James Osborne: Right. Well, hi there everybody. I hope you are well. For those of you who don't know me, my name is James Osborne. I am an Advisor and Mentor to recruitment organizations, both here in the UK, where I'm based and also Internationally as well. I am also the co-founder of an organization called Recruitment Network which is a large global community well, recruitment business leaders and recruitment organizations all over the world that come together, collaborate, share ideas, share best practice and support each other, navigate through extraordinary times, such as we've been through. And also the good times, as well as celebrating that we just hold the back of a big event.

James Osborne: We hosted yesterday actually with a couple of hundred recruitment business leaders. They are fantastic. Getting everyone back together into a room. And one of the things we were talking about. It's how the industry has changed and is changing and will continue to change because of COVID because of the evolution of technology and just by everything else for that matter.

James Osborne: So my presentation today is what I refer to as recruitment. I put evolution restrict revolution because I'm not necessarily sure whether the Well's changing significantly or whether this is part of what was happening anyway. But what I want to do today is just run through some ideas and thoughts about what I'm seeing happening in the recruitment world, based on my experience, working with hundreds and hundreds of recruitment organizations in different guises.

James Osborne: So I hope you will find this. As some of you do know me, I speak very quickly. So I'm going to throw as many ideas as I can at you today. But obviously there'll be a copy and recording of this video and my sessions and puzzles. So a copy of the slides available for you to have a look at. So let's talk a little bit about the sort of the recruitment market, what's been going on, what's happening, moving forward and what we need to do to really capitalize and maximize on these opportunities.

James Osborne: So to start off with, I'm just going to focus on the markets themselves and what sorts of things are happening. I suppose, if we look over the last 12 to 18 months, I suppose, generally the industry, the COVID and this whole COVID pandemic period has actually been very positive for the industry.

James Osborne: I hate to say that during a pandemic, but the reality is COVID has been good for the recruitment sector for sort of fairly obvious reasons. And if you look at our, some of our surveys that we've done across the industry the majority of recruitment businesses have it had a pretty tough stock last year and the year before, but actually now it's been quite a positive experience overall and looking forward, if we move forward into this year and beyond the next 12 months, pretty much the majority of the industry is pretty positive about what's happening.

James Osborne: In the marketplace, they're pretty confident about the growth opportunities, et cetera. So we know it's been pretty good for our industry and we will say I've got a good sentence that it's going to carry on being pretty good as well. I'm absolutely fundamentally convinced that the next 12 months, 2022 in particular, will be the best year for recruitment organizations that have been for decades.

James Osborne: I'm absolutely convinced that for those of you who had a great end last year or a great last year that's going to be even better. I think this year providing we get some things, right. And I think now we've got an amazing opportunity here. Capitalize and maximize it and do that. But one of the questions I'm asking a lot of recruitment organizations at the moment is, are we doing well right now because of us and what we're doing, or is it just purely because of the market and being the market being so buoyant.

James Osborne: It's a really important question to ask yourselves because it's quite easy to ride the wave and coast during this period and do incredibly well, but actually are we really changing our business strategy and structuring things to make sure we're really winning right now because of what we're doing as much as the market is incredibly buoyant.

James Osborne: So I want to talk about four areas today which I think are four key components that you need to be really thinking about right now, certainly in this quarter, starting this month to really move forward in 2022.

James Osborne: The first one is obviously around people. People are pretty much what our industry's all about. It is the most important part of it.

James Osborne: And it fundamentally will drive your business performance. In all sorts of ways, when we look at some of our surveys and some of the results that we're looking at coming in, and some of the data, you know, the two biggest areas at the moment for recruitment businesses the biggest chariot and challenges I suppose, for their growth will be around candidate shortages, obviously.

James Osborne: So our ability to convert business and also attracting and hiring new employees ourselves and that's just bringing in recruits into the industry and into our business as well. All of a sudden we've got lots of other challenges, stroke opportunities. But definitely the two biggest ones are really focused around people, candidates and recruiters finding more of those and being able to convert more of those.

James Osborne: It's a really big focus on the people's side. When we look at people I'll actually Franklin with you, I should say that when we look at talking about people, think to note, we've got a real issue at the moment when it comes to the recruiter side as well. If you look at, for example, over Linkedin. They look at some of the index over the last 12 to 18 months.

