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Andy Simpson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyhsimpson/) is joined by Ben Musgrave (https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmusgrave/), COO and Head of Product at Hinterview (https://hello.hinterview.com/) to discuss USPs in recruitment and working smarter, not harder
Watch on Youtube - https://youtu.be/iqY1x2rSJvo
Listen on:
See previous episodes:
00:00 Introduction and Podcast Welcome
01:12 Ben Musgrave's Early Life and Education
02:43 Transition to Recruitment
04:14 Challenges in Recruitment
07:33 Consultancy and Recruitment Dynamics
16:51 The Role of KPIs in Recruitment
21:35 The Pitfalls of KPI-Driven Recruitment
22:27 The Birth of Hinterview: Solving Recruitment Challenges
23:18 A Game-Changing Candidate Experience
25:36 The Video Interview Breakthrough
27:59 Building and Scaling a Recruitment Business
40:59 The Future of Recruitment: Automation and Personalisation
Andy Simpson: [00:00:00] You wouldn't invite four website designers to build you a website. And then at the end of it, pay the one that you like the most and the other three can just get lost or say to the three, thanks a lot. I've gone with somebody else, but I'll be in touch next time. I'm looking for a website. Imagine that.
Welcome to another episode of our podcast. My name is andy Simpson, CEO and co founder at Hinterview. Today, I'm joined by Ben Musgrave, our chief operating officer, and I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time with Ben talking about his background before recruitment, which I think really, he's got a really interesting kind of, story, how we fell into the recruitment industry and all of the different things that he's done, in between and since then. So Ben, welcome to the podcast.
Ben Musgrave: Thanks very much.
Andy Simpson: We normally start these episodes by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about their Genesis story. Where they came from you've got a [00:01:00] more interesting story, a more storied history than most.
So yeah I'd love to hear from the, yeah, where did it all begin?
Ben Musgrave: Yeah, I think Typical fell into recruitment, so I did chemistry at uni. Loads of my friends have had a go at it. I
Andy Simpson: think you've got to go back a bit further. Further? I think there's a more interesting chapter than that. So you've got to give the people what they want.
Ben Musgrave: Okay. My dad worked for BP, so he moved all over the world when I was a kid, and so spent my teenage years in the US, in Alaska, so was graduated from high, American high school prom, graduation, all those types of things, but had applied to come back to the UK to university, so came back.
to study chemistry. Loads of my friends at uni had a gap year, so I thought I'll go and do that. So I ended up having five of them. And what were you doing that was so interesting that it took you about five
Andy Simpson: times?
Ben Musgrave: Skiing. Skiing. Yeah so yeah, winter's out in [00:02:00] the Alps. Which I
Andy Simpson: guess, which I guess you picked up in Alaska originally.
Ben Musgrave: I picked up before that because my parents before I was born was, had lived in Norway. So they got into skiing there. So obviously in the oil game. Yeah. So we'd always skied. And then, yeah, definitely in Alaska, a bit of everything like snowboarding, Alpine skiing, telemark skiing, cross country skiing, back country skiing, kind of anything on snow I was interested in.
Yeah. Moved back from the Alps. I'd had enough living out there, living out of a suitcase permanently and things moved back to the UK. Yeah. Moved to London, needed to find a job, started applying to jobs, and then got approached by some recruitment companies, and was learning about it, trying to figure out what I wanted to do.
Fundamentally, I needed cash, so I said yes. And I, what I, It's a story as old as time itself. Exactly, yeah. And but I wasn't actually, I guess I wasn't actually a recruiter, I was a relationship manager for for a recruitment company. And so I was really looking after our big clients and it was the, a [00:03:00] lot of the big banks where we were on the PSL, for like tech PSLs, risk PSLs, finance PSLs, whatever.
In general, we were already on them and I was maintaining those relationships, making sure we stayed on the PSL each year. And trying to, convince the client that we were doing a good job so they'd keep us, that we were staying within their rules, and also pushing our recruiters to fill as many jobs as possible and to, the reality was, push those rules to the limits to try and get an advantage over everyone else on the PSL and, there's a lot of jobs come out of them, but therefore there's a lot of people on the PSL, so there's five or six companies.
Andy Simpson: Yeah.
