We are looking for Recruitment Partners!

The Hub is a UK based network of recruitment specialists utilising a centralised delivery, back office and support function – or hub – hence the name.
We are part of a £120m recruitment plc. The Hub provides independent recruiters with the benefits of group infrastructure and support.

We are looking for Recruitment Partners to join the network.

How it works
As a recruitment plc, we can call upon significant resources which we deploy across our brands. Our brands include recruiters across a range of industries but also media companies, job boards, incubators and VC’s. We have a significant delivery capability using our own mature resources but also access to international, national, regional and niche job boards.
The Hub offers this infrastructure to our recruitment partners.

Typically, The Recruitment Partner passes us details of a vacancy that they would like support with and The Hub uses the groups delivery capability to find the best available candidates. The Recruitment Partner maintains contact with the client and we maintain contact with the candidate. When the placement is made, we split the fee.
Our Recruitment Partners benefit from the support of a large recruitment group, providing additional services and taking away some of the pain of life as an independent. Our Recruitment Partners are able to concentrate on winning and delivering business using our range of services and crucially open additional delivery channels by working with The Hub.

We also able to offer additional services including advertising , websites, invoicing, technology, investment etc and work with established recruiters and start ups. For further information, please visit www.recruitment-hub.com or http://jonnyhub.blogspot.com
If you would like to discuss further, please give me a call on 0845 117 0 115 or send your details to info@recruitment-hub.com

I am also the owner of a Linkedin Group, specifically for Directors of UK Recruitment businesses. To join, you must be a Director of a UK based recruitment company - Simple!
It provides a great opportunity to network and share views. Link can be found here - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?homeNewMember=&gid=1962486&trk=

Info about me can be found at http://www.recruitment-hub.com or http://jonnyhub.blogspot.com

Winning & Maintaining Business

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
Latest news - http://jonnyhub.blogspot.com

Hiles family

Quick Personal Blog! - The Hub Business Blog to follow!

Thank you all for your messages. Jo has actually had a couple of days now with no morning sickness so is loving life!

The Pic this week is of me in my mad hat at Jo's birthday 'Mad Hatters Tea Party' at the weekend.
Why the Roman helmet? - I was after a Bicorn(e),- imagine an Admirals hat, but was unable to find one that wasn't either cheap floppy felt or an expensive antique. As they are Naval hats, I went on to a militaria website to try and find one and thats when I happend upon the Steel Roman Legionaires replica helmet. I guess that it would have been made for someone that is into re-enactments, but I couldn't resist it when I learnt that it was only £14.40!
Granted, I hadnt really thought through wearing it on a hot day and running around playing rounders!

We will be flaking the main on Domino this weekend and heading off down river so keep fingers crossed. Update next week!

Blogging

The Hub Blog - Monday morning and a big list ahead of me.

Firstly, news! - I am delighted to announce that JoJo and I are expecting our first baby! Jo is three and a half months pregnant and due in January. We are both over the moon and have greatly enjoyed telling family and friends of the news over the past week or so.

Secondly, apologies! I am sorry for not updating the blog last week! Thank you for your various prompts and especially Martin McNerney for his email - It amused me so it got posted. I have lots on at the moment as you will read!

As you can imagine, life is busy at the moment. I am over-joyed at the pregnancy and the prospect at being a father and Jo is doing really well despite constant morning sickness. She has a lovely bump and the scans looked great. The pregnancy really only hit me a couple of weeks ago when we could see the baby moving and its heart beating, seeing this little life really affected me and made me determined to be the best husband and father that I can be.
This really is a life changing event for me and although friends and family tell you that it will be, until it happens, it is impossible to understand the affect that it starts to have upon you.

The baby however, is already giving me sleepless nights as I lay awake concerned with my new sense of responsibility and wondering about all of the things that I now need to do. Practical things include - convert the spare room into a nursery, sell Jo's Mini Cooper and buy a 5 door car, save lots of money to support us whilst Jo is off work, pay a chunk off the mortgage, and move house!

