Hello Bloggers:
My name is Dustin Massey, and I am a 24 year old recruiting and networking professional in Greenville, SC. I am a cofounder of GreenPLUG Staffing, a newly developed “Green Energy” staffing firm, as well as the owner of several professional networking groups on LinkedIn.com. I am excited to have the opportunity to express my goals as I continue my career in recruiting.

To fully understand my future goals associated with my career in recruiting, you must first examine my past. My father, Doug Massey, is currently a recruiter, and has been for over thirty-five years. In 1993, when I was eight years old, Doug left his position as Manager of Employment with CRS Sirrine (now Jacobs Engineering) to venture out on his own and develop an EPC recruitment firm. At the time, Doug did not have the finances needed to open an office, so he created a home office in our living room using only four cardboard boxes (for the base of a desk), a closet door (for the desktop), a typewriter and a phone. This is when I began to open my eyes to the world of recruiting.

Over the next six years of my life, I would come home from school every day and watch Doug work. I was truly interested in his work, and viewed it as a learning experience- an opportunity to learn the ins and outs of a career at a ripe age. I’d come home with homework about Christopher Columbus only to learn how to source candidates from companies without leaving as much as a trace that it happened. While most kids were riding bikes and exploring in the woods, I was learning how to build and manage professional connections. By the age of thirteen, I was assisting Doug with executive searches. I remember making phone calls to sixty people with the name “Jason Kimble” just to find the exact person my we were searching for.

Once I entered college, I had my eye on starting off much like Doug did. I developed “Massey Consulting Services, LLC,” offering assistance to independent recruiters on their critical positions under a split-fee basis. This experience led me to merge efforts with my father in 2006, creating “Massey Search Group”. The creation of this new firm required me to leave college early and adopt recruiting as my full-time career. Leaving college was a tough decision, but it may have turned out to be the best choice I have ever made.

Doug and I moved into an office in early 2007, and that’s when the ideas started flowing though my head. First step- modernization! Doug is old-school, so he had been saving resumes into a candidate file in his “My Documents” folder on windows. This needed to change, so we immediately implemented a recruitment software to track our applicants. Next step- branding. Doug had successfully operated for fourteen years without a professional logo. I brought in a graphic design team to create a modern logo, stationary, brochures, and a cutting-edge website. Once these projects had been initiated, we began marketing our firm and expanding our recruitment resources. Doug had never used internet job boards or resume databases, so we began utilizing those resources.

We started 2008 off strong by expanding. Three senior recruiters were hired, and for the first time we could see our efforts paying off. However, later that year when the economy plummeted, our business plummeted too. Clients issued hiring freezes, and our phones slowly stopped ringing. Eventually we had no choice but to close our office and layoff our employees. 2008 proved to be our most profitable year, but not lucrative enough to keep us in business. The year 2009 would be started with another rebrand. Doug and I developed GreenPLUG Staffing, a green energy staffing firm. Along the way, I also developed several professional groups on LinkedIn.com, one of which has over 1300 members.

And with all that said about my past, now I am ready to explain how these experiences have prepared me to accomplish my future goals in recruiting. I am a firm believer that everything I have been through will only prepare me for what lies ahead. I think watching my dreams fall short in 2008 taught me how to turn things around in 2009. I am no longer satisfied with just being a “recruiter”; I want to be something more- an innovator, a motivator, a progressive young individual who will usher in a new era of recruiting for the rising generations. Yes- I want to bring new blood into recruiting, and I have just the ideas to make that happen.

For the next five years, I plan to market GreenPLUG Staffing and franchise it as the top green energy staffing firm. At the same time, I would like to back our firm with job boards- multiple job boards. Over the last two years, I have been buying up premium domain names in hopes of creating job boards out of them when finances get better. Now that the economy is turning around, I have been fortunate enough to start planning these projects.
Although I am not sure you can purely call it a recruitment project, my greatest passion is my project controls networking group on LinkedIn.com. My group, The Project Controls Network, has grown to over 1300 project controls members. I would like to use this group as a platform for bigger future projects. One of these projects will be creating a non-profit professional society for project controls engineers. Sure, there is the AACE (Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering) but that doesn’t cover all project controls engineers. I have two names in mind for this professional society: the SPCE (Society of Project Controls Engineers) or the AAPCE (Association for the Advancement of Project Controls Engineering). I haven’t decided on the proper name yet, but this is one of my largest goals.

Another goal is to establish a project controls engineering major within universities. Although most management and engineering courses touch on project controls, I have yet to hear of a specific course or major dedicated to it. The closest degree available would be a BS or MS in Project/Construction Management. In fact, the only training for this career is offered by software companies like Primavera, consulting companies, and employers. I feel that students interested in a career in project controls would benefit from a BS in Project Controls Engineering or an MS in Project Controls Management. Is this goal directly involved in recruiting? Yes and no. I believe these goals will make me much more than an average recruiter. I don’t just want to provide career opportunities- I want to offer people life opportunities; the opportunity to be better educated, better prepared, and more motivated to conquer life’s struggles.

My future in recruiting is absolute. I sometimes joke that recruiting is in my genes, but perhaps it really is. I have been raised to be a recruiter, and unlike most children who steer clear from following in their parent’s footsteps, I have embraced my father’s profession as my own. Simply put- my father is my role model, and through him I have gained experiences in recruiting that cannot be taught in classrooms. I hope my story has inspired you. I am rising above the failures in my life in hopes of providing a better life for others.

So, what is my future in recruiting? Being more than just a recruiter.