Ben Musgrave: That was really interesting, I loved just Learning about all of these different jobs that up until that time I'd never didn't even know they existed, that risk was such a thing that, all, you know, learning about different types of engineering and coding, et cetera. I found that really interesting. But what I really struggled with was, How do we pitch ourselves?
Because I was being told, [00:04:00] oh, we need to, let's see if we can pitch to get some more work out of these guys. Can we get on some more PSLs? Why should we stay on the PSLs? Oh it's because we've got this incredible database of candidates because we are specialists. We just do tech in, recruit in finance or.
But we also do risk in finance. And we also do, we also do quants in finance. And our guys are niche, they only work their niche. And I said, okay, but I think everyone else on the PSL is saying exactly the same thing. So I don't even think it's a unique combination of things that we have, nevermind none of them being unique.
Andy Simpson: Yeah. Yeah. And
Ben Musgrave: so I, I really struggled with that and then I left and I went on to worked in. Consultancy. So I worked in a data and analytics consultancy in sales there. And moved on to another consultancy but I think kept in touch with you. By that point, you had your own recruitment consultancy.
So I actually used you to recruit [00:05:00] people for us. And I couldn't actually even tell you what your USP was then that
Andy Simpson: we didn't have one.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah I used you because, Of the relationship because I knew you that I thought you were a good guy that you wouldn't rip me off that you would do a good job as in you'd find decent candidates and you'd get them to me in a decent amount of time and I only used you not because you'd negotiate an exclusive with me, but because I knew as a hiring manager, I didn't have the time to be dealing with multiple different recruiters. I just wanted to speak to one person and I saw that as a benefit for myself.
Andy Simpson: And so we may come back to that in a minute. So you've obviously worked as a recruiter. Yeah. You then worked as a hiring manager in a firm. Fairly large consulting business. And now you've worked as a chief product officer, COO in a software company.
And so you've seen the full gamut, the [00:06:00] whole smorgasbord of, you've been on every side of the table. And I've been recruited. And you've been recruited. Yeah, exactly. Recruited by recruiters. The rounds, like what's your experience been like from a what have you learned over the years since, since you started in this game and what would you say the things that stand out to you are?
Ben Musgrave: I used to struggle even when we're on a PSL with a client of like, why should a hiring manager meet us? Why should they invest time with us? And what are we really doing to help them out? And that feels like it's got even worse, right? When you're outbound prospecting, I get probably dozens of emails a day from recruiters.
I am lucky if I even skim read one a week, I reckon. Feels like for recruiters is getting harder. The interesting thing, right? When I used you as a recruiter, that was to find contractors that I could place as a consultancy. [00:07:00] Into a client. So arguably all we're doing now was adding two layers of costs in because you were taking a margin and I was taking a margin and then they were going on to the end client.
But we could, we added a bit more of a wrapper where we did have, we had some permanent employees, there's like overhead that provided a bit of QA to that. But really we just had more of a story around. We know this space. We have, we can give you people that you want in this space to do big data, to do analytics and therefore get your guys through us.
And the end client didn't even ask do you employ these guys? Do you not? How does it all work? They just said, yeah, that's great. Yeah. How much will you charge us? And we charge a day rate. So we were just adding a margin. There was no fixed price or anything like that. Yeah. So that was my first introduction to how the [00:08:00] wrapper is so valuable.
Andy Simpson: Yeah.
Ben Musgrave: And it's not just a, Oh, I'll put 10 percent on top of this, but it's a, I'm not even going to talk about what this guy's being paid. I'll just tell you that my. The our fee is a grand a day for this guy or whatever it is.
Andy Simpson: Yeah. And that's really interesting, right? Because in an earlier episode, we were talking with Sam about how the difference between being a recruitment consultancy, agency, whatever, however you'd wish to describe yourself.
And the leap to being a consultancy, whether that be ey, Deloitte, pwc, or any of the many SMB consultancies that are out there, it's nothing more than really positioning and messaging. Okay? Some people might, they might permanently employ some people. They might have a bench of people, they might have, a few different solutions.
But fundamentally, they're putting people into an organization. and they're just putting a little bow on it [00:09:00] and charging four times what you're charging. Yeah. But most importantly, what they are not in is the recruitment budget. That's the key. Yeah. They're in a completely different budget. Yeah. That recruitment and HR have got nothing to do with.
