Catching up with Allie Crone
The time we spend at our desks can take up a lot of our time. And while what we do to make a living is important to our lives, it isn’t the full picture of who we are.
So we've set out to discover how our team spends their time during the work day and once they clock out.
Allie Crone joined TurnkeyZRG in 2018 and currently serves as Vice President, leading the firm’s Marketing & Communications practice. Allie has led dozens of executive level searches including Chief Marketing Officer of the Kansas City Chiefs, San Francisco 49ers, Ilitch Holdings (Detroit Tigers & Red Wings), and Comcast Spectacor (Philadelphia Flyers), as well Chief Communications Officer for the US Olympic & Vice President of Communications for the Portland Trailblazers and Philadelphia Flyers. Within the Marketing function, she has also led searches in Live Entertainment & Game Presentation, Digital Marketing, Content and Social Media.
Read on to learn more about Allie.
I wake up around 6:30am in the morning. My kids, Felicity age 5 and Grace age 3, are usually up or wake up around the same time. My husband and I will go downstairs and make them breakfast. After wrestling them to get dressed, ready and out the door, I’ll drop them off at daycare and preschool.
I’ll get home around 8:10am and at that point I'll run an errand or straighten up from breakfast and do some tidying around the house. This is also when I do my daily Wordle.
Then I'll turn on my laptop and start my workday. The night before, I typically make a to-do list for the day. So, I check that first thing in the morning and get those tasks done and answer any new emails.
I'm a vice president at TurnkeyZRG and lead our marketing and communications practices, bringing in and executing searches in those spaces.
My days look completely different depending on the number of searches we are working on.
If we have a lot of searches, the day is just bombarded with phone calls. I try not to schedule a call before 9:30, so sometimes I'm on the phone sometimes from 9:30 (or before if needed) until often after 5:00.
When we are lighter on the number of searches or we’re in later phases of the searches, I’m doing a lot of client management, candidate management, talking people through processes, and doing a lot of business development and outreach to either people I know from a candidate perspective or new people.
If I find a new job or hear that a job is available and open, I do everything I can to get someone from the organization on the phone to pitch our services and bring it in for us to execute.
When I talk to individuals that aren’t candidates for a specific search, my goal is to get a summary of their career and a better understanding of what they are looking for as a next step. It’s helpful to understand from a leadership perspective, type of company, size of company and whether it's an agency, property side or brand/corporate organization so when new searches are launched I know what might be the best fit for them.
I also try to find out some personal information from a family perspective. I’m looking for what motivates them in their career, their trajectory, moveability and compensation range. I want to get a picture of what type of roles will be the best fit for the individual both personally and professionally.
When we are interviewing for a search it's a very similar conversation, but much longer. We do a detailed deep dive into their background, their job history and experience and I answer questions they may have about the organization we are recruiting for and the role. Based on the role, I'll have some specific questions based on what's most important to that position, whether it's revenue growth, digital, leadership and building a team.
Then, if the job requires a move, which most of them do, I ask a lot of questions to figure out, again, how likely they are to move and if compensation would help or hurt the possibility.
I’ve been at Turnkey for over five years. I came in as a director, and I had never worked in executive recruiting before. I worked in college athletics for about eight years prior at the University of Delaware, Oregon State and Rutgers University in finance and administration roles.
I’ve grown significantly since I’ve been with the Turnkey team. I had to learn this business and how to communicate with candidates and clients. In the beginning, all of the work I did was on the candidate side– from interview developing, vetting talent and guiding candidates through a process.
As I grew into the VP role, I started working on business development and with our clients on searches to figure out what's most important to them, what questions to ask, how transparent to be through a process, and how best to communication. I’m now running the full funnel of a search from pitching and winning a search to guiding somebody to sign an acceptance letter.
There’s been a lot of changes in recruiting over the last five years. There’s been a transition to more of a candidate driven market, where candidates can negotiate up compensation and other elements of an offer.
Flexibility is the most important thing that individuals want to hear about.
Most of our jobs require a relocation and candidates want to hear how often they are going to have to go into the office. But the real question they are trying to answer is “What is my life going to look like? Am I going to have the flexibility to take my kids to a doctor's appointment or go see a school play? Or work out during lunch?”
Understanding what this will be is the most important and frequent thing that I'm hearing in the market from candidates that rarely came up in the past.
The time it takes to close out a search has also increased. It’s been the later stages of a process where I've seen it increase– from making an offer to getting a deal done and signed. There is much more negotiation and conversation in that part of the process.
People value career progression for sure, but they also are valuing being able to have more control over how they're spending their time.
I have had several challenges in this field. We are in the people business, so we're affecting people's lives and sensitivity and empathy must be there. But it is also our job to fill a position and do right for our clients. The balance of that may not be the hardest part, but it's always on your mind.
Diversity in our industry is also very important to me personally and to the industry. Ensuring that we have diversity in leadership roles can be challenging when there isn’t enough of it existing. The goal is to make sure we're setting our placements up for success and putting them in situations where they will thrive.
Allie and her family
All dressed up!
To get a break during the day I’ve started taking daily, or almost daily, walks. Sometimes it's even as simple as stepping away from my computer and getting outside. Now that it's nicer weather and warmer outside it is a great break and refresh during the day.
After the day, I wouldn't say I relax. I have a five- and a two-year-old and nothing is relaxing about that.
It’s enjoyable chaos.
Typically, we play outside and when the weather’s bad or cold we are playing games, right now our favorites are Hungry Hungry Hippos and Disney Princess Memory. My husband does a lot of the cooking so he’ll start to get dinner ready so we can eat together as a family.
We also take a lot of scooter rides around the neighborhood (the kids, not me – I run next to them) and go to a lot of playgrounds that are close to our house. We enjoy spending time together and it is important for us to do that as much as we can together after work and school.
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ABOUT TURNKEYZRG
Founded in 1996, TurnkeyZRG is a highly specialized talent recruitment/executive search firm filling C-level, senior-level and mid-management level positions throughout sports, entertainment, music and media. Over the past 25 years, TurnkeyZRG has filled more than 1,400 positions throughout sports, entertainment and media. TurnkeyZRG helps teams, leagues, stadiums, arenas, theaters, college athletic departments, events, sponsors, agencies, media companies, private equity companies and other clients identify, recruit and hire the very best management talent. Turnkey now benefits from ZRG’s global footprint, full array of industry practice groups, data-driven, analytical search tools, and technology investment in changing the way executive search/talent recruiting is done. TurnkeyZRG becomes a tech-enabled disrupter of the prior executive search model.