James Osborne: This is up until may. Last year. We can see the demand for recruits is absolutely skyrocketing. Now that's both TA internal recruiters as much as it is for agency recruiters as well. So if you're a recruiter, absolutely brilliant. You're in a phenomenally cool market right now, and you're hugely in demand.

James Osborne: And actually, if you look on LinkedIn itself, there are now currently more jobs being advertised for recruiters. Things like software engineers. I mean, that's incredible when you think about it. So the importance, the prevalence of good recruitment talent right now, is significantly important. And I think we've got to really remember that when it comes to how we're going, gonna grow our businesses, because that's a challenge for us, there's a huge demand for recruiters and we have a bit of a short-lived shortage of recruiters at the same school time.

James Osborne: Now let's go back to people. So there's three, I suppose, fundamental groups of people that we should think about when it comes to recruitment. You've got clients, you've got candidates and you've got employees or consultants working for us. Let's start with employees. Cause we just touched on that a second.

James Osborne: Yeah. Three arrows that you can see here. I'd say to recruitment businesses all the time. If you are growing your business and you're trying to grow by headcount growth. So you're looking at recruiting more recruiters, you need to be the most important client that you work for. The reason why I say that is a lot of recruitment organizations complain quite a bit that we can't find good towns at the moment.

James Osborne: We can't find good recruiters out there. There are plenty of good recruiters out there. Providing that you are focused and putting in an investment of time, properly into your attraction strategy to hire good recruiters. It's not good. Just dabbling at this and doing it. When you get a bit of time you've got to have someone or something or a time to focus on headhunting and sourcing new talent, bringing in new business and new tech consultants into your business.

James Osborne: You are your most important client. Never forget that. So if you had a customer that was a million pound customer and retained. You will throw everything out. That's exactly what your business is to use. Secondly, we've got to embrace these new working models. You've all heard about hybrid models.

James Osborne: The nine day fortnight is the four day weeks glide time working from anywhere, work from home, all the different acronyms and stuff that's going on at the moment. And the world is changing and it has changed when it bounced back to its old traditional state of five days a week in the office. I don't think it will.

James Osborne: I don't think it's right. That it should. And I think those organizations I'm embracing the new world of work are the ones who are going to be incredibly successful at attracting new employees and new recruiters. So now think about your strategy, embrace your strategy, and absolutely go for it. If you're going to do things like work from home or hybrid time.

James Osborne: Make it purposely work from home. So have strategies and things set up. So for your recruiters, they can work properly from home rather than just sitting there on their kitchen tables with no support and no help. And hopefully they're doing quite a good job of that. And then the third thing to think about is this anchors of performance.

James Osborne: And we talk a lot. We have a process we called which is where waste elimination and how we improve the capacity of our recruiters. There are a whole bunch of anchors that we as organizations puts in place by accident. We think we're doing a good thing, but all that doing is anchoring. The performance of our recruits is sliding off our recruiters down, making it hard for them to be performing at the level they should be performing at.

James Osborne: So think about all those things. You'll see your employees down, slowing your recruiters down, let's start removing those away. So our recruiters can actually do a better job of what they're doing. We've got a big focus at the moment in our, across the recruitment network around capacity. How do we get more capacity out of our recruiters, out of our clients, out of all jobs that we work on, et cetera, et cetera.

James Osborne: Really important thing to think about. Second thing is on the Candidate side, on the left-hand side. And it's a simple thing. If you look at our cans' attraction process, it just has to be better than it is at the moment. I don't think recruiters, recruitment organizations. I don't think organizations do a particularly good job at bringing in talent into their businesses.

James Osborne: We make it hard for people to apply for jobs. We make it, I live in a world where if I want to buy a coffee, I can literally order a coffee. Put a code on a reader. And within 30 seconds, I can walk out of a coffee shop with a coffee. And if I want to find my future wife or futile departure, I can start to swipe left or swipe, right?

James Osborne: Whatever it is you do on these dating apps and that sort of stuff. And yet in recruitment, if we want to attract someone to come and work for us, they have to download their CV. They have to outlay a load of information and details about them. It's just difficult for a job seeker to apply for jobs at the moment, Candidate to apply for jobs.

