Ketan Gajjar: Hi there. Namaste. This is Ketan Gajjar from the very AAPNU Ahmedabad. Today, our guest on the podcast is Neil Carberry, the CEO of Recruitment and Employment Confederation, the voice of the UK recruitment industry. Neil, welcome to the Recruitment Curry podcast.
Neil Carberry: I’m delighted to be here and I’m looking forward to it.
The the market in India is so closely interlinked with the market in the UK that it’s a great chance to have a chat.
Ketan Gajjar: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I personally am I’m really grateful to the UK recruiting industry, especially because, I’ve been, associated with the sector for almost.
20 years now and thankful to my previous employers and the sector now, employs about, five to 6, 000 people in Ahmedabad now, working for a number of agencies, providing, front middle and back office services. What we want to cover, today for our listeners, Neil is more from your perspective in terms of the size of the UK recruitment market and then the overall impact, it has on the UK economy and then, how it helps, employers, nationwide.
Neil Carberry: Look, I think the important place to start when you talk about recruitment is how we conceptualize it as an industry. And one of the things that I think is really important for us as recruiters is not to be a grudge purchase for clients, and that’s difficult to to achieve because as Greg Savage would say, we’re here, no one wakes up in the morning and thinks I’ve really got to talk to my recruiter today, which is a pity, but I think how we conceptualize the industry matters because recruiters make a massive difference.
So at the REC, we talk about recruiter, recruiters making great work happen. And we do that by opening up opportunities for candidates and by helping companies to grow and achieve their goals. And I think both of those are important. The UK industry is worth about 40 billion in gross value added to the British economy every year.
That makes it a substantial professional services sector. Some work we did last year for our recruitment for recovery campaign which was very kindly funded by a wide range of of UK based recruitment businesses looked a bit further than that. at what good recruitment unlocks for clients and for candidates in terms of growth and the ability to service needs and actually the impact can you can see the impact getting up to as high as an eight sort of 80 billion impact in the British economy and give you a sense that puts us slightly larger.
Than the accountancy profession or the legal profession. And when I talk about recruitment in the UK, because UK is, I would argue just about the most mature recruitment market in the world, we’re talking about an industry that we should see as a serious professional service and as recruiters. That means being judged on delivery.
And it means being able to flex to clients changing business needs and being truly consultative with them and it means having a real professional status in everything that we do and If I think about what the rec is trying to steward in the uk, it’s a move in that direction,
Ketan Gajjar: right? And then, obviously You mentioned about nobody wakes up and then your says that you know They want to talk to the recruiter and then you know in the last two years You Post pandemic, we’ve also seen, given the supply demand gap in the market and the surge of the demand how the entire situation is literally turned upside down where, most of the companies are reaching out to the agencies, asking for support, asking for help and realizing the importance of the recruiters and then, which is where, again, the point is that given the surge in, in the overall demand, across recruiting is looked upon again as As a more serious career for a lot of people, we know want to entering into the industry.
So what would you say, for, people who are exploring and all that, yes, I want to take up recruitment, as a serious business for myself be it from the agency side or be it, working in house.
Neil Carberry: I think first and foremost, it’s a people industry and the skills are people skills.
I started in recruitment in the 1990s. I went away and did some other things for a few years and I came back to run the REC. I found it, The career recruitment does some fantastic stuff for your business skills, for your negotiation skills, for your people skills generally, and I think the most important thing thinking about this is, the global economy, the global labor market has been getting tighter for some time.
You can see it, for instance, in the global shortage of medical. Yeah. And I think that will continue over the next 20 or 30 years. And that’s going to make talent strategies for client businesses more important. So actually, I think it’s a better prospect to be joining the industry now than maybe when I joined in the 1990s, because we are a bit farther up the ladder and being seen as super important to how companies deliver.
And people who are joining the industry now are probably joining a battle to help client businesses see buying your people like you buy your paperclips isn’t the right way to go and that there’s something bigger and more meaningful about the right employee value proposition, the right employer branding the right onboarding, which leads to good retention if you’re in house.
But I actually think agencies should care about retention as well as a client service. There’s a whole suite of added value there that maybe some of the management consultancies have got used to adding for clients for years, but which is a huge opportunity for us. I always say to recruitment businesses here in the UK, every chief exec I talk to at the moment, is really worried about their talent strategy.
