posted 30th September 2021
Time for the next Sargeant blog says Lori, the TSR marketing guru. That means another quarter over and it has certainly gone quickly! Coming out of lockdown I had decided to approach business life by treating TSR Select, which is a 15-year-old recruitment agency, as a brand-new start-up company. The plan has been to write a quarterly blog to hold ourselves accountable and document our progress as we built a new style of IT recruitment agency post-pandemic.
That has meant a move to home working, a new website (delivered brilliantly by Lori), and a new CRM from JobAdder (what a success - I would highly recommend it to any recruitment company particularly because of the monthly licences and its massively user-friendly interface).
Against these successes there have been endless problems moving phones from one supplier to another and getting remote working to be effective. An inability to effectively deliver basic services from the supplier balanced against the issues of trying to leave the existing contract and find a new supplier has proved to be challenging.
Also, acknowledging that while remote working is good for experienced staff who really want to work at home, it is undoubtedly a challenge for new staff and near to impossible for people who are new to recruitment, at least with our present set up. What people can pick up in a couple of days sitting next to an experienced consultant can take much, much longer when you don't have that in-person contact. However, we are starting to understand the challenges and will improve moving forward with regards to who to recruit and how we help develop their skills.
One issue that can be sometimes overlooked is that new staff require time from managers and can be a distraction from the job at hand. Working as we do now that is probably exaggerated. As a result, existing staff can suffer as we develop new people.
The biggest disappointment though was the realisation that through old habits we lost impetus in terms of building a new, better business and started to recreate the old one. The way we want to grow the business and develop TSR Select is by cultivating a community of MSP clients and candidates which we can continually grow and with whom we can regularly communicate. Instead of doing this we have recruited consultants and left them isolated in home-based working roles just trying to make random placements and not growing the business. Everybody who joins from now on will work at developing the community and their success will come from this.
Overall, there was a slight fall back on figures in the third quarter. This was down to a new emerging world of counter offers as competition for staff increases and a few placements fell through due to some unusual, one-off circumstances. We definitely arranged enough placements to overachieve on targets and it is a very busy market, so the opportunities are there.
Our goal for the end of Q4 is to have grown the community and to be in contact with helpful, monthly email communications.
We are looking forward to continuing to evolve and grow. Now on to a successful end of the year!
Gary Sargeant, Managing Director