James Osborne: So we've gotta be faster. We've got to be more agile, more responsive, and remove all those barriers. To allow all our consults, our Candidate and job seekers to really engage with us easily and quickly I can get, I can share with you afterwards. Maybe I want to reach out to basically great examples of recruitment organizations.

James Osborne: And other organizations have done that incredibly well. And then the third piece, which I'm really passionate about is the client, the side of the people piece which is about the supply chain. If you go back to how recruitment has been for many years, many decades, we've got clients sitting at the top of the pyramid.

James Osborne: The clients are the most important people in the supply chain. And we're down here supporting and trying to service our customers. Customers are obviously, always really important, but it's now time to flatten the supply chain. We recruited. Client employees are on the same level. We are all as important as each other.

James Osborne: We all have a part to play in the recruitment of talent. So if you're working with organizations or you're an organization working with a recruiter, you have got to think of it as a partnership. Rather than as a supplier relationship, you will not solve your talent shortages as an organization. If you're not engaging with your recruiters as a true partner, working them as a true partner, if you're working their hands, distance, arms, distance.

James Osborne: So the contingent supplier of a service or a product. And then I think you're going to fail basically. So the supply chain is now flat. We are as important to recruiters, as important as the organization is. And the hiring managers in the whole supply chain are working together now rather than for each other.

James Osborne: I think it's completely different. So that's sort of so I was looking at the people's side of things. If we look at the structure just by the way, The majority of people that we polled and we've looked spoken to in the recruitment sector are definitely going for a hybrid model, the majority.

James Osborne: So two or three days in two or three days out some people have gone for this sort of working from anywhere full time, which is great, or working from home and then a small section of our full-time back in the office, whatever you do, doesn't matter, it's going to be right for your business, right. For your culture.

James Osborne: And I'm not going to question that learning, you know, As if the majority of the industry are going down a hybrid route, you sort of got to think about how does that position yourself as an employer of choice. If you are doing something radically different, that is maybe not aligned with what people are looking for right now.

James Osborne: So what do you think about that? It is important. And this is again, as we always talk about this is beyond just having a pool table in your office type. If you are growing your recruitment company from a people point of view and simple tips and techniques and tricks, I suppose I always tell people. And so the companies that we advise you've got to build a scalable team structure.

James Osborne: So your business needs to be able to scale quickly if you want to scale properly, especially this current year, when the opportunities are real yet, one of the things I always say to people is build a three-year-old chart. So imagine what your business will look like in three years time, I'm going to go to a brilliant.

James Osborne: So I'm happy to share with any of you, if you have any, if you'd like that to utilize allows you to build out this really clever org chart to see exactly what your business, how we structured in three years. So you can then work it backwards from today to work out the journey to get there. In essence, always hiring pairs as a minimum, so never hire an individual recruiter on their own.

James Osborne: You're going to hire someone to hire two or three people at any one time to make sure you're. The cashflow to be able to support that. And that obviously saves you a huge amount of time when it comes to inducting, onboarding, and training, et cetera. And actually the likelihood is if you hire one person, they might well leave your business.

James Osborne: And the minute workout, if you're hiring two or three, at least you're gonna have one or two left. If one person does need it. So it doesn't sort of slow lately, an annual growth. If you can't train people, then don't hire them. So you've got to build that capacity for when people join your business, that you can focus on them and frustrates the hell out of me.

James Osborne: When we bring on new recruiters, into our industry, into our businesses, whether experienced or brand new to the industry, and we don't invest enough time with them, right? The very beginning to train them, support them, grow them, give them the skills that need to be able to do. You've got to invest in people properly, right?

James Osborne: From the very beginning. Those first 30 days are business critical for you and for them to really get that right. And apply for a scale for tomorrow. So don't panic about the fact that you've got recruiters, maybe not performing in the first four weeks, six weeks et cetera. Remember, this is an investment into where you're trying to get to tomorrow so long as you've got the cash flow to support it.

