Executive-Recruitment Industry Leader MRI Announces Appointment of Joe Mullings

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., March 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- MRI (Management Recruiters International, Inc.), the 3^rd largest direct hire firm in the U.S recruitment industry with 400 offices worldwide, announced today the appointment of Joe Mullings as the new Chief Vision Officer, reporting to President & CEO Bert Miller.

Mullings, 58, has 30 years of experience in executive recruitment. He is currently the CEO-founder of The Mullings Group, a leader in talent acquisition in the medtech industry with a who's who clientele including Google, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Medtronic and Abbot. He will continue in his current role as Chairman & CEO of The Mullings Group Companies.

Miller, who acquired MRI last year, has brought Mullings to the organization because of his vision and ability to constantly innovate in the Talent Access industry. One of the industry- changing platforms that Mullings has introduced, is his inbound storytelling strategy for recruiting. MRI will incorporate this innovation to increase and improve engagement with new talent across the myriad of industries that MRI serves. Mullings developed the technique in 2015 when he was tasked in a matter of months with securing over 250 specialized medical device personnel for Verb Surgical, the robotics co-venture between Google's Verily division and Johnson & Johnson. Realizing that there was not enough time to rely on traditional recruitment techniques (essentially, cold-calling prospective recruits or as Mullings refers to it "the legacy analog approach"), Mullings created an original video production platform and shared the hiring initiative on LinkedIn. He was among the first ever to post video messaging on the social network, and the initiative resulted in thousands of qualified candidates contacting him.

Established in 1965 and now headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, FL (strategically located near Studios' ONE90 and ONE60 at Dragonfly Stories HQ), MRI's primary focus is providing training and back-end office services to its individual member-companies. Last year when Miller bought MRI, which operates as a franchisor, the firm generated $190 million in net revenues through its network. Miller and Mullings first met at an MRI conference in the 1990s. Miller continues to own and lead Protis Global, an executive recruitment firm specializing in the consumer-packaged goods, food-and-beverage, hospitality, banking and cannabis industries along with interim staffing firm ACE Talent Curators servicing the same verticals.

"I saw our industry moving toward a media-forward model and just as we are transforming MRINetwork, I also saw the unique opportunity to take a luxury brand like MRI, and re-energize it. I knew Joe's passion for our business, his deep roots within the MRINetwork family, and his ability to guide the digital transformation of our network and the recruiting industry, that made the decision easy to bring Joe on board. For over 20 years Joe and I have shared our vision of the future of recruiting, while building two successful businesses. Now, that shared vision has a media-forward platform to create accelerated growth," said Miller.

In addition to The Mullings Group, Mullings also owns Dragonfly Stories, a full-service media production company that he uses to create promotional videos on behalf of his client companies. The company is a multi-camera / multi-facility production and post-production organization in Delray, Florida, located just south of Palm Beach.

"The Talent Access process must change in order to thrive. In this digital age, the industry's primary reliance on analog, cold-calling for business development, is history. Today, a brand's success in selling products or services is determined by how effectively its story is told to an increasingly technology-savvy audience," said Mullings.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the executive recruitment industry and virtually every other industry, both Miller and Mullings re-committed to establishing the new CVO position at MRI.

"When we decided six months ago to announce this position, we of course had no idea that the world economy would be experiencing its greatest challenge since the Great Recession ? possibly even the Great Depression.  We actually don't know yet what career development will look like once the pandemic is over. However, we can be sure that on the other side we will be poised to meet the challenges with an expansive, forward-looking philosophy," said Mullings.

ABOUT MRI
MRI is a professional services provider on a mission to help recruiting and talent advisory firms thrive in every stage of their growth, because MRI believes these firms can impact business and change lives when supported by a strong network and the right resources. Over the last 55 years, MRI revolutionized the recruiting industry by providing consultative support and world-class training to the independently owned firms that make up MRI's global membership community: MRINetwork. In 2019, under the direction of new private ownership (Bert Miller, Protis Global & ACE Talent Curators), MRI launched MRIThrive, a platform to serve established staffing and recruiting firms which operate outside of MRINetwork. With its rich legacy and truly limitless future, MRI is once again leading change in a rapidly evolving industry. www.MRINetwork.com

SOURCE MRINetwork