They're having different conversations with different people who've got a lot more authority and are less focused on just cost management. And it, I think it's wild. How small that gap is, or how small the step is, but for some people it feels one giant leap for mankind, they, it's, it feels like it's an unfathomably big step to make.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah. And sometimes there is a big difference, right? And you get all of these shades of gray and actually it's become even more blurred. I think in the UK with all the IR35 stuff, a lot of the recruitment, agencies started bringing in their like professional services consultancy, which really just proved how [00:10:00] much of a facade a lot of that consulting work was because suddenly they were professional services they were outside of IR 35, but they were still just bringing day rate guys in to deliver work for the end client. And it's still. Paid day rate was no fixed price stuff. There's no, there's not even a QA wrapper around it at that point, right? Where you could say I do have some experts that can oversee and make sure this is going in the right direction.
They're not doing that. So yeah, it's just that really, I think, emphasizes how little you can, How little you have to do to make a big difference to justify a, a change in approach.
Andy Simpson: Yeah, and I think, whether you call it resource augmentation or human capital outsourcing or consulting it's fundamentally just about helping organizations engage with on demand talent.
Yeah. And how you do that is, It's not really, it's not really much [00:11:00] difference in it. It's just about how you position it to the customer and how much confidence you give the customer that you are the guys, rather than, just getting a bunch of, CVs or resumes from a bunch of recruiters.
So let's just talk about, your experience as a client services manager in recruitment. So you're working in a big staffing business. You've got, I would imagine a range of blue chip accounts. You're probably competitive with X number of other I would imagine relatively large staffing businesses as well.
How do the economics of that work? You, do you accept your fate that you'll fill one in five jobs? And is it just part of the game that it's just a volume play and you have to accept that? Or were you trying to evolve, innovate, change, develop, win better quality business? Or are you [00:12:00] just we just do what we just do what we do and that's it.
Ben Musgrave: In general, we just did what we did, is the reality of it, and we'd have discussions around it, but it never felt like much really changed. And I think it's interesting for us at the time, it felt like being on the PSL was like the holy grail, of course you want these big clients to be on the PSL, because then you're protected, you've got this moat around you, hiring managers aren't supposed to use anyone but you, so that's great.
But it meant each role was hyper competitive. Yeah. Because you couldn't be like, Hey, I've got a great relationship with this guy, so I know I'm the only one, or I get it a week ahead. Ev Everyone on the PSL was getting that job at the same time. And you were expected to work the job. So you had to expect you're only going to fill one in five, one in six, because that was the process that was built around it.
And so you play a bit of smoke and mirrors there. And you'd say I do have a good relationship with this hiring manager. [00:13:00] So he's told me he is going to have a job coming out so I can be ready for that job to come out, but I still can't submit CVs. Until the job is out. And then there'd be another job that comes out where maybe, he, that hiring manager has a great relationship with somebody else so probably they've been working it before you. So there's no point in you working it, but you'd put a CV or two in to show because you had to show you were doing something about it. So you could do a bit around that, but it was playing at the edges, right? It was never, nothing fundamental to really shift how that all worked.
Andy Simpson: And how do you motivate a team of salespeople who know that they're only going to get paid, I'm trying to divide a hundred by six, eight, 12 18 75, one in six. So they know that five, five sixths of their effort is a total and utter waste of time. Yeah. How do you motivate inspire and retain people where it's [00:14:00] blindingly obvious that most of the work they do is completely pointless.
Ben Musgrave: That was where I just leave people like you and, the actual managers of those people to try and motivate them. And, I think we, we were a large, established organization. We had a lot of process and insights and, we knew to focus on things like. If you had a good candidate, get the multiple interviews because again, it's unlikely you had the candidate on exclusive.
So that candidate was probably speaking to other recruiters. So the more interviews you could get in, the more you'd have them blocked out and the more likely you are to place them. And then we'd target jobs with multiple interviews. Because again, if you could block out those interviews, you're not only as are the numbers there, because if you get, Five first interviews, you should get two second interviews.
You should get a placement, but also if you've blocked out five first interviews for that manager, he doesn't have time to interview anyone else's candidates either. Yeah. So we were targeting [00:15:00] things like that, but a lot of the time it did. I'd be frustrated because conversations would be things like, so last month you did only did one placement and you did.
