Investing in Recruitment

Hello all, just a quick interim message to let you all know what I have been up to and why I haven't blogged in a while.
The market is busy and our ventures have seen huge activity over the past 6 weeks.

The Hub - www.recruitment-hub.com has benefited from the uplift in the market as our partners have been swamped with vacancies. The Hub is a flexible resource and we have been providing a valuable overflow option to our customers with some great results! As always, we are looking for new partners so call if you would like to discuss!

My work with Fusion - www.fusioninvestments.co.uk has generated two new recruitment ventures which we are very excited about. Fusion is a specialist recruitment investment business that I am running as an interim. We invest in start ups and existing recruitment businesses and again, looking for further opportunities so call if you would like to discuss a new venture / Joint Venture or an exit plan.

I will get time to blog in more detail over the next week or so but I was conscious that I hadn't updated in a while. Home life is great by the way!

Hope all is well?

Jonny

www.recruitment-hub.com

New Site

With the upturn in 2010 and a general need to update what we do, we are redesigning our website. - http://www.recruitment-hub.com

The new site should clearly define what we do and include news and latest updates from our solcial media channels. We also have a projects page for ventures such as Fusion or Recruitment Wave.

The release is a test version which will be live for 24 hours to gather feedback and test links / funtionality etc. I therefore would appreciate your comments / feedback on the site - please mail to jonny@recruitment-hub.com

I have used Sticky Media Group as the designers / developers - www.stickymediagroup.com.

Hope you are all well and enjoying a positive start to 2010?

Jonny Hiles
The Hub
www.recruitment-hub.com

PS. you may need to refresh your browser if you had visited the old site recently. On the new site, there is a picture of a chain on the home page!

PPS. Still no baby news!

J

Fusion

The eagle eyed amongst you and in particular those following a link from Linkedin may have noticed the introduction of Fusion Investments to my profile.

At the outset it is important to state that The Hub is still my focus and the primary business. The Hub is a specialist split fee recruitment brand and for more details please visit www.recruitment-hub.com
The Hub provides a delivery partnership to independent recruitment businesses thereby improving their delivery capability. The Hub is growing as the popularity of split fees grows in the recruitment industry.

Fusion is a specialist investment company, specialising in the recruitment industry and investing in recruiters. Fusion provides funding to start ups and new businesses as well as acquisition of established recruitment agencies.
Fusion is actively looking for new investment / acquisition opportunities.

Fusion is an initiative that I have been involved in for some time but had not accepted a formal role with but I am providing specialist consultancy to them and enjoying it greatly. For more on Fusion, please visit www.fusioninvestments.co.uk

As for everything else - No baby news yet, even though I am asked by everyone I speak with and the market is busy so happy days!

Hope all is well and speak soon!

Jonny

PS. Fusion pays a bounty for successful introductions - for more info please call 01179 370 3077.

J

PPS. I hadnt realised that the silly pic in the last post was so big and visible! Never mind.

UK Recruitment Directors

Hello! I hope that you enjoyed the guest blog from Mike Wedge of Sticky Media last week. If anyone else would be interested in guest blogging, please let me know!

The Hub continues and despite the blip a couple of weeks a go, November has been a busy month. A number of new partners have joined the network and we are very active with live roles which we hope will resolve before Christmas. We have this morning, taken another 7+ IT vacancies from a new recruitment partner and December is looking good. Just as well that we are expanding our team! One of our partners has even informed us that from January, he will begin to use The Hub for all candidate delivery to his agency, allowing his employees to concentrate purely on business development!

Recruitment Partners typically find out about The Hub via referral or via our now establised social media channels and I am a big believer in the value to be gained from social / professional media, once you get your head around using them. The vast majority of our business has come from a free source - i.e. we havent paid to advertise! I am by no means an expert in social / professional networking tools and because we didn't want to spend loads on advertising at the outset, we had to find alternatives. There are a host of mediums that a business can use nowadays to advertise their wares and some are industry specific whilst others work for general cross market services.

My preferred network tool is Linkedin which is widely used by the recruitment industry. Linkedin allows you to build a network of colleagues, clients and associates and once established with a decent sized web of 1st degree contacts, search for other users that are linked to your contact (within a couple of degrees).
Once connected you are notified of status updates and able to search for contacts by job title or by company or organisation. - Its easy to see how why this is of use to recruiters!

