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NWA’s ‘Vendorville’ Lets Down Guard as Millennials Blend In

2 min read

Cameron Smith, whose efforts to place women on corporate boards of directors was the subject of a front-page story last week, says it’s not always easy persuading denizens of New York and Silicon Valley to move to Vendorville, the Bentonville-Rogers-Springdale-Fayetteville metroplex that’s home to 1,390 suppliers to Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

“We fly them in at night so they don’t look down and see all the chicken houses,” he said. “It looks awful when you’re flying into northwest Arkansas.”

And then there’s a special route that he drives when taking recruits from the airport to the Cameron Smith & Associates office in Rogers.

But it all starts with the phone call, Smith said.

“People don’t realize we have a tough job. ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but in the next five minutes on the telephone I’m going to have you considering selling your house, moving away from your family and taking your kids out of school and quitting your job.’ That’s a big pill to swallow.”

There’s a process, Smith said. “It’s just the way you do it, the way you broach the subject.”

He’ll say to the prospect: “’My name’s Cameron Smith. I’m a recruiter. I’m sure you know why I’m calling you.’ I kind of gently put it out there and say, ‘We have a wide range of opportunities. Here’s my question to you: If we came up with the right opportunity, would you be interested in hearing about it?’

“Nobody can say no to that, so they just bit the hook.”

After that, he said, it’s a matter of discovering what’s important to the recruit and matching the recruit with the right company.

Smith has reeled in a lot of fish on a lot of hooks in the last 22 years, and he’s seen tremendous changes. One of the most notable is a changing of the generational guard.

“The millennials are reinventing the job market. We’re seeing titles and positions that we’ve never seen before. Data visualization expert. What is that?”

“There’s a big paradigm shift going on in the Wal-Mart world because you’ve got the back-slapping person who’s done business one way,” he said, but those back-slappers “don’t have their pulse on social media like the millennials. The millennials, however, don’t understand the most sophisticated supply chain process in the world. Wal-Mart does. So there’s a blending of talents that’s going on right now.

“By 2015, we expect Vendorville to be about 80 percent millennials.”

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