Jonathan Yung, Founder and Managing PartnerIn an interview with Manage HR, Jonathan Yung, Founder and Managing Partner of Vertico Human Capital, shares how the company’s agile approach helps them serve clients in an efficient and customized manner.
Could you brief us on the inception of Vertico Human Capital?
I founded Vertico Human Capital in 2013 to help businesses in the digital space find leaders who’d drive their organization’s vision. I was inspired to become a headhunter when I was a teenager and listened to a career-related speech at my middle school by a friend’s father—who was then leading Korn Ferry in the region. Driven by an idea of a career in recruitment, I decided pursued a degree in human resources while in college in the US. After graduation, I joined J. Robert Scott, a Boston-based executive search firm focused on technology companies. I was later relocated to London—one of the most highly specialized executive search markets globally. The experiences I gathered from all these places made me understand the importance of extensive industry-specific knowledge while filling leadership roles.
However, coming back to my native country Brazil, I realized the executive search market has been operating in a generalist capacity. There weren’t companies that focused on a niche market, and that was the spark behind starting Vertico Human Capital. Today, we are a team of 30 people committed to sourcing talent for leadership roles in the digital space based on a retainer model. We do executive search for digital-native companies or traditional companies that are in the process of digitalization.
Please tell us about the process that you follow to serve your clients.
As specialists in recruiting executive-level professionals for digital, technology, and innovation companies, we believe that executive search is about pragmatism, persistence, and passion for finding the right person. We have designed our processes in a manner that serves each client in a highly customized way with commitment, agility, and extreme transparency.
Our entire process is driven by metrics that help us to quickly identify the potential problems and challenges in the talent search field. This data-oriented approach has provided us with the inputs, for instance, to address the highly seasonal nature of recruiting. We have observed that callback ratios from candidates are the highest at the beginning of the year. We provide these stats to our clients and start a lot of searches in January to garner better outcomes. Our company also follows a human-first approach. We are empathetic and design processes based on each client’s specific needs, considering their organizational contexts, objectives, and structures.
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We have designed our processes in a manner that serves each client in a highly customized way with commitment, agility, and extreme transparency
As our approach is person-focused, we evaluate candidates also with the same care. We realize that candidate experience is highly crucial for successful recruiting. The candidates should not feel that they are just one prospect in a bulk recruitment process, which mandates the need for executive search to be highly customized. We always send out highly tailored outreach messages to each candidate. We pay close attention to the candidate’s track record and make sure to gain access to good references—both formal and backdoor—to obtain valuable insights on potential hires. To enhance the quality of our services, our team also goes through quarterly training on candidate experience. We bring in experts as guest speakers to help us design and improve our overall processes.
What is the key differentiator that sets you ahead of other market players?
What really differentiates us from the competition is our commitment to diversity. Our company consists of about 70 percent female employees. We have individuals from non- dominant ethnicities, different sexual orientations, age groups, and religions. Also, we hire people from the technology companies who are employed in business roles for industry-specific inputs. This fusion of diversity in experience and expertise helps us serve clients across the globe.
While sourcing professionals for clients, we pay close attention to DEI and focus on shortlisting candidates from different ethnicity, race, and gender to ensure the placement of diverse candidates in leadership positions. In fact, our team has successfully maintained diversity across historically male-dominant roles, such as CTOs and CFOs.
Today, we see ourselves as part of breaking the cycle of male-dominated leadership. Our company proactively takes the responsibility of creating bridges for individuals who do not have access to opportunities in the corporate world due to numerous structural barriers.
