About the Owners

What are your qualifications?

Renee Yousey: I graduated with my degree in Psychology (Industrial) with a minor in Business Personnel (Recruiting) in 1989 and was ready to take on the world! Most companies were not into hiring much during that time and I set out to be a ‘Recruiter’ to find people jobs. Looking back, I wouldn’t change the timing. It really helped me be better at my job. My first recruiting job out of college was with a Fortune 100 company in their Human Resources Recruiting Department (and it only took me six months to find it!). I was with them for almost two years helping hire for professional positions before they started going through heavy layoffs. I learned that when people are let go in a corporation, the worst place to be working is in recruiting…smile. The good thing about the lay-off was that it encouraged me to take a risk I wouldn’t normally have taken. I saw an ad in the paper for an agency looking for recruiters, so I answered it. It was 100% commission and the environment was not a positive one, but I did enjoy working with many companies helping people find jobs. My specialty there was Accounting and Finance and I really enjoyed working with that group of people. I found I was very successful at placing people with companies. I was making a good income, but not enjoying going to work there. We seemed to work against each other and other company offices. After six months, they were ready to put me in charge of the office. A friend of mine gave me some good advice. He told me that I should consider what I am doing today and how that will work into my future. I didn’t see a future with that company and really didn’t want to hire people to work there, so I left and got a job as a recruiter for contract engineers at a national firm. I recruited engineers for three years. The environment was better than my first company, but still not a good one. People were seen as numbers, we didn’t have office supplies, computers, or other tools to do our jobs, there was high turn over and changes kept coming from corporate that didn’t benefit their employees, so again I decided to make a move. At that time I was almost to a point that I wanted to go out on my own. I always loved my job and what I was doing, but didn’t enjoy the companies I was working for. Then, I accepted a position with a company that specialized in the Accounting and Finance area again . Finally, it was a company that seemed to share my values and ideas. It was wonderful! They valued employees and had computers! I learned so much from them as to how a company could be. I was very happy there my first couple of years, but shortly after that, the company went public and leadership changed. After a while, I realized that again I was not enjoying who I was working for. During my time with them I was promoted and opened up a new territory for them as a Branch Manager. We were profitable within three months, even with the large corporate overhead and other red tape we had to go through just to get our job done. Brian Browning and I worked together there for three years and he went with me to open the new branch. We worked great together and both knew what it would take to handle a start-up and the challenges we would have. We really felt like if we were going to be happy and have a good future, it was time to take it into our own hands and start a company. That is how APT started. We formed a corporation in 1998 and started building our business on the strong foundations of ethics, innovation, and a focus on people and meeting their needs! Brian and I have always been the top producers where we worked, so I never really felt like it was a big risk. Many of my friends still ask how I feel about the unstableness of business ownership, but I believe it is the most stable job I have ever had! I can control business decisions and know they are good ones! I will not be laid off and I know because I do a good job and build great long-term relationships in the marketplace, I will always have work and referrals. After a little over a year in business we hit the $1MM in sales mark. Now we have successful offices in Dallas and Ft. Worth and are developing markets in Austin and Houston with nationwide expansion in the near future. The best part is that I enjoy going to work and who I work for (Our Companies and Candidates)!

Brian Browning: I graduated from the University of Central Oklahoma in 1986 with a Bachelor’s of Business Administration majoring in finance and real estate. Unfortunately, this was right after the oil bust and the entire business climate in Oklahoma resembled a ghost town. Since I had worked practically full-time in retail all through college and the job market in Oklahoma was bleak, I accepted a salaried management position at a department store. I enjoyed the fast pace, people interaction, changing priorities, selling, motivating, hiring, and training. In 1991, I was selected to open a store in the Dallas area. Moving to Texas was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life! I continued and progressed in retail management until 1995 when I grew tired of the 60-80 hour work weeks including nights, most weekends, and holidays. In November of 1995, I responded to an ad seeking a recruiter for an employment agency that specialized in the placement of accounting and finance professionals. This job entailed everything that I enjoyed-people interaction, developing long term relationships, interviewing, sales, and a fast pace, in addition to a normal work schedule. I could have a life! I jumped at the chance and soon became the company’s top producer in permanent placements. I received several awards as well as numerous commendations from clients and candidates that I helped. After three years, a new management team took over the company and things changed drastically. This leadership seemed only interested in their own well being instead of taking care of their candidates, clients, and employees. Renee and I had been working together for three years and shared the same win/win/win philosophies. We thought we could do a better job at treating companies, candidates and employees like we wanted to be treated, so we formed our own corporation, Advanced Placement Team in 1998. We have had a lot of fun and helped a lot of people along the way. We would love the opportunity to work with you!

Are you accountants?

No, but we love working with accountants and helping them get jobs. We think we make a great team. Most accountants don’t enjoy interviewing and would never want our jobs, and honestly, neither one of us would be happy doing accounting all day. We have over 15 years’ combined expertise with interviewing and placing accountants, so we understand the terminology and the skills needed for each of the jobs. If we don’t understand what someone is looking for, we know how to ask questions until we do! It is pretty unusual for someone who has been in accounting for years to do well in recruiting and sales. The jobs normally take different personalities. Don’t ask us to come take care of your financials, please! But if you want someone who knows how to find the right person to work with your company and know what they are doing, we can find them! That’s our job!

