Every team has people with the spark of leadership. You may or may not have the title, but you have the will to make a difference. Often something holds you back. We’re here to break those barriers to unleash your full potential.
Katie Hagen spent fifteen years building candidate pools inside California’s prison system, some of it under a federal healthcare receivership. If she can find good people under those conditions, “we can’t find anyone” can’t be what stops you.
In this conversation, Lee sits down with Katie, CEO of CPS HR Consulting, to talk about the part of recruiting most leaders skip: what happens before the interview. This one’s for the middle manager without a dedicated recruiting team behind them, the person who’s struggling to find great people. Katie’s path runs from analyst at the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to HR chief at CalPERS. Today, she runs an HR consulting firm serving public agencies in 32 states. Along the way, she and Lee get into what indicates a good hire versus what just reads well on a resume. They talk about how to work with your HR team and your own network to build a stronger candidate pool. And where the line really sits on recruiting the ethical way.
Additional Resources:
Connect with Katie Hagen on LinkedIn
Learn more about CPS HR Consulting
Follow CPS HR Consulting on LinkedIn
Read: Assessing the Landscape: A Comprehensive Checklist for Public Sector Leadership Success
Read: Assessing the Landscape: Workforce Challenges
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Key Takeaways:
- Katie uses a 30/70 split to separate what you can train from what you can’t.
- “Hungry, humble, and smart” beats “smart” every time, and the math behind it is simpler than you’d think.
- The go-to recruiting tool most public agencies lean on is quietly hurting their candidate pool.
- Ethical “warm recruiting” looks nothing like what most leaders assume.
- There’s one part of the process candidates remember most, and it isn’t the interview.