Chuck Hutsell

From the Support Desk to a Worldwide Rollout

His background is IT, and he started his career just as personal computers were entering the corporate scene. He began as what would now be called a technical support specialist, supporting PCs in a corporate environment for a Fortune 500 company based in Nashville. Five years in, an opportunity arrived that he had been aiming at since college: a role at what was then Deloitte & Touche, now Deloitte. Over four years there he ultimately led the worldwide implementation of Lotus Notes.

From Deloitte he moved to an IT consulting company, where he spent nine years. It was a small shop, which meant the job was really three jobs at once. He would go out and sell services, lead a technical services team, and then lead those teams to deliver the projects he had sold.

The Accidental Recruiter

Inevitably, clients would tell him they didn't have a need for a project but were looking for a network engineer or a software engineer. With his technical background, he could easily understand what they were looking for, and with his network, he knew people. So he started matchmaking, treating it as a favor rather than a service.

Then someone called him one day and asked what his fee was, how much they owed him for a successful placement. That's how he found out there was this whole world called recruiting. He began doing more of it at the consulting company, but the firm was small and eventually ran out of money for other reasons. That led him to Thinking Ahead, an executive search firm. By then he had a genuine passion for the work and relished the chance to leverage his IT skills into a job that would let him help people.

Learning the Craft

He arrived at Thinking Ahead thinking he knew a lot about recruiting. He quickly discovered he didn't know much of anything about recruiting. What saved him was a firm that invests heavily in training, and the good fortune of being trained internally by some really good recruiters as well as a really strong leader. He also got trained by the likes of Greg Dorshing, John Bartos, and Greg Savage.

That grounding compounded over time. The training set him up to ultimately lead a global talent acquisition team for a SaaS company, which was his last job.

Leaders Who Shaped Him

The first person who made a lasting impact was John Denton, his manager at Service Merchandise and his first boss ever. Denton wasn't just a manager but invested in him deeply, once telling him he was the son he hoped he would have had. When you're young and just out of college, getting the chance to work for someone who will invest that much in you is invaluable. As Denton would put it, "I'm going to give you just enough rope to climb but not hang yourself."

The second was Larry Quinlan at Deloitte, a manager when Hutsell worked for him who would go on to become the U.S. CIO and then the global CIO for the firm. A brilliant man, Quinlan taught him the value of hard work beyond what his father had taught him, and something subtler besides: the value of not trying to be the smartest guy in the room, but just trying to be in the room with a lot of smart people. He taught Hutsell a great deal about leading people too, largely through the confidence he instilled in the team around him.

The last was Greg Boucher at Thinking Ahead, who completely invested in him and went all in. Boucher turned his whole process around and really trained him. Beyond being his boss, he became his mentor, and even today the relationship continues.