One of the things that I set up a few months back was the UK Recruitment Directors Group. The UKRDG is a space for Directors of UK based recruitment businesses to network and discuss news, experiences and issues. We have a diverse membership and some interesting debates. Members include IT, Finance, HR etc agencies but also plenty of niche companies including a lift (Elevator) specialist recruitment business and, a helicopter pilot recruiter. We now have over 300 member companies and new membership applications every day. The group has been a success and we are currently considering replicating the group out of linkedin, onto a dedicated forum.
If you are not a member yet and would be interested in joining, please let me know.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?homeNewMember=&gid=1962486&trk=

Christmas will soon be upon us and things will be slowing down over the festive period. It is always difficult to predict what Christmas will be like for a recruitment business and some years i have sat around twiddling my thumbs whilst I also remember placing 7 SAP contractors between Christmas and New Year! I hope that we will be busy but also get the time to relax with family.

It's going to be a bit of a funny christmas this year for the Hiles household. Jo will be 8 months pregnant and have finished work, whilst I will be reactive to Hub requests and slightly unsure of whether I will be at home or in the office. Jo is of course not drinking and our focus is really January and the arrival of the baby rather than Christmas day. Christmas day, we are going to Browns for lunch so no washing up!

My weekends have gone from sailing Domino in Topsham and a few drinks to buying baby stuff and decorating. The past few weekends have been spent decorating the nursery and hall, whilst the next couple of weekends will be spent decorating our bedroom. We have even replaced the double glazing and spent goodness knows how much on goodness knows what! Thankfully, we have some very generous parents, greatly looking forward to the arrival of the 1st grandchild on both sides.

Yesterday, after fitting the new light in the nursery and attempting to hang a blind, Jo and I unwrapped the new Bugaboo Chameleon. I cannot believe how complex and expensive buggies are! - especially when you spend just under £1000 in John Lewis on the buggy and car seat and then have to assemble the buggy as its flat packed.

Bugaboo do very nicely out of John Lewis. It seems that you cant have something cheap, practical and lightweight when it comes to buggies. The staff at JL in Bristol appear to take every set of new parents through the same circuit when showing the buggies, starting at the cheaper but heavier / less practical ones and eventually arriving at the bugaboo. As a father, you of course do not want your wife / partner to struggle with a heavy buggy and so you end up by buying the expensive bugaboos or icandys.

The really strange thing though is that you dont mind and want your baby to have the best buggy they can and nicely decorated nursery. It must be that something is built into us all about wanting the best for our children, even before we meet them.
Beanie is due January 23rd and I can't wait!

More about me on this blog - http://jonnyhub.blogspot.com or about The Hub at http://www.recruitment-hub.com

1) The Hub is a split fee recruitment business.
2) Send vacancies that you are unable or struggling to fill to us.
3) We will source candidates and present a short list to you.
4) You brand the candidates and send the shortlist to the client.
5) When the placement is made, we split the fee.

The Hub is part of a £100m + recruitment group and uses their combined delivery capability and infrastructure to deliver applications for our recruitment partners. Our recruitment partners generate the vacancy, we find the candidates, the partner maintains contact with the client, we speak to the candidate and split the fee when the placement is madeIf that could be of use, for any vacancies that you struggle with, then please let me know.

Vacancies

Is it me or has the market dipped a little? All the talk of recovery is great and generally, the recruitment industry has kept going despite of the hyped doom and gloom. The way that the British media comment about the economy of course affects the performance of the economy and therefore I hope that we are coming out of the worst of the recession.
In the past week we have been catching up with a couple of regular partners who tell us that November looks like a quiet month at the moment and then of course we are into Christmas so potentially fewer vacancies until 2010. Of course we realise that things are still tough at the moment and that few businesses will be kicking off projects in 2009, which makes it more important that we maximise opportunity from existing vacancies and clients.

(Step by Step) How we can help -

1) The Hub is a split fee recruitment business.
2) Send vacancies that you are unable or struggling to fill to us.
3) We will source candidates and present a short list to you.
4) You brand the candidates and send the shortlist to the client.
5) When the placement is made, we split the fee.

