Meet Mindy Murphy- BD, Ops, Client Success & Adventurer Extraordinaire

Welcome back to our BWBacon Team Series. We've had so much fun introducing our recruiting team and sharing their stories this year that we think everyone on the team deserves their own moment in the spotlight!

Team Feature: Mindy Murphy

While every person on our team represents the BWBacon lifestyle in their own unique way, Mindy Murphy encapsulates some of the most essential of BWB values in the ways she trusts her gut, embraces change, and inspires optimism for our entire team. In 2017, through a mutual friend and First Descents connection, Murphy met BWB’s CEO and founder, Dave Bacon, and joined the team shortly thereafter as a Senior Account Manager. She is now our Senior Manager of Client Success, Operations & Business Development.

From helping our team grow, to nurturing client and candidate relationships, to being recruited for a National Geographic television show where she would have no contact with the outside world for 30 days beyond her coworkers, Murphy seizes opportunities in front of her and is constantly pushing our team to new heights.

professional background + introduction to the staffing industry

Starting her career at ad agencies as a Creative Producer and an Account Director, Murphy shares that after a number of years in the agency business, she was ready to make a change. After a brief hiatus in the culinary industry where she explored her own creativity and experienced a lot of personal growth, Murphy was recruited by an agency to become a recruiter for Creative Directors, Designers, UX Developers, and all things in the creative space.

“It was a good time for a career change, so I said ‘yes to the dress,’ and learned the recruiting world. I was not sure if I would like it, but I very quickly learned to love it. I love the aspect of working with people, the fast-paced energy, and the ability to help people both from a candidate and a client perspective in terms of growing their teams. It resonated with me very quickly,” Murphy says.

how did you ultimately get connected with BWBacon?

Murphy explains that when she was working in the culinary world, she was also introduced to a close-to-our-heart nonprofit organization in First Descents, BWB’s long-term philanthropy partner and now, office-mates; “it makes me excited every day that we are still involved with such a great organization, and I hope to continue to support First Descents from a culinary and partnership standpoint. To be a part of bringing nutrition to the table of young adults who are experiencing cancer and share how food and nutrition can help support their path through a cancer journey is incredibly important and rewarding.”

She continues, “I share the story of First Descents because it is the origin of how I was introduced to Dave. A mutual friend who was heavily involved with and also a participant in First Descents through her own cancer journey knew Dave and that he was looking to expand his team, so she made the introduction. While I was not necessarily looking to get into tech, meeting Dave and the whole team fit like a glove to me in terms of the type of organization and small firm I wanted to be a part of.”

If you had to give hiring managers advice on hiring in 2023, what advice would you give them?

“I don't care if it's 2023 or 1995, you’ve got to move quickly. Candidates are still entertaining a lot of different opportunities, regardless of how the market has shifted. Be prepared to move quickly, especially with candidates that you're interested in. More than that though, I would say be open...

Over the last two or three years from a candidate perspective, people have been through a lot. They’ve had to move jobs more often than they wanted to, or were put in positions that were not ideal for them, or were forced out of positions they did not necessarily want to leave. As [the pandemic] was something none of us have ever experienced before, reminding clients that being open around a candidate's background is key as the candidate market is opening up.”

What do experienced recruiting agencies bring to the table that other teams struggle with?

Murphy’s response is multifold, starting with how our business is “built first and foremost off relationships and our network. We are in constant communication with the candidates that we're serving, so our ability to form a relationship with a candidate is at a much deeper level than you might be able to form with an in-house team because of the tenure.”

Typically, when working with candidates, our team is not just working with them on one role; it’s actually more likely that we have worked with them on multiple roles or have had a relationship with them for years. Murphy says, “we've seen the lifecycle of their career path, and sometimes that's gone from being a candidate of ours to being a client, and back to being a candidate. There are a lot of people in our network and our referral bases that we have deep relationships with that go beyond the resume and beyond a 30-minute vetting conversation.”

She stresses that the depth of our relationships and the care we give our candidates and clients is one of many benefits of working with BWBacon Group,

Our candidates come back to us year over year, job change after job change because they have had a good experience with us. They trust us. They know that we're going to bring good opportunities to them.”

