Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III & Part V

A Greater Philadelphia firm defining best practices in the talent acquisition and HR industry

Harry Griendling is the founder and CEO of DoubleStar, a talent acquisition, advisory, and analytics consulting firm. Since 1993, Doublestar has helped hundreds of business attract and retain top talent in industries like healthcare, banking, pharmaceuticals, engineering, and biotechnology. With Harry at the helm, DoubleStar has grown into a leading partner for organizations looking to recruit staff; the company has appeared twice on the Inc 500 list of America's Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies and six times on Wharton’s Philadelphia 100 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the Philadelphia area. Recognized for his thought leadership in the HR industry, Harry has been honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the Philadelphia Business Hall of Fame.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you tell us about your clients?

HARRY GRIENDLING: Most of our client base is companies that are either technology- or science-driven. We’ve done that on purpose. When we started the firm, we were very smart about healthcare and IT. Back in the early days, 70% of our business was in IT and we were probably the only firm that had a clue how to talk to a CIO about his or her IT needs.

Now, we have business in financial services, pharma, biotech, healthcare, IT and some other random industries here and there that we’ve learned along the way. But those five are primarily the work we do. We’re very strong in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and biotech. We have already started working on putting an office in Boston next year because of the biotech community there. We have an exceptional client base and history of accomplishing projects in that area, so we’re going to expand up there.

Q. Are there any specific case studies over the years that you’d like to share?

A. With over a thousand clients, it’s difficult to remember every project at this point, and especially since I’m a little older than I was when I started the firm.

Some of the case studies that I remember that stand out for me are probably not our greatest hits, but they were things that we were meaningful or significant to us at that time.

One is with a local hospital system. We were there recruiting function for ten years. When I think about what it takes to have a ten-year partnership, it’s like a marriage: you have fights, you argue about the children, you fight over who gets up and goes to the office today and who stays home and takes care of the sick kid—all those things were part of our relationship with that client, and the fact that we were together for ten years was really an amazing feat. I ask my friends in the industry around the country if they’ve ever had a ten-year relationship and I’ve yet to find anybody who has had a continuous, ten-year relationship with a client. For me, that was sort of a testament to not only our commitment but to the client’s commitment to making something work, and it was very cool. We saved that company probably $3 million a year for ten years, compared to what they were doing before we got there, so it was valuable to us and it was certainly valuable to them.

I also remember one where we trained a global workforce for a global pharmaceutical firm. We trained their recruiting team in Europe and in the US, and they had a small operation in the Middle East. We trained all of their recruiters. We wrote that from scratch. We developed it. And as a result of the client pushing us to do that, because that was not a service we typically offered then, we were able to launch that as a product line and we’ve done that for a lot of clients. I remember that relationship as well being a pretty cool project, where the client took us out of our comfort zone and made us better.

Q. How would you describe your overall strategy? What’s next?

A. Our strategy is to remain a super-regional powerhouse, if you will. We never sought to be national, we never sought to become a $100 million company. We sought to be a great boutique provider of our services in our region, and to be known as the thought leader and the expert.

We don’t have aspirations to grow nationally. What we’re doing currently to help with growth, because we do want to grow, is to look at Boston as our next beachhead and then fill in the area between Philadelphia and Boston. We have a lot of clients in north Jersey, a couple of clients in New York, we have some clients in Connecticut, one or two in Boston—what we’re going to try to do is focus on building that out and become really super-regional, or at least the boutique firm of the Metroliner of the Amtrak cities and try to put our services in all those areas.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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