Dennis Drellishak Jr
Photo Credit: Dennis Drellishak Jr
Name: Dennis Drellishak Jr
Current Job: VP of Enterprise Improvement at Corporate Screening Services and President of Corporate Screening & Investigations, Inc.
Favorite restaurant in town? My favorite restaurant in town has to be Peppers in Lakewood. It’s a very small and intimate Italian restaurant a few blocks from my house. The food is simple, but delicious, and they are very generous with their wine pours!
Favorite thing about Cleveland? I love that Cleveland feels like a small town but has the amenities of a big city. Whenever meeting someone new here in Cleveland, there is a good chance we both have a mutual connection. Cleveland feels like one big family! Also, those Cleveland Browns tailgates!
Q: You are a VP of Enterprise Improvement at Corporate Screening Services & President of Corporate Screening & Investigations. What does that entail? Yes, two very different jobs, but both very exciting. Corporate Screening Services is a pre-employment background screening company. We work with a lot of companies, specifically in the healthcare area, to conduct background checks on potential job candidates. To process these background checks we have developed technology to automate and streamline our internal and client processes.
I work with our leadership team to come up with different ways to improve our proprietary applications, reduce labor, and develop integrations. I then manage those projects from start to finish working alongside our IT team and subject matter experts. It’s fun to see a project begin as an idea, proceed through development, and finally be utilized by our customers.
Now onto my other role! Corporate Screening and Investigations, Inc is a subsidiary of Corporate Screening and is a due diligence firm that conducts background checks on companies and individuals. We work with investment firms, law firms, and corporate departments to screen companies and individuals they may invest in or do business with.
This side of the business has been around for 25+ years, but about 4 years ago we put a significant investment into our marketing and our technology. My role as President is to manage our sales team, investigators, and developers. Like my other position, I get to see all aspects of the company and help make it grow.
Q: You started your career in the digital marketing space before shifting to software development. How did your digital marketing career prepare you for software development? I went to school for video production at Ohio University with full aspirations of being a director. After I graduated and realized I needed to make money. I used my knowledge to work with various companies to produce marketing videos and web content. I loved taking an idea and building something from nothing. I started building websites and creating marketing automation workflows and realized I was falling more and more into a career path of a developer. Growing up my parents have always encouraged me to keep learning and to try new things. I never see anything as something I don’t know, but as something I haven’t learned yet. This type of mindset prepared me very well when becoming a developer. Developing to me is like a puzzle, you have all the pieces in front of you and you know what the final picture looks like, you just need to spend the time to put the pieces in the right place.
Q: More people than ever are attending coding boot camps, yourself included. Why did you decide to attend a boot camp instead of learning on your own? What do you wish you knew before attending the boot camp? I did a lot of independent learning before deciding to go to a bootcamp, but with so much content on the internet it quickly became overwhelming. I knew I wanted to be trained in .Net and C# and didn’t know where to start. My Uncle, who is also a developer, offered guidance (and still does) on what skills I needed in order to be a successful programmer. I was referred to a coding bootcamp that was hyper focused in MVC C# and also promised to give you the skills of a junior developer in only 12 short weeks. My work agreed to pay for my training, and I signed up.
I quickly learned during these bootcamps that you got out what you put in. I remember my first two weeks feeling confused and frustrated. I decided that I hated feeling this way and would go home and spend hours studying after class. After putting the extra hours in things began to click. I quickly noticed that those that didn’t put any extra effort into learning were falling behind. These bootcamps aren’t a place where you sit down and listen to a lecture. You must actively be engaged and put the extra effort into teaching yourself something new.
Q: You've accelerated quickly up the org chart at Corporate Screening Services going from digital marketer to running one of their subsidiaries. What do you attribute this rapid rise to? Corporate Screening Services has gone through a lot of changes. Over the last 6 years, we have gone through a re-brand, released our new software, and actively became a technology first company. With all this change, came the opportunity for me to step up and take on different responsibilities.
One of the many benefits of working with a small to mid-size company is you get to see and touch all aspects of the business. My father, who has been the biggest role model in my life, instilled in me at an early age to approach everything with an open mind and get out of my comfort zone often. This helped me learn a lot of new things, and overtime, I took on more and more responsibility. As we transitioned into a technology first company, I helped implement many new ideas and structures. The company noticed and kept feeding me more responsibilities and with that came new positions.
Q: You have a busy professional life, but what do you do for fun? Well, I am happily married to my beautiful wife and have a very active, 11-month-old son at home. I also have another son on the way and he’s due in October, so a better question may be what did I used to do for fun? Haha. In all seriousness, I like to detach from technology and go on long walks with my wife, son, and chocolate lab. My wife gifted me a record player last year for my birthday that I have become obsessed with. It is a nice change of pace to select a record and sit through an entire album without some sort of screen involved. I also am a Browns season ticket holder and look forward to being disappointed by them every Sunday.