Rick Chung: An Extraordinary Leader Redefining the Recruitment Domain with Value-Added Services

Rick Chung, Managing Director, Captar Partners

Since the dawn of recruiting, we’ve all been told, it’s a numbers game. As we all know, recruitment is a very diverse, varied, and fast-paced industry where being quick off the mark is the key. Thus, many recruiters often get caught up in the numbers game while hiring for their fast-growing startup or scaleup. However, standing apart from the rest, a few visionary leaders strive to look beyond the numbers and emphasize on the human element of human resources and people management to provide appealing and exceptional work experiences for the employees. They believe that recruitment is based on people and partnerships rather than numbers and targets. One prominent name among such exemplary business leaders is Rick Chung, the Managing Director at Captar Partners, a world-class recruitment service provider across multi-disciplinary with offices in China, Hong Kong, Singapore.

Before starting Captar Partners, Rick worked for several Fortune 500 companies which gave him insight into how large corporations operate from the groundwork perspective to business management and high-level strategic planning. Being in that atmosphere, climbing up the corporate ladder unconsciously became his goal. He seized the opportunities along the way and built a successful career path with his unmatchable performance. But meanwhile, a strong vision has always been looping inside his head that recruitment shouldn’t be just about numbers, but also about impacting people’s lives and the local community. And with his previous experience in Citi Private Bank, he realized that as a service provider, one should always produce a high quality of service for clients instead of being transactional. Keeping these two key elements as core values, he decided to create a platform that will allow him to freely follow his philosophies and create a positive impact on the community. As a result, Captar Partners came into existence in 2021.

A Fascinating Journey with Captar Partners

The firm’s name, Captar, is based on a Spanish word that means— to engage, understand or capture, which encapsulates the firm’s vision and approach to the recruitment field. Captar started its journey with just a couple of people who share the same vision. However, it aspires to become one of the market leaders and a regional business within 3 to 5 years. And, in order to achieve that, the dedicated team at Captar worked 24/7 for almost the first full year, juggling multiple hats to speed up its growth. This year, it opened up its first regional branch in Singapore based on the success and solid foundation that it built in the first year. Today, Captar stands tall as a world-class recruitment service provider in the industry. However, like every successful company, it had to face its own share of challenges to reach where it is today. Setting up the right level of infrastructure, defining the market proposition from others, and culture creation are some of the most crucial hurdles that it had to navigate. “Externally, as a new player in the market, we let the market know about our unique selling point (USP), and what can we offer to the clients, clearly to show that we are not just another recruitment firm. I always emphasize that if you are good at something, then focus on that area and groom it. We conducted different media interviews that were published over social media platforms to maximize our exposure in the market, especially in the Financial Services and Fintech industries,” asserts Rick.

He goes on to state that internally, the right level of infrastructure is also critical for both operations and expansion because he simply believes that even top-class talent requires a well-established environment with sufficient resources to fully/over perform. Thus he strives to build a platform that would offer the best to the consultants and make the success of the firm faster.

Redefining True Entrepreneurship

According to Rick, a true entrepreneur should be visionary and a risk taker, someone who is able to drive the business even in an unknown situation and become the pioneer in the market. “If an entrepreneur doesn’t have a big and clear vision to move forward, the business will be at true risk,” opines Rick. Moreover, as a leader, he truly believes that employees should also share the taste of winning no matter from glory, reward, career, and happiness. “If the owner is the only ultimate winner in this business, I don’t believe anyone would be loyal to this company. People often say a typical entrepreneur should have less personal emotion in the business but be more number/ sales focused. I somehow do not agree with this as the topic of leadership has evolved over the years. A visionary, compassionate, and hands-on entrepreneur is more needed in today’s world,” adds Rick.

Continues Adding More Value in the Years Ahead

As the world is changing rapidly, Rick strives to come up with ideas as wild as possible to enable Captar to keep pace with the change. The dedicated team at Captar always shares different ideas across the floor and tries to execute as many as they can. As a leader, Rick encourages the idea of “try and error” as he believes there is no such thing as a meteoric rise to fame. He also emphasizes on collaboration and sharing. Moving ahead, Rick aspires to continue leading Captar on the path of success while staying true to his vision of impacting the community with premium job searching and talent matching services. “My passion for recruitment would never change and I definitely will always be a humble servant to my business with over 100 successful consultants from different offices and keep impacting the local community on daily basis,” states Rick.

In today’s world, where there are lots of opportunities to start a business, Rick feels everyone doesn’t need to have the idea to “change the world” in order to be an entrepreneur. But as entrepreneurs, they must love their business and live with it while keep investing in their business whenever they have profits. “Money sitting in the bank account doesn’t mean anything to a start-up but expand it to the point that you cannot control this, that is what I would call chapter 2 of your story,” affirms Rick on a concluding note.