Specializing in completing wine industry searches for:
CEO/President/GM and Senior Executives in Wholesale Sales, Hospitality & DTC Sales, Marketing, Finance, Winemaking/Production, Vineyard Management and HR.
what fuels our work
The Recruiting & Hiring Model is Broken. You Deserve Better.
Traditional approaches primarily focus on defining candidate skills and capabilities,
which overlooks the all important ingredient that makes great matches stick: Culture Fit. After seeing this fail companies and candidates too many times, we completely re-engineered the recruiting model to provide for this undervalued element. Our approach is high-touch, rigorous and comprehensive, resulting in the right senior level leaders for our clients’ real business needs and cultural dynamics. This mission-level pursuit has become a core driver of our commitment to delivering exceptional service and placement results to the industry we love.
WHY you get better results
We Go Beyond Just Skills and Capabilities
Each search starts with defining the job over the first year. Key Performance Objectives define success, not a list of skills and capabilities from a traditional job description. If you don’t know which core accomplishments your new hire must successfully deliver on, how will you know you’re hiring the right candidate? We are not looking to simply match a resume to a job description. Instead, we focus on hiring executives who can solve problems, specifically the problems you have!
This allows us to achieve better results by hiring for success on the Anniversary Date, not the Start Date.
We Baked Three Key Differentiators Into Our Approach:
1) Performance-Based Hiring Process.
Developed by The Adler Group, this is a groundbreaking solution for finding, recruiting and hiring only A-level talent that leverages the reality that top performers go about their job search very differently than B-C players: Top performers care about the answers to two critical questions before they consider compensation. And if you don’t proactively address these, you’ll never catch their attention or get them to lift their heads up from the busyness of their current lives to engage in your recruiting process:
“WHAT WILL I BE CHALLENGED TO DO WITHIN THE FIRST YEAR?”
If your job’s core accomplishments line up with where they are in their career and what they’re ready to do next, they are much more likely to lift their head up and engage with us.
“HOW WILL MY CAREER BE IN A BETTER PLACE
3-5 YEARS IN THE FUTURE IF I LEAVE MY CURRENT JOB AND JOIN YOUR COMPANY?”
Top performers seek career challenge and professional growth, so again, we must proactively address this or they’ll never engage with us.
The Newlin Associates process is grounded in thoroughly addressing these two mission-critical elements so our clients’ open job opportunities catch the attention of top performers and inspire them to engage with us.
2) Scientifically Validated Personality Assessments.
Each person has a unique and unconscious internal operating system that drives them to think and behave in certain ways, but not others. By assessing whether each candidate is naturally wired to think and behave in ways that lead to job success and resonate with your company’s culture, we are able to more accurately evaluate candidates to ensure strong Job Fit and Culture Fit, saving you time and money from hiring the wrong candidates.
3) Focused Attention.
Many recruiters become seduced by: more clients = more money. As a result, their focus is diluted and the quality of their efforts and the accuracy of their placements suffer. Unfortunately, you as a client company usually bear the brunt of this reality. We intentionally limit the number of clients and assignments we take on, allowing us to truly hear and understand the scope and depth of your specific needs, as well as to stay focused on closing your open assignments.
our training
We Don’t Just Talk the Talk, We Walk the Walk.
Forging a new path takes more than passion. It requires investment in building the necessary skills to turn vision into reality. We understand this and have always made it a priority.
David is the only certified Performance-Based Hiring Recruiter in the wine industry.
We are the first recruiting firm in the wine industry to use a performance-based personality assessment tool.
DAVID NEWLIN, Founder + President
30+ years of executive search and management consulting experience combined with performance-based assessment tool certifications.
David’s curiosity for understanding what motivates people and how they thrive in the workplace drove him to develop an advanced understanding of human psychology and behavior, with expertise in the following:
Certified Performance-based Hiring Recruiter
Master Facilitator of the Drake P3 assessment tool
Certified in the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment tool
Certified Master Practitioner in Neuro Linguistics Programming (NLP)
A Trusted Advisor to owners, board members and senior executives in the wine industry since he founded Newlin Associates in 2002, David brings 25 years of executive search experience, plus nearly a decade of finance and strategy management consulting. David’s deep and broad background and network of senior level contacts positions him to be asked regularly to provide leadership, team and culture development advice, along with broader strategic counsel to clients and prospective clients. David also speaks regularly at wine industry conferences and roundtables.
David’s education includes Executive MBA coursework and a BS in Finance and Economics, both from San Jose State University.
Over the decades of his adult life, David has also become a committed student of a wide variety of spiritual disciplines and practices that provide a solid foundation for being a Trusted Advisor to clients, candidates, colleagues, friends and family.