The fact that each item in my list is dependent upon The Hub's success and building some security in an unstable market is not lost on me and therefore ultimately I lay awake think of work at 3am several nights a week!

The Hub is working, we have some great partners supplying us with vacancies, we are sourcing candidates and generating interviews and placements. We are working hard and the volume of business and the interest that we attract is also growing. I still lay awake worrying. My greatest concern is the market - a) the volume of business, b) the margins, c) the slow recruitment process.

a) is obvious and I cant complain. We have business where plenty are struggling.

b) margins are down as everyone tries to be competitive and is squeezed. Again, i can't really complain as we only work above 15% perm and 12% contract and we still have business.

c) the slow recruitment process is a massive frustration at the moment when we are all keen to secure business and as a newish company, I am particularly keen to prove our worth and demonstrate how well the model works. One of our partners, a specialist search company, gave us some finance vacancies in late June. We sourced and had feedback and interview requests during the first week of July, requesting interview dates in mid-August! In reality, a two stage process with this customer will conclude in September with a start date in October and invoices paid in November. (if they stick to 30 days). The major work by us will have taken place in late June and therefore the recruitment cycle for this role is likely to be c5 months!

It would be far worse if the candidate was on 3 months or more notice.
12 months or more ago, this would not have happened. The customer would not have the luxury of waiting 6 weeks before first interview. The candidates would have dissapeared!

In recruitment, the summers are always a little slower as decision makers are on holiday but we are finding that this year, the process has been slower than I can remember.
Last week we were working with a couple of great new partners and a three partners that had been quiet for a few weeks have given us some new roles, so our resources are keeping busy. We are working across some familiar and unfamiliar markets and the variety of roles keeps things interesting for the team. CV's are out on most roles, so just waiting for feedback!

As always, we are looking to work with new recruitment partners even if the market is slow!

Our attraction strategy for Recruitment Partners has always been 'Ninja Marketing' - a phrase that I coined in error with Sticky Media. By 'Ninja Marketing', I meant, use of the online communication tools such as Linkedin, Twitter, etc and this blog. 'Ninja Marketing' is obviously not the correct term and is nonsense but I quite like it anyway. What I guess we use is a 'Gen Y' approach, which is simple, cheap and seems effective. Sticky have helped design lots of pieces of this strategy and thank you Mike once again for the new look blog, I hope you all like it?

Linkedin has probably delivered the most initial interest via things like my profile and the UK Recruitment Directors Group, but The Hub website and the blog are probably the most important forms of communication. I do not believe that I have met with any recruitment partner recently that hasn't read the blog and I regularly receive positive comments about it. It is something that I enjoy but sometimes find it hard to spend the time to keep updated. I know that its an important tool for The Hub and my rule is to try and add one item a week. I try to keep the blog chatty and a mix of personal and professional. I find some very dry business blogs very dull and surely that should not be the objective!

Of course, if you do enjoy the blog, the best way to check for updates is to subscribe, although I understand that it is difficult unless you have the right kind of email account. Therefore, we are creating a subscribers list for updates. The list will not insist that you have the right kind of email account and all we need is your name and email address. We will not spam you! If you would like to receive the updates, please send an email with 'Subscibe' in the title line to info@recruitment-hub.com and we will add you to the list!

The Hub is a UK based network of recruitment specialists utilising a centralised delivery, back office and support function – or hub – hence the name, Details about The Hub can be found either in the blog - http://jonnyhub.blogspot.com or The Hub website - http://www.recruitment-hub.com

Finally a boat update! I have spent the past couple of weekends on Domino, helping with general fixes. Domino is in great condition and has a fantastic pedigree. We are still a couple of weeks away though from our maiden voyage, just because of time, but she is coming together well and I cant wait. My bro has taken lots of pics so will send a link to his photo blog when he has updated.

Thank you for your patience in waiting for the update, if you would like to discuss any aspect of The Hub, please contact me at jonny@recruitment-hub.com or 0845 117 0 115.

Jonny Hiles
Director
The Hub
www.recruitment-hub.com

P.S. Congratulations to Che and Maria. We enjoyed the wedding!