We use the delivery engine of a £120m recruitment plc to source the candidates through access to massive online and offline resources.
You, the recruitment partner can concentrate on winning new business and maximise existing relationships by asking your clients for a greater range of roles.

More about us at http://www.recruitment-hub.com but the best way to find out more is to call Jonny Hiles on 0845 117 0 115 or email jonny@recruitment-hub .com - (I put a space in the address to avoid too much spam)

Collaboration - www.Recruitment-Wave.com

We have been playing with Google Wave this week, inbetween sourcing candidates for our partners! As you know, we have been thinking about Google Wave based recruitment applications since Wave was announced. Mashable.com suugested a number of potential applications for Google Wave in their article - http://mashable.com/2009/09/05/google-wave-ideas/ and we really do agree that Google Wave could be game changing - http://mashable.com/2009/05/31/google-wave-features/

We are investigating Joint Venture opportunities and are very interested to hear from anyone that would like to collaborate with us on a recruitment based Wave extension. As you know, we own the domain - http://www.recruitment-wave.com and various other wave.com URL's centered around recruitment and we know recruitment!

If you would like to discuss www.recruitment-wave.com or www.recruitment-hub.com in greater detail, please give me a call on 0845 117 0 115

Jonny

Cyclical Recruitment

Has it really been two weeks since my last post? Where do the days go?
We have received positive feedback from our www.Recruitment-Wave.com ideas and thank you to all that sent us a message. Also welcome to all of the new members of the UK Recuitment Directors Group on linkedin. We added 50 new recruitment businesses in a week!

Professionally, I am pleased that August is out of the way. It's not that I dont like the sun, its that fact that everyone is on holiday. The week either side of the bank holiday was the quietest couple of weeks we have known all year. Our Recruitment Partners were working, but applicants were hard to find and client decision makers were all away!

We picked up a recruitment consultant role in birmingham from one of our partners which we had a look at as we thought that it would be very straightforward. We placed an advert on Reed on the Friday evening, anticipating a huge response, only to find that we had received one application by Tuesday morning. It really was just a consultants role with £18k basic, but we should have been inundated. We opened the role up to Monster and Total Jobs in the end and still very few responses.

Now that we are back in September, life returns to normality and the cyclical recruitment market starts up again. I think that I may have mentioned in a previous post that the year for a recruitment consultant tends to look like this -

January - 1st two weeks are quiet but then busy busy! +the long wait til payday
February -busy busy but short month so commission may not be great.
March - gets a little quieter as clients have run out of budget!
April - 2nd half is manic
May - manic and a lots of working days so good commission
June - busy and make the most of it as summer will soon be with us!
July - holiday season (need I say more!)
August - holiday season
September - typically a great month, contractors do lots of hours to recoup holiday costs
October - busy busy
November - busy busy
December - 2nd half quieter but activity switches to renewals of contractors

Of course, January and September are normally months where people look for new employment having had some time away from the office to think about life!

So, because of the way that the year works, agencies are able to anticipate what the month is likely to throw at them and allocate resources and budget and maximise the opportunity. This year has seen some spectacular lows and quiet months but the boom times will come again.

The Hub concept supports a recruitment agency business by providing a professional flexible resoucing team that you only use when all of your resources are tied up. We use the resources of the £120m recruitment plc to find the best available candidates for your role, which you then deliver to your client. When we place, we split the fee! It really is a very simple model.

Aside from delivery, we can offer recruitment business support and consultancy and this is an area that it growing for us. Once again, we just use the groups resources but becuase of our size, we know what we are doing and how to maximise revenue and opportunity. Call me if you would like further info.

We have been spending our weekends down in Topsham, enjoying the boat whilst we can. Pilotage on the Exe is interesting, and really not as complicated as you may initially think although we havent tried it after dark yet! We took Domino across the Bar at Exmouth this weekend. My ancestors would have known the run down the Exe, out across the bar into Lyme bay well, as well as the various pubs in Topsham that would have provided hospitality to them upon their return as they do for us now. It is nice to follow in footsteps sometimes. The entrance to Exmouth is notorious and lumpy and poor Jojo was ill, which oddly had the most wonderful side effect as she felt the baby or beanie as it is currently known, began to kick for the first time on Saturday evening and has been kicking ever since. We may have another sailor on our hands!

