Successes—ViOptix

Mohamed S. Elmandjra, PhD, MBA—President & CEO

ViOptix Inc.

Fremont, Calif. (USA)

“What we were looking for was really to build our field sales organization and we were looking for people in specific geographic areas where we didn’t have any relationship or reach. We were looking for a fast turnaround finding someone with very specific attributes that we required for our hire. And we needed to be working with someone who had flexibility in terms of how they’re compensated. That’s how we worked with DEC.

“I have worked with several different organizations and teams of different sizes—all the way from the big hiring search firms to independents. I think it was a good combination of having a nice palette of candidates yet having people that were targeted enough that we didn’t need to review a lot of candidates for a long time … in general the process was fast. Speed was pretty critical to us.

“The person we were able to hire was very qualified. Our criteria were pretty specific. We needed someone that had large-company discipline, small-company experience, to know what it is to be flexible and entrepreneurial and also some specific domain knowledge and, more specifically in our case, it was plastic surgery. So the person that we ended up hiring had those three characteristics …

“Finding anybody especially salespeople is really critical in that you really cannot afford to waste time. And you cannot afford to make wrong hires. In larger organizations you have a dugout. If someone doesn’t work out you cover, etc. In our small organization world, whoever you hire is it. You can’t make a wrong bet. Given that, it is not very easy to find people who can fit the characteristics that you require and also have the independence.

“My experience with the DEC team has been very positive in that they fit a number of criteria that I have, which is: being effective and fast; being flexible in terms of understanding they are not dealing with a huge company and, therefore, there are some things they need to be flexible with in terms of finding the people and how they get paid …

“It’s a nice combination of having the breadth of network they have to be able to put people in front of us and yet not having the huge overhead of a big recruitment firm. I have worked with a whole gamut of different recruiting agents or search firms, etc. and for this specific niche or area—mid-management to entry-level sales—I think it’s a very efficient way of doing it. In this niche, there are slim pickings essentially to find the right people. The DEC team, with this experience, has shown they can do it.

“The value that DEC brings is being able to serve small companies such as ours in a very efficient way. And what I mean by an efficient way is speed, flexibility in the way they get compensated so that it’s affordable for our types of companies where cash is extremely important and flexibility is also important, and also to be able to address a niche of the market that is very difficult to get good candidates from And that niche more specifically is not just the medical device market but within the medical device market, the area that focuses on mid to low-level management sales personnel.

“With their approach, it was cost-effective and efficient. That’s why we decided to hire them.

“Efficiency in this process is to not have to churn and review a lot of candidates that are either irrelevant or that are not qualified or that have demands that are out of what you can offer. Efficiency is kind of the ‘hit rate.’ Over a period of time, how many candidates do you get in front of you and out of those, how long does it take to find a qualified candidate? That’s what efficiency is.

“Efficiency in the case of DEC manifested itself this way. Number one, we quickly started the process. There was not a lot of pre-work. Two, we started getting candidates very quickly after we started the process. Three, we quickly started evaluating qualified candidates. It wasn’t the number of candidates that were before us—we quickly got to the top three that we could choose from and we could get an agreement from.”

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