James Osborne: Think about the investment you're making for great talent, 3, 6, 9, 12 months down the track. The great thing by the way, at the moment is because the market is so hot because most recruitment desks are so warm at the moment that actually the speeds higher or the speed performance of a new recruiter is much, much quicker, much shorter now than it has ever been before.

James Osborne: So, you know, we're saying graduate recruits are now actually having an impact on performance. Or on the billing numbers, I, within six weeks, which is absolutely off the scale. Brilliant, I think, and because they're coming into a warm desk and that they're cracking on with it, which is good. Thinking about what you're recruiting, is it a 360?

James Osborne: Is it a 180 or a 120? Those of you who know me, I'm a bit, I'm a big fan of the 180, 120 model. Nothing wrong with 360 days. A little bit of my bias has three sixties in the business and it works incredibly well, but if you're scaling a business, it's a lot easier. It's more efficient, more productive.

James Osborne: I think if you've got a team or building a team of 180 recruiters, Focus and focus on just converting business right now is all very well winning business. If you're not converting it to point exercise. And if you can't find great talent, if you can't head home great recruiters to come to a business, then build your own academies, build boot camps and even think about maybe off-shoring parts of the process.

James Osborne: And we're a big fan of automation and offshoring to help you increase people's capacity as well. So I just did that, and again, we've got some great partners that we work with offshore. And, think about your strategy. Is it a scalable team structure? If you're trying to grow your business properly in this case and just by the way, thinking about your business, as you do grow, there's a couple of really important roles.

James Osborne: I think in a growing recruitment company, you need to have someone or have a person or the full-time, or part-time dedicated to engagement someone who's dedicated to data and supporting that data in your business. Like you share with your customers and help you manage your business better, but also someone who's a talent officer.

James Osborne: So if you're looking at hiring 10, 15, 20 people in your recruitment company in the next 12 months, have someone dedicated full time to do that as their job. They're a Chief Talent Officer that goes and find you people. They onboard people, they run academies for you. They bring in that next generation of talent into your business.

James Osborne: So important. Remember you're a million pound customer, the most important customer has someone dedicated and focused to that. Second thing, that's the people side of things, obviously incredibly important. The second thing is the model, irrespective of what you're trying to do with your business, whether you are one person recruitment company, just trying to expand to make more making profit, or if you're 101 business trying to expand internationally, whatever it is, the model concept is sort of fairly similar right now.

James Osborne: And again, I'll keep this top level for today, but. The things I'm really wanting you to think about and want again, one of the great things that's happened because of COVID is that our focus now, as recruiters has changed from the short-term winning a bit of business closing, a quick deal, making a quick placement to long-term strategic partnerships with our customers, no longer we having meetings in the meeting rooms with our customers, we're having meetings in their boardrooms.

James Osborne: Now we're talking about there future hiring plans, that growth strategies, how can we partner with them? Not as a supplier, as I said, but be a true partner with them. And that allows us therefore, to create these different models that we're working with. And we did a lot of work around what we referred to as productized solutions.

James Osborne: They helping recruitment organizations build a product suite to take to market that allows them to have predictable revenue models, this recurring revenue, this ongoing. So not just about temps and contracts here, what all sorts of different types of products you can have that give you an annuity revenue or just regular income coming through for you and customers.

James Osborne: It locks you in with your customers. You become embedded in that business and you create this MRR, which is such an important part of your growth strategy. So. From a positioning point of view and how we're structuring the model of our businesses. We've got to stop being these contingent suppliers of a service and start becoming a true partner with our customer, lock them in on contracts, predictable revenue models, and use revenue and so on and so forth.

James Osborne: And again, I'm very happy to share the of examples of those, but the point is, get your head around this, because this is a great opportunity for us in our industry. And again, if you look at this face simplistic graph, I put together. You know, a lot of time pre COVID for that. And that's a lot of recruitment companies that were doing incredibly well, working really hard.

James Osborne: Do lots of contingent work, working on PSLs, whether it be low volume or high volume, but that type of business is very transactional. There's a lot of wastage in. He spent a lot of time working. I'm not making any money out of it. Recruiters working on jobs that I'm going to get paid for, et cetera. I also think it's hugely high risk as well because your customers there's no real loyalty there.

