Creative craft

Senior level recruiters at Sarasota-based EHS Hospitality Group had a doozy of an assignment waiting for their new colleague, Kristen Pace, when she started working at the firm late last year.

The task: Pace had to find an executive chef for a new Spanish gastropub in Miami who not only speaks Spanish, but is from Spain and immersed in Spanish culture. “They threw me to the wolves right away,” says Pace, who was previously in real estate and worked for a Chicago-based firm that recruited advertising executives.

Pace went straight to the phones. She cold-called more than a dozen Spanish restaurants in and around Miami and asked to talk to the chef. If she got resistance, she sometimes said she wanted to thank the chef for a great meal she had there. Once Pace got through, she talked about the job and found out some background about the chef.