Now, either you can deliver that as a good value for money specialist in actual talent, or they can go and waste a load of money on reports by, let’s pick a name at random, McKinsey, Yeah, which might be very good, but actually your clients could have got better from you. So there’s a real opportunity there to build in some things, which I think are really important to sustainability in the industry, exclusivity.
So we’re not working 10 jobs to fill one. And in the right specialist staffing sectors retained work as well, which I think is really important because we’re going to be delivered, judged on delivery, not just on being able to get candidates in front of the client. That’s a big that’s a change that’s been coming for some time, but I think the pandemics really sped it up and actually I think it makes the job of a recruiter more exciting and more interesting.
Ketan Gajjar: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, again, linking the previous point in terms of the opportunity creation, for more people to work as recruiters and, obviously across various spectrum of the recruiting lifecycle, be it front, middle or back office. The other avenue that I’ve seen, increasing is [00:07:00] the number of, coaches.
And consultants as well, to help and support exactly on the point and your number of training programs. I’ve seen the recruiting, the recruitment network that TRN, coming up with various modules, right from account management.
Do we know how to drive sales how to you know investing or in terms of value edit services retention and things so You know, fast, you know Looking at this probably five years back courses like these they want much of But now, a lot of agencies are now looking at the, these aspects in a very serious way that, okay, fine.
How do I structure my, my recruiting business, is it one 83 60 what processes do we involve, from training perspective, for example, how do I train my newbies right from sourcing to, going and doing client meetings, key account management. Those factors.
It has also evolved in terms of helping new job creation, apart from just within the recruiting agency. And terms of the change. So what would you say that, the change that agencies have evolved in the last two years, because, pandemic literally opened up a Pandora box of their defining, you have to work remote.
You have to adapt technology. And I see that a lot of agencies in the UK have adapted that model. So from your perspective, because, REC has got what, almost 4, 000 members on books. So we’d like to hear more, in terms of that how have they adapted?
With various solutions now given the demand.
Neil Carberry: So I think there’s a couple of big lessons that have come out of the pandemic. And I think we were already heading for less of a 360 world and into more of a 180 or even a 120 world before the pandemic, that idea of having a team around the clients, separating out delivery from resourcing from client advice and management, having clear.
Value propositions that sit around a client that, I think that’s just been supercharged by the pandemic because client needs have changed so quickly and because delivery has been things like resourcing have become so much more difficult in the very tight market that we now have.
bear in mind the fact that prices for things like jobs boards have been going through the roof. A lot of skills that I would recognize from my days on the desk in the 1990s are actually coming back to the fore in terms of candidate sourcing. And you can do that in a number of ways. You can partner for bits of it.
I know you talk to a lot of businesses in the UK about that in your bit. Business, you can think about what the skills mix you need, but a couple of things really drove that home during the pandemic. The first thing was a lot when we had a big furlough scheme in the UK where staff could be placed on furlough, they couldn’t work for you, but they received 80 percent of their wages until until people were brought back after the initial pulse of the pandemic, a lot of recruitment firms learn then that they thought they had a brilliant client.
Until the moment that they furloughed the only consultant who ever talked to them. So that idea of systematizing your client relationships, putting a team around your client relationships, being ready to be judged on different bits of your delivery and then Thinking through the best way to deliver each of those segments of what you do.
I think is front and center In a UK recruiter’s minds right now. And then how do you add value in terms of finding out where your client’s pain points are now is probably the other big thing. I talk a lot to businesses around the business, your clients had in. March, February, March 2020 is not the business they have now.
They are trying to do different things, and this is actually where working closely with your contacts as a recruiter in the internal recruitment team and the in house team can be helpful because actually the in house team. are scrambling to work out what the business now needs because it’s not the people plan that’s changed.
It’s the commercial plan. So the more you can do it, the leadership level of the businesses to do some thought leadership on talent, to just draw people into a discussion about what about the direction of travel in the business, whether it’s the group HRD or in a smaller firm, maybe even the CEO, just getting those soft links into clients at the senior level is going to be really important.