A hundred first interviews and you got 50 2nd interviews. So we need you to get two placements this year, this month. So that means you should be going for 200 1st interviews to get a hundred second interviews to get the placement. And I was just like, it's wild. This is madness. , instead of just making our funnel bigger, can we not adjust the size of the funnel to say what do we need to do to get these a hundred first interviews to make?
That 100 become two placements or three placements or four placements. Yeah. But it's the kind of work smarter, not work harder. Do you think that still goes on? I'm sure it does. I'm sure it does. And I know it does actually from speaking to Our sales guys and our customer success guys, where they're, as part of what we do in training our clients to use our software, but just to [00:16:00] train them in general is what are you doing to help the end client?
And if you're helping the end client by saying, You're going to have to spend less time interviewing, you're actually saying I'm going to get less interviews to still get the placement.
Andy Simpson: Yeah.
Ben Musgrave: And often it boggles their mind and hold on a minute, but I need my interviews because I'm KPI'd on the number of interviews I have.
Andy Simpson: Yeah.
Ben Musgrave: Is that what, but this, then you start, you have to wind all the way back to why do you have those KPIs? What's the purpose of them? Yeah. If the KPI is no longer fit for purpose, you need to adjust your KPI. Fine. I know you've got stories of a client that refused to video interview a candidate, because they knew that if they video interviewed them, they'd never get an interview with the client.
So they didn't video interview them to get them to have an interview with the client. So they were just wasting an hour of the client's time so that they could hit their KPI.
Andy Simpson: I see all the time where the [00:17:00] client or the, sorry, the recruiter will do a video interview. realize the candidate is terrible, so they will submit their CV without the video so that they get the interview to hit a target, even though they know the candidate.
They'd rather hit their target, they'd rather waste an hour of their client's time with a terrible candidate so they could get their, hit their number. Yeah. And that is That's not uncommon. That that's pretty widespread right now. Look, most customers that we work, not all, but most, typically you don't buy our product and implement it effectively.
If you are, if you think in that way, most people are trying to re imagine or just get better at what they do, but it absolutely does still occur where people will willingly waste an hour of someone else's, the customer's time. in, in in pursuit of a KPI. And look, you could [00:18:00] argue that the client deserves it, the client's working with four agencies and why should you do the client a favor, or whatever it might be, however you might position it. But what it is really the client, the recruiter, and arguably most of the industry are locked in this like loveless, perverse dynamic where everybody knows it's weird and it's pointless and it doesn't work, but nobody wants to break the cycle.
So everyone's the example I always use is, imagine that you were going to build a website. You wouldn't invite four website designers to build you a website and then at the end of it, pay the one that you like the most and the other three can just get lost or say to the three, thanks a lot.
I've gone with somebody else, but I'll be in touch next time. I'm looking for a website. Imagine that. Imagine that. If somebody said that to you, you'd be like, I don't want to do that again. I've just done that [00:19:00] one. Seems terrible. But, and we go, thanks a lot.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah.
Andy Simpson: Thanks very much. I look forward to hearing from you again.
And then you just take, when you take a step back, you realize how, it's lunacy, right? It's total and utter lunacy. But of course we just keep doing it. Over and over again, knowing that one in six people will buy something from us and we're willing to sacrifice the five and six.
But
Ben Musgrave: I think
Andy Simpson: the
Ben Musgrave: Fault's maybe too strong a word. I think KPIs are there, or at least start for a very good reason, but then recruiters start thinking only about their KPIs and they stop thinking about what's best for my customer. And they stop, and therefore they stop thinking. How do I articulate my offering to this customer based on the benefits to them?
And so then you get the I'll just chuck this CV over. Cause I think if they look good on paper and I can get them an [00:20:00] interview and then I've hit my KPI. And that KPI is there because in general, if I get two, five high quality first interviews, I get two second interviews, which gets me a placement or whatever your ratios happen to be in your industry.
So the ratio, the KPIs were there for a reason. The recruiter stops thinking about why they're there and starts gaming them. And in doing that, they degrade the service they're actually delivering because they stop thinking about the client or they're incentivized to stop thinking about the client by these KPIs.
And everyone just gets into this cycle of I need to get more out the door because I need to do more deals or it's getting harder. So I need to get more out there to do the same number of deals and not stopping to think what am I trying to achieve here? And actually, even before what am I trying to achieve is what is that hiring manager trying to achieve and how can I best help them?
