DeepN

I’m Teddy Alexander, Founder and Managing Partner of DeepN.   I’m pretty hands-on, and I’ll answer any questions you have when you talk to me. But for now, here’s a bit of my story so you know where we’re coming from at DeepN.

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About 20 years ago, I was stagnating in my career. My father had just passed away, I was thousands of dollars in student debt, and while my job put food on the table (just barely), it wasn’t challenging me to grow in the ways I needed.

 

A friend of mine kindly offered to refer me into a branch of the recruitment company he was managing. I knew nothing about recruitment. But they were interested in my sales background, and willing to take a chance on hiring me.
 

I really enjoyed the work.  I also quickly realized that recruitment can have a dark side for both our clients, and our candidates.

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My first position was working directly with IT professionals.  I saw first-hand that recruiters—trained more in sales than in people skills—sometimes treated them as just a number, when what they wanted was to be treated like valued members of the team. My position, 'Resource Manager,' was aptly named: it encouraged us to think of IT Professionals as resources to be extracted, rather than real human beings.

 

In my later role as a client executive working directly with our company’s largest clients, I witnessed that our clients were also regarded as numbers.  For example, our bottom line was always measured in whether we made market share that quarter, and didn’t take into account the complexities of the clients’ needs and fulfillment of developing long-term relationships. Honourable relationships are harder to measure in dollars.

 

It was as though certain stakeholders believed that a healthy bottom line couldn’t go hand in hand with treating all the human beings involved with fairness, or creating systems that increased everyone’s long-term bottom line and work satisfaction, rather than focusing only on short-term value. 

 

It didn’t make sense to me: there were huge opportunities to provide value to everyone, being missed or ignored.

 

I believe that everyone has the right to work, to earn a good standard of living, and to actually enjoy the process. In that first recruiting role, I made it my mandate to serve my clients and my candidates with vigour, to see the smile on their faces when we placed them in a good fit.

 

I also believe that businesses are built to thrive: to prosper and develop a rich culture of people and resources. In my later role as client executive, I made it a practice to get to know my clients well, both as people and as representatives of their organizations. I encouraged them to talk about their challenges, their successes, and their long-term goals, while sharing a human moment over coffee or a meal.

 

And, the best part was: I was really good at it. I sort of surprised myself by breaking performance records at the company. I earned the income I wanted. I got promotions. Year after year I fine-tuned my processes. I began to notice a new sense of purpose around my work, and see the potential for upgrades in my industry.

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Sure, like everyone else, I enjoyed making enough money to support my family without monthly anxiety. But at the same time, the missed opportunities I was seeing met with my strong values around fairness, and sowed the first seeds of a new model.

 

And then, about five years ago, I had an experience that let me know the world of IT Recruitment was changing.  That’s a long story for another day, or maybe a blog post.  But suffice it to say, I took that experience as an opportunity to re-imagine my relationship to this career path that I had stumbled into so many years before. 

 

After a successful 15 year career in a traditional recruitment firm, placing over 1300 IT professionals in all areas of technology, I started my own company so I could do things differently.

  

I began at the ground level, with my guiding values of Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (the ‘Good F.A.T.s’), and built out my systems and processes from there.  When it was done, what I’d built was a way of recruiting that is about a win/win/win for the client, for the consultant, and for my recruitment firm.

 

I created a specialized agency that is small enough to care and allows us to be hands-on, yet is backed by a scalable support system (contract recruiters and employment specialists to help with compliance, legal, immigration etc). Less ‘throwing’ resumes for quick placement, and more in-depth process and effective systems.  Streamlined operations that generate savings we pass on to our clients. Active Communication and Listening that treat organizations and people not as a numbers game, but as valued relationships.

 

If you’re an IT Professional reading this, we want you to know that we recognize you are an individual with your own needs and goals, and we want you to find a job that does more than just pay the bills.

 

If you are a representative of an organization, we hope you can feel our passion for this work, and how much satisfaction it gives us to connect you with the right team members to serve your customers better, and grow your business—whatever the scope of your project.

 

Welcome to DeepN, a global support system for partners like you: organizations that are working to develop products/services that empower and benefit my fellow humans; and highly skilled professionals who are excited to do that innovative work.

 

I look forward to thriving together.

 

 

Thank you.