Watching Jo climb off of the tender, up the ladder onto the stern of the boat is becoming more and more nerve-racking so we know that we will not be able to do it for much longer. I thoroughly enjoy life on a boat and actually had forgotten how much I really do enjoy it. I am grateful that I did loads for a while and gained the experience and the skills I have. I am in a very fortunate place at the moment with a great and healthy family, a job that I enjoy and believe in and of course a baby on the way! I was reminded of how fortunate I am when I watched a disabled couple struggling to cross the road this morning. We are very fortunate not to have that constant struggle and sometimes not as grateful as we perhaps should be. I will make a donation to a local charity today.

If you would like to discuss anything contained in this blog, please call Jonny Hiles at The Hub on 0845 117 0 115 or email info@recruitment-hub.com

More detail on The Hub at www.recruitment-hub.com or via the pages on this blog - http://jonnyhub.blogspot.com

Jonny Hiles

Making Waves

What happens at this time of year? People are away, decisions are not being made and the whole recruitment process is on a go slow for much of the summer. It seems especially the week either side of the bank holiday. Hits on my websites - http://www.recruitment-hub.com and http://jonnyhub.blogspot.com were down and just look at the volumes of traffic around on the road to tell you that people are on holiday and not in in the office. This morning I was the only car sat at traffic lights where there are normally 10+ cars waiting in the line with me.

Again we still have vacancies and infact a few more arrived over the weekend, so we are keeping our guys and girls busy. We have picked up some more interesting roles over the past week or two including a Pastry Product Developer for a well known company. They want someone to design cakes!

I have been determined to find some time to look at new Hub projects and products. We have opened up our offering further and we are now providing a broader range of Hub services to compliment the delivery. This effectively means that we are now offering everything from incubation services to recruitment business process outsource type services although I am slightly reluctant to really term the additional services under that banner. In my opinion, the term business process outsource is a minefield because of all the offshore companies that use this term. We are a UK based recruitment company first and anything else second!

One of the new projects that we are excited about is the potential of Google Wave. incase you haven't heard or read much about it yet, A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. There is loads about it on the web and search for Wave on the Google tool bar or have a look at wikipedia.
I first heard of Google Wave one evening whilst checking Twitter and noticed that Wave was a huge trending topic. A quick look on the rest of the web about Wave convinced me that there was a huge buzz about the potential and I realised that this was potentially a game changing product if Google gets it right.

If it really does what it says it will, then Google Wave really could revolutionise the way that people communicate over the web. Of course to succeed it will need to be 1) Relevent 2) User Friendly, both of which really remain to be seen, however Google has invited developers across the globe to develop applications to sit upon it.
I believe that it will have both business and social applications and of course the business applications are what interest me. I have plans for www.recruitment-wave.com and www.recruitment-wave.co.uk and www.cv-wave.com and www.jobwave.co.uk etc and will be launching the holding page for these this afternoon. What is interesting is that a couple of these sites get hits even though I am not promoting them in any way, which potentially is a good sign for the future!

I am of course keen to continue promoting and speaking to new Recruitment Partners and am sure that demand for The Hub will increase as the market picks up. If you are interested, drop me a line on 0845 117 0 115 or to jonny@recruitment-hub.com

Outside of work, Jojo is doing really well and looks great. We started clearing the spare room over the weekend and chose the buggy so all is becoming more and more real. We managed to get to Topsham early on Saturday and took Domino down the Exe to Exmouth. We managed to get down and back in time to enjoy the festivities of the Topsham Carnival on Saturday afternoon and evening which we enjoyed greatly. It had been years since we were out on the Exe near Exmouth and Starcross and brought back happy memories of my childhood, family sailing in a small dinghy.

As ever, if you would like to discuss any aspect of the blog or The Hub, please drop me a line on 0845 117 0 115 or to jonny@recruitment-hub.com

More info is available via the other pages on the blog or The Hub website - http://www.recruitment-hub.com

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

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

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