Why specialize in Accounting and Finance? 

We really enjoy working with Accounting and Finance people. It makes sense to specialize in recruiting a targeted group! The benefit is that you build a close network of good people within an industry. You also become an expert in finding those people. You know what questions to ask and what sounds realistic when you are working on positions. Often times we get calls from companies that we have wonderful working relationships with asking us for help in other areas. We always let them know that we would love to help them, but we just don’t know that much about that particular field. We try to refer them to someone who does. It amazes us that some companies will work with anything thrown at them and expect to do it all well. We know if you give us a position in Accounting or Finance, it will be taken care of and in a timely manner. We have an entire database filled with only Accounting and Finance people and if the right fit is not there, we know how to network to find them!

What is your interviewing/screening process? 

We try to keep our interviewing process short, but our relationship development process long. Most candidates are working and have a tough time spending half a day in an interviewing/screening process. We do want to meet everyone and find out what is important to his or her job search. We want a comfort level with representing them and their skills. Meeting applicants and companies helps us make better matches, but we don’t want that initial meeting to be too long. Typically we will meet the candidates, go through their resumes, ask about reasons for leaving, gaps in employment, experience, and what they are looking for in a position. We like them to meet the whole staff while they are here so that if someone is out, there will still be a comfort level. We then rely heavily on references, degree and certification verifications, and background checks. We will be talking to the candidates frequently during the job search process and will be covering in more detail their experience and how it applies to a specific position, but that is mainly done via phone. We don’t spend time here testing. We think it not a good use of time for someone with degrees and certifications to take more tests. We are happy to administer a company’s test to our applicants if it is something they need for their particular job, but since so many tests vary, we chose to validate experience levels with background checks and interviews. That has really worked well for us. We always are told we have a wonderful group of qualified candidates that are able to perform well on the job. Again, we are into the long-term relationships, so we are careful about keeping a good reputation by sending out only qualified candidates.

How are you different from your competition?

We only know about the places where we have worked and what candidates and companies tell us. Every day we hear that we are very different. Candidates enjoy meeting with us and talking to us about their careers because we care and want to help. We really enjoy what we do and that shows when we are talking with people. Other companies view people as numbers; we see them as people. We have told candidates before not to take jobs through us if they have a better opportunity. We see it as their career and life and that is more important than money in our pocket! Sure, we don’t mind the money in our pocket if it is the best thing for them, but we will not try to get someone to do something that is not in their best interest! At our company, in all situations we ask a simple question: ‘Is this a win/win/win solution?’ This means that the candidate, client company and Advanced Placement Team all come out ahead and want to work together again. If anyone in the equation isn’t winning, it is not worth it! We are not afraid to walk away from a short-term solution in order to keep a long-term relationship!

We also highly encourage everyone here to work as a team and help in any way possible for the success of our company, clients, and candidates. Although each person gets a bonus for individual productivity, we also have group incentives and all pitch in as a team. We are always e-mailing and talking back and forth about candidates and companies we are working with and how we can better help them. We also think we are very innovative. We are always trying to find a better way to do things.

What are some innovative things you have done?

We have a computer database system that is internet-driven. This means that we can access it here in the office, at home, or at a client’s office. It can do searches by keywords, experience, and many other criteria. It has the ability to e-mail applicants and companies with information and show on our website which candidates and positions are immediately available. We send a weekly newsletter to thousands of companies telling about available candidates and helpful topics that apply to work and everyday life. We are very automated and try to stay on top of technology! Honestly, we have had to learn to not be so quick to jump ahead with technology to the point where we pass up our clients. Our dream is for all our clients and candidates to be on the internet so that we can have a system in place that benefits everyone. When we started this company, we offered video interviews on a CD-ROM to run on their computers. We found that most companies were not ready for that. Many people didn’t have sound and the CD readers didn’t go fast enough for it to be a benefit. Someday soon we would like to go back to some of that…possibly even video streaming, but we don’t want to jump too far ahead again and need to wait until firewalls and computers will support this in most corporations. We do think we need to be constantly asking ‘What’s next?’ in order to stay ahead of the game and use the tools we have available. One of the things we stress here is that we will try almost anything that sounds like it may work. If it doesn’t work well, that’s one more thing we know not to do…or possibly not to do just yet. As long as the ideas stick with our basic philosophy of smart business, long-term relationships and strong ethics, it is worth a try!

What is your favorite part of your job?

Both of us think the best part of the job is helping people with their careers. When you connect the right person with the right company, it is very rewarding. Especially if they were both really needing help! We enjoy talking to people after they have been at a company and hearing that they are so glad they are there! We think we are helping make people’s lives better and are making a positive difference in the worlds of the people we work with and that is a great feeling!