find your best employees

(Photos by Paula Marshall)

Hiring the right people can make or break a retail business. From sales associates to store managers, the wrong hire can lead to burnout, turnover and lost sales — while the right one can strengthen a team and improve the customer experience.

Grapevine agency founders Lori Zuker Briller and Rachel Zaslansky Sheer have spent more than two decades helping companies identify and place talent. Through their work with employers and job seekers, they’ve seen firsthand what leads to successful hires — and what often goes wrong.

Here, they share their perspective on finding the right candidates, building roles that attract good employees and why getting back to hiring basics never gets old.

—Interview by Marcy Medina, edited by Bianca Prieto

How did you come together to found Grapevine?

Zaslansky Sheer: My former boss and mentor, CAA Managing Partner Kevin Huvane, had told me if I ever started my own agency, all of CAA would be my client, so I had started plotting and planning, and I got a phone call from Lori, who had caught wind of my plans. We had a coffee meeting and clicked instantly.

Zuker Briller: Rachel had taken my old job at a recruiting agency, so we knew of each other. We both had that entrepreneurial spirit and backgrounds in the entertainment industry. With Grapevine, we reinvented the way people were looking for jobs before LinkedIn. We gathered all the emails we had and blasted postings once or twice a week. Other agencies copied us, and we still do it today. We started out recruiting entertainment industry assistants, then house staff, support staff, chiefs of staff and social media managers. We’re now pretty balanced across all areas and can do any type of staffing search outside of IT.

Your new book, “Straight From the Grapevine: How to Crush Your Job Search,” is out this week. How would you describe it?

Zuker Briller: Back to the basics. It’s for everyone–people who knew but lost sight of the basics, or those who never knew the basics because they grew up in the age of the internet or Covid. It’s a straight-shooting playbook for what you need to be doing to land your next job, or what to know if you are trying to hire the ideal candidate.

Zaslansky Sheer: It comes from 20 years of watching people do the wrong things. There’s a lot of Do’s but also a lot of Don’t’s. It’s meant to be read and re-read and highlighted and shared. Just like we support our clients long-term, we want to support anyone who reads our book. It’s tough to land a great job and also tough to hire the perfect person, so understanding each side of the process and knowing what a candidate or a hirer is thinking is really valuable.

What would you tell a small business owner who is trying to hire key staff positions?

Zuker Briller: Be crystal clear about the role you are looking to fill. Be truthful about compensation and what that person needs to get paid in order to stay with you a long time, because the cost of turnover is high and you only want to do this once, especially if you’re paying an agency fee. If you are using an agency, trust their expertise and empower them to do their job. Also, be realistic about your timeline because good candidates move fast. Be ready to pull the trigger and hire someone or you will lose good talent.

How do you know when a job candidate is “the one?”

Zuker Briller: Aside from checking all the boxes for skills, some of it is intuition, a gut feeling that someone is going to be right for the job. If a resumé comes across my desk that is outside the box, I still might encourage a client to meet that person because it could be something unusual that stands out to them. It’s also a lot of luck. Sometimes you just have to take a chance on someone and hope that it pays off.