James Osborne: They're working with multiple agencies work on the right-hand side. Spend more time. There have to have a commitment to this part where it's more transformational. You've got exclusivity. You're working on these partner programs or retain solutions, manage services, RPO and RPO lights task Rassie puddle, these acronyms being fun around the industry at the moment.

James Osborne: And there's loads more as well, but this type of business you get far better reward is far more efficient business. Now don't be afraid of your small business, listening to what I'm talking about today. We've got organizations that we work with that are one person recruitment companies doing RPO is brilliant.

James Osborne: I'm making an absolute fortune right now, and they outsource offshore parts of the delivery process. So really think creatively about your positioning. So get to the right-hand side. If you want to have an effective, profitable growth business on the left-hand side, there's a lot of pedaling going on here. You may not make much money out to it necessarily.

James Osborne: That obviously translates back to some of our survey assessments and are going to be look back at our poll across the industry at the end of last year. Now the biggest strategic priorities moving is 2020 to convert your ratios. How are we going to convert more jobs at the moment to placements?

James Osborne: It's not that hard to win business right now. It's harder to win good business, but it's not that hard to pick up jobs. What is hard is converting those jobs right now. So we've got to really think about how am I going to do that. Interestingly enough, if you look at the third, the third biggest strategic priority for recruitment organizations is acquiring new clients.

James Osborne: So whilst we're in a really booming market from a business point of view, the smart recruitment organizations are not stopping that business development. We are continuously selling all the way through. This is the best way to sell. You'll get through a Candidates short market to sell your way out of it.

James Osborne: Sell better business work with more embedded customers. And partnership solutions and you can do different things. You can win better business and find better ways of goods, conversing jobs as well. So these are some of the priorities for sure. You've got the similar sort of ones as well, but again, let's convert more business now as much as anything else.

James Osborne: Okay. Third piece. Financials. I hope you will keeping out with a hook as well, too fast. Financial side. I'm a big numbers geek. I love the financials. I think it's a really important backbone of any business value. Obviously, I don't think a lot of recruitment organizations, especially the SMEs that focus enough on their financials.

James Osborne: I think we really need to traditionally be a recruitment organization when we're doing business planning. Where are we today where you want to get to next year? What's our headcount growth. What's our revenue growth going to be. I think that's a flawed strategy. I really do. To me, you start off looking at the profit.

James Osborne: You want to get to creating a great business about creating a profitable business. You've heard that expression, you know, turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity is absolutely right. We really learned that over the last couple of years during the COVID pandemic as well. So focus on the profit. Where do you want to get to from a profit point of view.

James Osborne: In 2, 3, 4, 5 years time. And then re-engineer your business structure and strategy back upwards to identify how you are going to build a business? That's going to create that level of profitability. Don't just go with, let's put a lot of head count and work out how much profit we might make off the back of that.

James Osborne: So things to think about when it comes to profit growth and driving profit growth, as things about automation. All of the non-core or repetitive tasks are, how can you maximize the machine, get the machine running better for you. How do you walk away from poor business? We have a thing called a customer value index, a scorecard exercise for poor customers.

James Osborne: Tell your customers how you scored them. Why is he walking away from them? Because it's just not good business right now. We want to work properly with customers. If you want us to do a good job. So don't be afraid to tell you. Maximize client lifetime value. Get more out of your existing customers, that account management account penetration piece.

James Osborne: Are you truly sticky with your customers? Is it very easy for them to leave you think about restructuring your business strategy? And we'll talk about a 360 180 model. Is it going to, is it going to enable. Got more job conversion at speed and scale, or is the 360 model still in play where you've got great recruiters, still being KPIs and doing lots of sales stuff.

James Osborne: When actually they've got too many jobs to work on and not converting those jobs, eliminate wasted, wherever you can think about the profit leavers within your best and in your business. So things like looking at technology. Can we talk about outsourcing piece automation? And I'm a massive fan of AI marketing.

James Osborne: So having a marketing funnel, marketing workflows, running for your business, that drives the BD strategy. And so on, I'm really get fixes on some of these core profit drivers of your business. Where do you make profit in your business? Who's you make profit out of, and let's go after those and spend less time wasting on things that aren't going to create that profit level sort of stuff.

