Success story of a partnership between Archetype and ESAB: How we replaced someone that we placed 25 years ago!
The success story with our client ESAB is an example of a successful partnership. Since the start of the collaboration in 1994, the companies have evolved through various projects, creating a foundation built on shared values and objectives. ESAB, a renowned welding company, embarked on its journey with Archetype with a vision of enhancing its workforce through strategic recruitment and training initiatives.
25 years ago, Archetype was contracted by ESAB to recruit a new Sales Engineer for West Flanders. Roger Cattoir was recruited by Marc Diamant (Archetype) and embarked on a successful journey within the company. As a continuation of the partnership, ESAB contracted us again to recruit the same position 25 years later when retirement approached for Roger.
Herman Heymans (Archetype) had found the perfect candidate, but one could argue that his experience in the field did not necessarily match the job description. However, we at Archetype don’t stop at the job description. We evaluate skills, people, and aspirations. Vincent Lawaese emerged as a promising candidate; despite his lack of direct welding experience, we were convinced that his strong soft skills and motivation to enter a more technical role compensated for his lack of experience in the field.
His extensive sales background and familiarity with clientele from his previous role enticed the interest of Eric de Man (ESAB Sales Director for The Netherlands and Flanders) and his team during the interview process.
Here we want to thank Eric and his team for being open to think outside of the box and looking beyond the shortcomings of adequate welding experience.
The importance of looking at soft skills
The partnership between Archetype and ESAB sets a perfect example for companies to be attentive to the whole skill set of a candidate. In our selection process, beyond the CV, we pay particular attention to what is the “Archetype” of a candidate representing your company in terms of values, identity, ethics, and here particularly in terms of soft skills.
It goes without saying that for some profiles technical and hard skills are important, but here we want to emphasize the importance of looking at the candidates motivation and interest. A CV tells us what candidates did, but not necessarily what they want to do.
This story shows the importance of a human-centric approach, evaluating candidates’ soft skills through personality assessments, sales tests, role-play, etc. This allows us to uncover the complete potential of our candidates, because if we had merely stopped at the screening process with Vincent, he would have never thrived at ESAB.
