Talent Acquisition Specialist, Sweetwater Sound

My name is Jordan Applegate. I'm a Talent Acquisition Specialist in the Human Resources department at Sweetwater Sound. Sweetwater Sound is the nation's number one online music retailer for pro-audio equipment and musical instruments. Basically, what I do is I manage the hiring process from interested applicant, hey, I'm surfing the careers page, I'm interested and I'm going to put an application in, all the way through the onboarding process. The way that Sweetwater's Human Resources department is set up is we actually have multiple Talent Acquisition Specialists, so I'm one of three, and we're kind of compartmentalized in the areas that we hire. So specifically, I hire for our Marketing department, our Merchandising department, Information Technology, part of our Service department, which has this Behemoth of an area called our Guitar Gallery, it has 50 or more employees at this point that do all the evaluations of any guitar that we sell a customer. Depending on the skillset, whether it be technical in nature or whatever else we're looking for, I will do a lot of proactive recruiting or what I would like to call headhunting, I come from a third-party staffing background, so I really like to put the headhunting cap on and utilize things like LinkedIn, other job boards and even social media, so Facebook and Twitter accounts and things like that, so I've been trained in a scientific style of searching and that's called Boolean search terms, so I can create this profile of an individual by using specific algorithms and Boolean search terms to really laser focus and filter down to an individual who plays guitar, has graphic design experience, and is from the state of Oklahoma, per se. We also use our customer database as a tool for us. Since we're the nation's largest online music retailer, we have tons and tons of customers that are already huge fans of ours and understand the culture in which we've created and the expectation that we've created for customer service, so because of that, we lean on our sales team to say, "Hey, do you have a customer that's a graphic designer?" Or, "Do you have a customer that's a web programmer "or someone who would be interested "in doing what you're doing in sales?" To really help in the recruitment process for us, as well.