She also points out that the BWBacon team has very tenured technical recruiters who truly understand the market. “Technical aptitude is certainly another area of expertise we bring to the table. We’re able to pinpoint very quickly if someone has the skill set our client is searching for based on a resume or LinkedIn profile.”

What BWBacon value do you feel best represents you?

“My natural gut reaction is authenticity. Authenticity resonates with me and in terms of trusting your gut, whether it’s about a candidate being the right fit for a role or if a client is a good partner for us.”

Sharing that she is a firm believer in being genuine and that we should be our authentic selves at all times, Murphy emphasizes authenticity as her chosen value because “it can very easily be overlooked in our industry, and that's why our industry can get a bad rap. I truly believe that everyone in our company is authentic at their core and is always looking to be genuine with our clients and our candidates. We're genuinely here to help because we care, and we’re not trying to force things."

"We’re providing a service for both our clients and our candidates, but in our industry, we're not paid until we succeed, so it only serves us to be honest and transparent. Our clients need to trust that we're being transparent and that we’re there for the best outcome for both them and the candidate. It's not about ‘how can we get the candidate another $5,000?,’ it's more like, are we making the right match? Is this genuinely a good fit?" Murphy says.

What was it like competing in an international TV Show with your coworkers? 

A few years ago, Murphy was recruited by co-worker Paul Montague Jr. for Race to the Center of the Earth, a National Geographic extreme reality TV game show. We asked her to share what that was like and what came out of the experience. Murphy starts by saying that the experience “was the most surreal I've had in my life.” She says the way it came about was completely organic, and that she feels grateful to have participated and be included in the opportunity.

“It was awesome to compete; doing something like [the show] with your coworkers was such a unique experience because while we had spent a lot of time together, our time was spent in a very specific capacity of supporting our clients and supporting our candidates. This was 30 days full-on, and the only people we had for support and to support were each other.”

She explains that the experience taught and reminded her of a lot of things about herself, adding, “people would ask me all the time [after the show came out], ‘are you still friends with Paul and Dave? Do you still work there?’ I get that it could look like a challenging situation and maybe you're not still friends from someone else’s perspective, but it's funny when people ask me because it doesn't ever cross my mind. My honest answer is always, we're actually better friends now, and we feel closer. Of course, we had our challenges like any other people would and the other teams did on the show, but how can you go through an experience like that and not feel closer to those people?”

Giving a shout out to the BWB team back home, Murphy says,

I was also constantly humbled by the support of our team internally that was not involved in the show. Even though we had so many reasons to potentially say no, it was such an easy thing to say yes to because of the support of the rest of our team. That was something I'd never experienced before, and it gives me chills to like to this day.”

If you've watched Race to the Center of the Earth (available on Disney+), it looked like a whole new level of like trust and respect was gained between Murphy and Bacon over the course of going through this challenging adventure together. When we asked Murphy if she felt it was true, she shares, “I'll be honest, when Dave and I had our conflicts on the race, it was very natural for me to communicate what I was feeling and how I felt that I wasn't being heard."

She continues, "in the moment it felt as though we weren't communicating as a team in the way I thought we could be, or that we should be to be our best. That moment developed a greater level of trust for us afterwards. There is absolutely a trust bond that was strengthened between Dave and I because of the scenarios and the experiences we had together on the race, and I would think he would say the same.”

Wrapping It Up With Mindy Murphy

Wrapping up our interview with the one and only Mindy Murphy, we've had a blast! Big shoutout and thanks for sharing your background, expertise, and giving us a glimpse into your memories of Race to the Center of the Earth. Murphy has time and time again fearlessly taken on challenges both in business and in life.

We can't help but be inspired by her unwavering determination and her out-of-the-box thinking. If you’ve worked with her on the client side of our business, you understand that her high level of attention to detail and diligence creates an environment of support and success when it comes to growing technical teams of all shapes and sizes. If you’d like to get in touch with Mindy, reach out below!

Here at BWBacon Group, we know and live what you are experiencing as an employer or job seeker in Denver, Boulder, Dallas, San Francisco, New York City or any of the other cities we work in. We believe great recruiting starts and ends with understanding people.

If you have any questions about living, working or playing any of the areas we serve, please contact us. We are happy to help. Seize the day, every day, that’s what we say!