James Osborne: Okay. Look at 2021, how did it compare to 2019 for most recruitment organizations? Or an increasing profits, ultimate turnover or head count profit growth by well, over 25% in some cases some by 25 cents some about the same level. So the majority of businesses are seeing a profit growth right now that is going to continue in 2022 and 2023, providing you listen to some of this stuff and you embrace the strategy in your business to make that happen. This is an example of a recruitment organization from March to August last years.

James Osborne: So about an 18 month period, the blue line is a net fee income, and you can see how that sort of grow grew over that period of time. The red lines, the really important line though, and that's the level of EBITDA or net profit that converted from that net fee income. Traditionally, I'd be very excited about a recruitment company hitting 23, 24, 25%.

James Osborne: This business now has custody of 35%. That's incredible growth, not only from a Net income. Top level, but also from a profit conversion as well. And that's now their new benchmark medium trends, twins. They were not going to look back on 25%. We're going to go for 35% as our benchmark moving forward off the scale.

James Osborne: It's almost like a tech company, but I'd say it's brilliant. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it, which is great news. Re-engineer it. Re-engineer your business planning. Start with the end in mind. It's all about value creation, a really simplistic exercise to do. If you are a recruitment company, the owner is just do this quick exercise.

James Osborne: It's quite fun, but it really, I think gets you thinking a little bit about your business and where it's going. So let's imagine, and I say this a lot of times. Let's imagine you wanted to sell your company in three years. It doesn't mean you're going to have to say your company's completely relevant, but the point is, if you've got a line in the sand in three year's time, it means you've got something to aim for and go for.

James Osborne: And it's based on profit and value creation. So let's imagine you're going to have a business in three years, time, it's worth 4 million quid and you own 75% equity of the business. And you're 25 cents you've given away and shares and EMI schemes and that sort of good stuff. Let's imagine in three years time, You got a multiple of four times your profit, which means sitting around a million pounds.

James Osborne: This is very crude. If I simplify just for the sake of good today. So based on that I can re-engineer my business strategy back upwards to work out what my GP needs to be, what my salary is, needs to be, what my overheads needs to be. Let's presume I'm going to get 30% off. GP is going to convert into a profit.

James Osborne: So 1 million pounds means I need about 3.3 million pounds worth of GP. 50% of my GP is going to make up my staff costs, paying good salaries to my staff and supporting them with bonuses and that sort of stuff. It's 1.65 million, my overheads going to make up the other 20%. So if my business looked like that in three, three years time, that's a good, solid business.

James Osborne: That's throwing off a good bit of value and a good level of profitability. We can then re-engineer my business now to work out, how are we going to build that business? So let's work it backwards. As an example, if my GP figures are 3.3 million, I can work out today. How many customers I'm going to have in three years time, they're probably going to be spending around about 200,000 pounds a year would be how many big customers we're going to have this spending about a 100K how many see customers at 50K, et cetera.

James Osborne: So I know how many customers are going to have in total and roughly what that demographic looks like. I can work out my stick with GP or the contract retained annuity or. Type of revenue. I can work out what my margin should look like. I work out what my geographical spreadsheet is like and so on and so forth.

James Osborne: So today based on the profit I want to create and the value I want to create my business, I can work out today. What my business will look like or should look like or could look like in three years time, I can now rewind my business today and work out how to create and make that happen. Okay. From a salary point of view, we've already identified about 1.65 million pounds, 1.65 million pounds to spend on salaries.

James Osborne: I can now roughly work out. My employee to manage your ratio is going to be my number of employees. My total headcount. How many Fiona am I going to have? Well, my average GP effort is going to work out per Fiona, is that realistic? Is that too light? Is it too big and so on and so forth? So I've got a really good center.

James Osborne: How many people are gonna have in my office. And even with that, what I worked out on the people's side, I can even work out what my office size is going to look like. How big is the office going to be? How much money am I going to spend on technology per recruiter? How much I'm going to spend on learning and development per recruiter, per head marketing costs centers.

James Osborne: So the point I'm trying to make is let's build businesses based, not just on the vanity metric, which is headcount and turnover, but on the profit metric, which is the 70 stuff, the important stuff, and then redesign our business strategies to make that happen. Think about an operating model in your business to build that out, you need to build an operating one of the matching of franchising or company in any franchise.

