Friday, December 17, 2010

Where the jobs are

Hailey businessman makes appearance on CNN


By TREVON MILLIARD
Express Staff Writer

Rob Reeves is the CEO of Redfish Technology. Photo by David N. Seelig

Hailey businessman Rob Reeves appeared on CNN's "The Situation Room" with correspondent Mary Snow last weekend, providing insight into one of the country's few job sectors seeing growth—renewable technologies.

"With only 39,000 private jobs added last month (in the United States), it's hard to find any silver lining in the November jobs report," Snow said.

Reeves has, however, seen the silver lining. Reeves is CEO of Hailey head-hunting company Redfish Technology. The company has a list of workers, most of whom don't live in the Wood River Valley, and its responsibility is to approach small- to midsize renewable-energy tech companies—which also aren't in the Wood River Valley—and connect the two, putting these tech professionals into jobs.

"The real upswing didn't come for us until the summer," he told Snow in his 10-second appearance via a Web camera.

Reeves, 38, said in an interview with the Idaho Mountain Express that Redfish—a company he founded in 1997—had more success at placing green tech professionals in jobs this summer than anytime in the past three years. He said the reason for that is that the renewable-energy field is cutting edge, and these companies are starting to realize that they can't wait out the recession before hiring and trying to break ground. If they wait, they'll be behind the curve.

"If you're sitting still in this industry, you're going backwards," he said. "That money's starting to come back into play."

Reeves said Redfish doesn't go after the big companies like Hewlett-Packard, usually referred to as simply HP, because they have internal recruiters.

"If we were to try to place workers at HP, their résumés would just become one in a pool of a hundred," he said.

So, how did CNN come to find the small-town Hailey company for its segment? Reeves said his company was involved in a conference call with a man who puts on "green expos" in San Francisco. CNN correspondent Snow called that man looking for someone in the renewable-energy sector who had landed a job. He, instead, mentioned a company landing these workers with jobs—Redfish Technology.

Reeves admits that Redfish's national TV appearance was "tiny."

"But anytime you get national exposure for a company in a small town like ours, it's great," he said, mentioning that several workers have since then sent their résumés. Others have e-mailed wanting to know more about the company.

The CNN clip can be seen by going to redfishtech.com and clicking on the link on the homepage.

Trevon Milliard: tmilliard@mtexpress.com




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