The Hub It is clear that the current recruitment market is a tough place to be at the moment. Over the last 10 years, the £26bn UK industry has been saturated by small entrepreneurial businesses looking for a slice of the action. The vast majority of the smaller agencies owners, by which I mean a business with less than 15 employees, would have started life with a larger agency where they learnt their trade and made their contacts before finally realising why am I doing this for someone else?

Most of these business owners would have always had the ambition to start a new business, although a few would have been forced into a situation where employment options were taken away and had to start a business.

The Recruitment Industry has always attracted ambitious, energetic sales people with no particular career direction as the employees of choice (I myself was in that category and have hired in that category). There can be no suprise that this group of people by nature have entrepreneurial spirit and one day look for an opportunity to start their own business.

When I used to be a corporate recruiter, I used to tell my suppliers that I wanted two things from them. 1) Consistently Deliver 2) Make my life easier - be easy to deal with.

In my experience, smaller recruiters place more emphasis on relationships and their success comes from the strength of their relationships. A single vacancy matters far more to a small agency when they are keen to win repeat business from you. How often does a large corporate pass a vacancy to a multi-national agency on a PSL and the vacancy just disappears into a black hole? The big multi national may know how to write a tender, but they do not always value your business when procurement has agreed a 7% margin.

I believe that a smaller agency, is far more likely to offer flexibility and genuinely try and make life easier for the hiring manager, simply because they have fewer vacancies and want to prove themselves to win repeat business.

Of course, smaller agencies however, are less likely to be able consistently deliver across a broad range of roles and different disclipines and that is where The Hub can offer support.

Example - We are working with a business owner, who is keen to maximise opportunity from her clients. As a finance specialist recruiter, she had been asked from time to time by some of her clients whether she could also deliver other vacancies such as HR, IT or Sales & Marketing. She had always declined because she did not have the infrastructure to deliver outside of her core market and therefore didn't want to commit and then lose her customers confidence. She has been well aware that she was turning down business, but when times were good, it wasn't as noticeable. We are now working with her business to maximise revenue from her clients. She now has confidence that she can deliver across the wider disciplines and the client is only too happy with her business as they can deliver and have an excellent relationship.

The Hub becomes your delivery engine, using our £120m recruitment plc infrastructure. You maintain the relationship with the client, we work with you in partnership to deliver.

The Hub has a range of services and we are always interested to hear from potential Recruitment Partners. Call Jonny Hiles on 0845 117 0 115 or info@recruitment-hub.com for more information.

The Hub website - http://www.recruitment-hub.com
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