So you can tailor that structure that you’re putting together for them.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. So it’s the collaboration factor that’s going to play a major role. Rather than just a transactional service that, okay, CV and CV out and just as specking the CVs in the left, right and center that rarely helps.
Neil Carberry: And it gives them, it gives trad old school recruiters like me a bit of a nosebleed, but the idea that, the sale might take a lot of the, the relationships will take a long time to build. Now, if we’re living week to week and month to month on our numbers, as we all do in the industry that feels.
Kind of slightly unsettling. Yes. But I think as an industry getting the balance right between what is urgent and what is important between working in our business and working on our business, I think for industry leaders and for people who are building their careers, that is really important. So you talk about the forest of advisory that’s out there now.
Personally, of course, I’d chill for Steve Guest and the REC Recruitment Mastery Academy. One of the things Steve says is, look, just chunk it down. And do the things that you say you’ll do, deliver on the promises you make, control the promises you make to make sure you deliver on them and build it over time.
And I think that’s absolutely right.
Ketan Gajjar: Totally. And, from, one of my conversations with Steve as well, in the recent past, one thing that we discussed was, what the process, because, as much as you say, recruiting is sales and marketing and everything, but at the end of the day, there’s a process element that, people have to follow to get those results there might be a slight fluctuation in the output, but you’ll still end up, getting the desired results that you want if you walk through, right from, process one to process 10.
Without missing a step. And it’s those boring bits as well, which, some people like doing, some people don’t, it’s a part of the life cycle that you have to follow through. You got to do what you got to do, that’s what he said.
Neil Carberry: System and process really matters. It always matters.
And I think that way, once you acknowledge that and you get, you develop some some clarity that makes it into. Investing in your system easier. There’s a common format to what you do and how you do it. Then the question becomes what five or 10 percent of change will actually transform the outcome for me.
And that’s where good advice really makes it, it makes a difference. I think that as recruiters, the delivery is a hygiene factor. Okay. If we don’t get the structures for delivery and the processes, everything else doesn’t matter. So that’s the platform. We need to build that platform strong and stable.
But if we want to build and market a recruitment business or thinking about the audience, even just a personal brand as a recruiter, then that is stage one stage two then is let me. Show you the scale of my ability to advise you as a professional services, professional or professional services firm.
And that’s the bit that I think more and more firms are building up. If you look at some of the big players in the industry, they are moving to full court advisory on people. led by their research and their understanding. And I think they, and I think that ultimately is the way the industry will go either for the big players or for niche specialists.
I think if you’re a small firm, niche specialism is going to be more important than ever.
Ketan Gajjar: And which is what, obviously I’ve seen, read and, heard, and, obviously throughout the last, 15 years or 20 years I’ve been associated with the industry, inch wide, mile deep is what, even Kevin Green used to mention in his speeches and,
Neil Carberry: I’ve never disagreed with Kevin on such things.
Ketan Gajjar: And then, I’ve been talking to recruiters. Majority of, again, I talked to recruiters and, most of them are quite niche in terms of what they do. Some are so niche that, okay, fine. We only work on, Microsoft Dynamics jobs and that’s all we do. We don’t do anything else.
That highlights the point, from anybody who wants to enter into the UK recruitment sector as well, that, you have to be ready to, be a specialist rather than a generous, working across variety of jobs, although those agencies exist, but, if you want to build a career.
And a specialist, then you obviously, you have to spend time researching work, obviously on the business, all of the process and the other things that you mentioned. So what is one advice Neil, that you would give, to, two things, one is, somebody who wants to start a recruiting agency be it in the UK or us or, wherever it is, and then two is, somebody who wants to venture into the recruiting industry as a professional that they find, I’m a fresher to the industry, I like what I hear and I want to give it a go.
So what would you say?
Neil Carberry: So I think twofold there. So if you’re starting an agency, I think the most important thing is to fully commit to the, to, to the niche that you want to serve. And then once you’ve done that, not to be bound by your conception of what an Agency should be. And what I mean by that is we are seeing more and more different approaches being taken, 20 years ago.
And we know what an agency looked like. A big agency was a room with a lot of desks and a small agency was a room with a few desks and people had phones and an email and and they were, yeah, It the shape of the business is very clear, but we are seeing all sorts of online developments.
