Lucas James Talent Partners

“There’s a way to do it better… find it.”— Thomas A. Edison

Echoing Edison’s words is Tim Schumm, the founder and president of Lucas James Talent Partners, a Chicago, IL-based on-demand talent acquisition services firm focused on providing clients with a high-quality, cost-effective, variable, and transparent talent acquisition experience. During his decade-long career in recruiting at a nationally recognized firm, Schumm saw first-hand the many challenges and inefficiencies associated with the traditional recruiting model. “Primarily, there was high turnover. Secondly, recruiters would spend a considerable amount of their time (25-30 percent) in monetizing or getting commissions, with the rest lost in non-productive searches. Thirdly, from a customer standpoint, there were a lot of unhappy customers. Clients were often stuck with exorbitant fees and undedicated support that often left both sides feeling at odds with each other,” he explains. In other words, the traditional staffing and recruiting model, which 90 percent of the industry relied on, was broken; it was transactional, inefficient, costly, and lacked transparency and visibility.

Spotting the need for an effective alternative, Schumm founded Lucas James with the customer in mind and worked backward from there to create a unique on-demand model of service. Today, the firm specializes in providing on-demand recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and retained search solutions that change the narrative of traditional staffing.

What sets the firm apart from other peers in the recruitment industry is its skilled team; the company only hires the best, most versatile team members who are able to support all of its clients’ needs. Lucas James comprises talent acquisition consultants and sourcing specialists who work as an extension of the partner organizations—either supplementing their talent acquisition departments or representing them as a third party. “It is a flexible engagement model where we start with four recruiters, scale up to six, then back down to two, and keep their costs associated with talent acquisition fully variable to what their hiring demand is at that point in time,” says Schumm. Another notable aspect of Lucas James is instead of charging a high fee on a per head basis, the firm offers resources as consultants on an hourly basis. “We work with companies that focus on what we call volume-based hiring, where the amount of job openings outweighs their current team’s ability to fulfill those job openings. And, because we operate on an hourly basis, we can fill multiple openings while we are engaged. Thus, we end up saving 40 to 60 percent of the cost compared to alternative models out there,” adds Schumm.

We work with companies that focus on what we call volume-based hiring, where the amount of job openings outweighs their current team’s ability to fulfill those job openings

Furthermore, the company follows a highly targeted approach to source passive and active job seekers. Providing a glimpse into the firm’s client-centered engagement process, Schumm cites, “Every customer engagement starts with a scoping discussion where questions like, ‘How many openings does the client have?’ ‘What is the difficulty of the skill sets?’ ‘What is the urgency with dates?’ and so on are addressed.” Once Lucas James gets an understanding of how many resources are needed, they staff a team. Every customer is also assigned a delivery project manager that not only manages the team and resources but also ensures the team is supporting the customer effectively. Besides, the manager acts as a primary point of contact, extending customer support and ensuring that the project runs smoothly. What follows is a kickoff implementation engagement week where the team meets with stakeholders on the client’s side and creates a standard operating procedure based on the client’s processes: the messaging that they need to use as a candidate marketplace, information about the benefits, so on and so forth. “This helps us really understand what their current process is, how to optimize it, and come up with an engagement model. We then establish our kickoff meeting,” mentions Schumm. As the next step, the team gets to work. “We set all our sourcing technology tools, put up job postings for our customers, and work within their applicant tracking system. By the end of the first week, we are already doing phone screens and working with their teams to fulfill their openings.”

Over the last three years, Lucas James has scripted numerous success stories. A recent instance involves a growing MW-based tech company, which had employees that focused only a portion of their time on recruiting in addition to not having internal dedicated recruiters. The client always relied on agencies or referrals for their hiring needs. Lucas James’ consultants teamed up with the client to support all of their tougher-to-fill technical requirements over a period of three months, which included filling positions such as the front-end engineer, back-end engineer, UI/UX designer, scrum master, and director of product marketing. Partnering with Lucas James, the client was able to hire over 70 positions at a cost-per-hire of eight percent of salary saving 60 percent of the cost compared to traditional firms.

Having carved a unique niche for itself in the RPO landscape, today, the company is treading on a growing path. “We hope to expand our team to 250 members by the end of next year and 600 members in the next five years,” asserts Schumm. To that end, Lucas James is investing heavily in sales and strategically placing sales teams across different parts of the country. “Our long-term vision is to be the go-to player for on-demand RPO, and we will give our all to reach that height,” concludes Schumm.