James Osborne: They have an operating model that you can pick up, stick it somewhere else. And it will work exactly the same sort of way. Same thing in your business. Have you got an operating model? The way that we work around here, does everybody follow that? Can we therefore measure it? Is it built around work? Do you have a delivery workflow, a sales workflow, an HR workflow, are you automating or outsourcing parts of that workflow to give you more capacity and so on and so forth?

James Osborne: It's almost like a manufacturing business in essence, where you can continuously playing with the manufacturing equipment to try and make it go faster, speed up a little bit and throw out more performance out the other end sort of thing. Think of it in that. If you can't connect to me as well, how it works.

James Osborne: And then the final part of my four hours is the performance. And I've touched on this super quick. It's sort of fairly obvious really, but performance right now is really important because what is happening is while we're recruiters are doing well, they're having record months or medical Coulters, which is absolutely stupid.

James Osborne: What we are seeing is a drop now in quality, a little bit, we're running around frantically, running around, doing lots of stuff, but quality is having a bit of a cake on the back of that. We can't let, being busy, anchor our ability to do great work. We've got to focus on the quality of jobs were working on the quality of the customers and the relationships we have with those customers.

James Osborne: The quality of the Candidates, the quality of our operating processes, even things like the quality of our job adverts. We did a whole session, received a lot of recruiters about the quality of job, edit lots of good job advert. And what's a patch of advert this market. We've got to change our thinking around that, which is super important.

James Osborne: So again, I'm a massive fan of data. I love looking at data. So look at the data that identifies quality, look at data. This is one of the reports that I utilize on a weekly basis with a number of members that I work with around now. How's that business looking? What, how are they tracking? Is this micromanagement?

James Osborne: Absolutely not. Of course it's not what this is about data analysis. To be able to make better decisions in my business to make my machine go faster to make me move and move more productively, make my recruiters better because I can forecast and plan what's happening in the business moving forward.

James Osborne: So don't drop a quality. In exchange for quality, for quantity, it is really important to think about that. I don't think, I don't think the market, I don't think our customers will tolerate that for too long. If we keep letting people down in essence is a big part of what we're gonna get. Right. And get it going back to.

James Osborne: What do you recruit and organizations think will help them stand out in the market over the next 12 to 18 months, it comes down to quality and predominance. The quality of the service. We provide the quality that you, the team of people we've got. It's not about price anymore. That's all gone. Now you can do your margins should be going up and your customers will pay for it.

James Osborne: If you're providing the quality and the outputs that we should be doing. So I fixate on quality as much as anything else. So that are the four areas I want you to touch on. I only had. I do talk super fast. I don't want to get as much in here as possible. It's about the people you've got in your business, customers, clients, candidates, it's the model that you're running the financials based on profit and value creation.

James Osborne: And there's been quality within your business as well. And hopefully some of those ideas I've shared with you today have at least got you thinking about one or two things you might want to be doing differently, whether you're a recruiter or recruitment business, or even if you're on the other side.

James Osborne: And you're a customer. Looking at how recruitment organizations are trying to support you and trying to work in partnership with you, which is exactly what they're trying to do and what we're trying to do right now. The bats that ask the question, are you doing well now because of you or are you doing well now because of the market really important question to ask there's a little QR scan.

James Osborne: I'll pay. If you want to give yourself a little scan. We'll take you directly to a page where you can download my slides from today and some further readings and free tools I'm going to share with you as well, et cetera, as just get that little scan, click on the link, it will take you straight there.

James Osborne: I hope you've enjoyed that today. I hope you're enjoying the day itself. Really. I think to be sharing best practice and ideas. There's some amazing speakers here today, as well as I'm sure you've got a, and I'm obviously, if any of you would like to reach out to me or find out a bit more about the recruitment network and what it is that we do, and then feel free to drop a link on our website.

James Osborne: And I would love to speak to you other than. If I don't have any questions at all or anything at that time something to have this world works actually. So I don't think we are all those few little things in there, but great. So lovely to see you. Well, thank you so much, indeed. And enjoy the rest of your day.

James Osborne: Thank you.