Episode 24: The Business Value of Talent: Melissa Mounce of GTCR, LLC

Big Fish in the Talent Pool

“Talent acquisition is so core to the business... it’s not just nice motherhood and apple pie initiatives... it’s a critical business function”. So says Melissa Mounce, the Managing Director - Leadership Talent and Diversity at GTCR, the Chicago based private equity firm which holds leadership as a key to their growth strategy. In fact, their approach to finding and partnering with portfolio leadership in core domains is actually trademarked as The Leaders Strategy™. It follows that their Talent and Diversity Leader might have some interesting insights on finding and assessing executive talent to share with us, especially given her career’s foundation in business. No stranger to tough environments, Melissa started her career in Chicago with Motorola Solutions as a global business strategy “road warrior”, and then moved to a business process consulting role with EY/Capgemini. PNC Bank was the beginning of her Talent Acquisition career where she applied her business skills to their large scale hiring challenges, then Aon Hewitt’s RPO, where she oversaw and innovated the logistics of hiring 70,000 people annually. She then led recruitment for Abbott Labs and later Baird Capital, rounding out a career with the widest spectrum of hiring volumes, levels, and roles of any leader on the Big Fish podcast to date. For TA Leaders who wonder what it would be like to “herd the cats” at a PE firm where basically everyone is a boss, Melissa offers her perspective of the pandemic’s silver lining for GTCR. “The COVID environment has made our leadership very accessible. We’re not on airplanes, so we’re using the time to deepen our pipelines and our network of executives who are ethnically and gender diverse.” We also discuss Melissa’s role in the trenches with portfolio company leadership, the power of company culture, and the benefits of slow-rolling executive assessment. Other topics Discussed: Evaluating the “equity value” leaders bring to the table The best metrics to measure efficiency and effectiveness Creating value as a business leader in the PE environment Using company core values to assess and match talent Using “found time” during COVID to deepen the diversity pipeline Connect with Melissa Mounce LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissamounce/?jobid=1234 Additional Resources GTCR Leaders StrategyTM Connect with Erin Peterson Erin is a Talent Acquisition Consultant, Interim Leader, and RPO Advisor with PeopleResults. She has led TA and RPO globally for some of the most successful organizations in the world including Accenture, Aon Hewitt, and Amazon. She translates her unique global experience to help clients with TA strategy, employment branding, onboarding, candidate experience, and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) decisions. Connect on Social Website: https://www.people-results.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/erinpeterson Twitter: https://twitter.com/ErinMcPeterson