We’re seeing niche work. We’re seeing agencies who are tying up their work with, as an agency, with other forms of HR services. So I think there’s there are so many potential options. I think it’s really important for agency founders to think, what’s my USP? Is it that I know this local market is that I know this sector, is it that I can advise on some really important high value things for clients and I can do some search for instance, around the edge of that, but really hone that down and work it up and I suspect work it up with two or three potential clients without pushing the salesy button on them to make sure that you do that.
inch wide, mild, deep piece thing to quote Kevin again, that really matters. If you’re starting in the industry, a slightly slight twist on what you said a minute ago, actually, I think the thing that matters most is the core skills of how you’re successful as a recruiter. Yeah. And so we all work hard.
That’s the picture of the industry. But it’s also about Do I know how to handle candidates effectively? Do I go back to people in the right way? Do I know how to be proactive with what’s going on? I think that skill set is really important. I want you developing that early and then building your niche alongside that in the knowledge that if you need to change, at some stage you possibly can change niche because you’ve got the core skills that are transferable.
I think the other thing is find the agency that is right for you. So just as I said, a minute ago that there are lots of different, there’s lots of variation in what agency is trying to do. I do think culturally, and this is, without criticism of any culture or any approach, if I look across the REC membership, I can see lots of different types of business and different types of culture and different people fit succeed differently in them.
So I think it, it’s also about. Think about the sort of workplace where you can be successful and you’ll get a sense of that when you’re talking to these businesses, but we need a lot of consultants. Definitely choose a career in recruitment. We are very short of skilled consultants at the
Ketan Gajjar: moment.
I totally, see that. And obviously while we talk, we’ve got about 25, 30 open jobs for, recruiting for the UK agencies. Of course, we are offshore. But there is an avenue that agencies are looking at as well. And, this is all down to the demand in the market compared to what it was.
And then on the point, you mentioned, choose the agency that works for you. So on my first forecast with Gavin, he mentioned clearly that, okay, fine. You, if you’re going to work with a small agency, at least. Figure out that, they have a proper process in place.
And then, if you’re going to shadow somebody, if it’s not going to be an in house training, if you’re going to shadow somebody, they at least talk you through the process and then, give you an opportunity to walk you through the process. You don’t want to go into, into a place where, everything is all over the place.
And then, you end up being confused.
Neil Carberry: I started at a small agency and I think I had lots of advantages in terms of understanding how a small business works and some of the pressures on a small business. Had I joined a larger agency, I might have [00:20:00] had a different training experience, might have been better but I wouldn’t have had that kind of P and L exposure.
That you get early in a small business, so there are strengths and weaknesses and acknowledging that, each individual recruiter has facets of an employer that help them work well and thinking about what they are for you is a really important thing for recruiters in their development.
Ketan Gajjar: Totally. So Neil, I think the audience in India will have a, a lot of quality information that you’ve shared. And, I really appreciate that before you I end the podcast, there’s just one last question and then it’s a tricky one.
What kind of curry do you like?
Neil Carberry: My mom’s from Glasgow and I think you probably know that the most ersatz British invest in invented curry, the chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow, but I shall not go down down that route. I’m lucky to have. Traveled in India for a bit.
I think the major challenge is that, as you all know, is that Indian food in the UK is not exactly the same as Indian food. I like I like something reasonably spicy with plenty of onions and tomatoes in it. That, that usually lands really well.
Ketan Gajjar: That’s perfect. We love onions and tomatoes.
I think my business partner and I, we have to pay a premium, when we go out in the local restaurants here, because before the curry comes in, we polish off, good amount of onions and tomatoes.
Neil Carberry: Yeah. The, um, the sometime when you’re over, we can meet in Glasgow and I’ll take you and I’ll introduce you to the mashup cuisine that that should win the prize, which is the haggis pakora.
Ketan Gajjar: Okay. Definitely looking forward to. And then, if you’re in London, I’ll take you to a good curry house, authentic Indian. You’ll love it. Excellent. It’s been a pleasure and thanks once again, Neil, really appreciate the opportunity to have you as a guest of the Recruitment Curry.
Thank you very much. Thanks Neil.
