What it’s like to work for Handler: Laura Lloyd

Laura Lloyd is a Search Partner at Handler. In 2015, she joined the Handler Team as a Search Consultant with Eric Handler to “build the new Handler.”

Laura is responsible today for the client success of all Handler searches, and she says delivering leaders worth following and serving others is her passion. She worked previously as co-founder and Chief Advancement Officer for an independent, K-12 new school in Alpharetta and with Speer & Associates as a management consultant leading strategic consulting engagements worldwide as a financial services/banking expert.

Laura loves playing tennis and spending time with her family—who all just so happen to live on the same street–in Atlanta.

We asked Laura to share her experiences working with Handler and here’s what she shared!

Question: What made you want to work for Handler?

Laura: I have a great story of why I wanted to come to Handler. It’s the day that I met Eric Handler–at a conference. He was a speaker, and he ended up sitting next to me as we were watching a presentation, and we struck up a conversation and realized we had a lot in common, and from there continued to build a friendship.

And I thought I was going to Eric for some career advice. We were having lunch one day and he looked at me and he said, I think you should come to work for Handler. I looked at him, and I thought he was confused. I had never thought about the search business before. I had been in Consulting, but I had never been in the search business before, and it took a little bit of time for me to process through that and for him to convince me, but in the end, Eric Handler is a leader worth following, and he had such a compelling vision for this organization that I just wanted to be a part of it and that was over seven years ago. It’s ended up being one of the greatest career moves I ever made. The reason I love it so much is because we have the chance every day to impact a life or to impact many lives, and the team we’ve created here where we are 100% for one another is unlike any organization I’ve ever experienced.

Question: What do you like about Handler’s approach to recruiting?

Laura: We like to say at Handler that recruiting is personal, and it really is personal. We build these relationships with our clients and with our candidates, and we have to earn their trust. 

We do what we say we will do, and they trust us over a period of time, and I think that’s what makes our approach so much different than other firms because we do take it so personally, and we invest deeply, emotionally into our candidates and our client’s needs. And we have pigheaded determination because it is not easy recruiting in this environment, but with that pigheaded determination, we continue to drive, drive, drive towards success for our clients. And in the meantime, we get to meet some fascinating people. And so, that’s why I think our approach is so different. We will not stop until we find the right candidate for our client.

Question: What does it mean to be “100% For One Another?”

Question: What does a typical day look like for Handler? Is there such a thing as a typical day?

Laura: There is no such thing as a typical day, and yet, there is a typical day and that is to expect the unexpected. Your day is organized and planned to execute certain things. All day— you have meetings and things like that and with one phone call or one email, everything can change. 

I think the typical day at Handler is a day where you sit down to begin your day, and you look up and it’s 6:00 at night. It is multitasking, it is collaborating with your teammates all day long, it is reaching out to candidates, it is reaching out to clients. It may be responding to the client, or aid in organizing interviews, or rescheduling interviews. 

Sometimes it feels like you’re an orchestra leader because you’ve got one thing going on one screen, another thing going on another screen. I generally use four screens at a time.

It is forgetting to eat lunch, it is sometimes just a lot of laughter because laughter is for sure, part of the Handler typical day because you just experience so many funny and unusual things. 

What’s most important in a typical day at Handler is to be present, be present with the person that you’re engaged in, whether they be a CEO or whether they be one of our teammates or whether they be a potential candidate, you interact with so many different people daily. 

One of our colleagues calls a typical day at Handler, where you just feel like you’re in a web of lots of different interactions and lots of activity. 

Question: What was one of your most memorable experiences during your time with Handler?

Laura: I had been at Handler for about a year and Eric heard of an opportunity with one company up in the Chattanooga area. 

He asked me to go with him to close this business deal, close this search and maybe kick off the launch of the search if we got the deal. And so it was 50-50, and we were very excited because we didn’t have a lot of revenue back then. 

The only problem was we were in a blinding snowstorm. I mean the whole city of Atlanta had shut down, and we get in the car and drive on I-75 North to Chattanooga and the mountains, and I looked outside and it was blinding snow. 

And I looked at Eric who was driving, and he was laughing and just having the best time and thinking about how great and fun this was, and I was pretty sure that he was a crazy man. I was pretty sure that I was a crazy woman for ever agreeing to get in that car, but we did get the search and we made it home safely. So that is a memorable experience of how important new client relationships are at Handler. I might mention the leader we hired for that company is still there today doing a wonderful job!

Learn more about Laura here, and connect with her on LinkedIn.

Interested in joining Team Handler? You can apply to become a Search Consultant today.