And then how do I articulate to them how I help them and how I can help them better than anybody [00:21:00] else. And that's why when you guys created Hinterview and I heard about it and I've, I followed you basically from day dot before joining because I thought this is great. This is, this would solve so much for me as a hiring manager, because as a hiring manager, I was basically telephone interviewing pretty much anyone who CV, you.
Got sent to me because I don't find CVs that helpful to really understand who this person is.
Andy Simpson: Yeah.
Ben Musgrave: So I needed that half hour phone call to know do I then invest another hour to bring them in for an interview? And I knew from being on the recruiter side, I struggled because we didn't have a single unique selling point or a unique package of selling points.
Yeah. And this created it. So it was creating value for the hiring manager. It was creating value for the recruiter and it should actually be a better process for the candidate as well. So the candidate should [00:22:00] perform better, which means they're more likely to get the job that's right for them. The candidates are happier and hiring managers are becoming more and more come recruiting companies that recruit
Andy Simpson: yeah
Ben Musgrave: are becoming more and more bothered about the candidate experience yeah and like their brand from a hiring point of view as well as their brand for whatever they're actually selling and so it just seems to be You know, it works all around.
Andy Simpson: Yeah. So I worked obviously in a large staffing business and, got married, had a kid, had my first kind of midlife crisis and, decided to leave a very well paid and successful job to, to start an IT recruitment company. Just what the world needed. And. In that process I was working on a job with a client wasn't exclusive.
So I was in like a CV race and I sent the CV of a candidate to the job. She was amazing. She was a fantastic candidate, but she'd been out of work for a number of years raising a family. [00:23:00] I think she'd been out of work for nearly four years. She'd had two children in quick succession, the youngest of which had gone to nursery.
And I submitted it, she was great. And when you've worked in recruitment for a long time, like I had, you just know what you're doing and you just get that kind of recruitment sixth sense that this is a candidate, this is a walking invoice. And I sent a CV to the client rejected it, not interested looking for somebody with more up to date skills and experience.
And so to my, I was like, Oh, I thought you might say that. So I went back to the customer, I said, look, trust me, I've been doing this job a long time. You should interview this candidate. No, not interested. And so I went back to the candidate. I said, I'm really sorry. They don't want to see you. And she was gutted.
And I guess in a, it was like a proper sliding doors moment, like a slight fit of petulance. I went, do you know what? I tell you what we could do. We could record a video you and I could show it to him. Then he'll see how good you are. And he'll have to interview you. She was like, [00:24:00] yeah, sure.
Why not? So we recorded a video. We use this thing. Google hangouts on air. It was called back then. I think it's now evolved to Google meet, but it doesn't exist anymore. We recorded a video. We published the video to YouTube. I sent the link from YouTube to the hiring manager and I said, look, Do me a favor, just watch two minutes of this video.
And if you still tell me she's not the right candidate, I'll never mention her name again. And of course, lo and behold, he watches the video, he responds 15 minutes later, Oh my god, she looks great, get her in ASAP. And we send her down for an interview and she gets an offer. And we've just Oh my God.
And then to be fair, it's him that said, why don't recruiters send videos? That was like super helpful. And actually fair play to you. I probably would have missed out on that candidate. And that was really how it all began. And of course. We just, we, anything about technology, right? We just thought we'd buy it in.
Like we bought in, I don't know, cube 19, CRM, [00:25:00] phone system, source breaker, whatever we were using, we just assumed that we would buy another tool in, but we didn't know anyone else that was using video. And part of the reason was there was nothing out there. So there was a bunch of different options, but they were all Nobody was really designing a product for the staffing professional.
Everyone was designing a product. It's all about automation. How do we disintermediate the human being from the process? And strangely, what we were looking to do was almost the diametric opposite of that. We were looking to A, showcase the recruiter doing their thing, B, bring the best out of our candidates, not the worst.
We weren't trying to, we weren't trying to screen our candidates out. We were trying to present them in a good light. And so we built the very, very first prototype of Hinterview and we used it from there as a USP for our agency. And then some years later we realized that there was a lot of money in software or so we thought.
And and we, we spun it out and we closed down our little recruitment business and we focused on this. So yeah that's [00:26:00] how this whole crazy journey began.
Ben Musgrave: And if you think all like the very beginnings of that, you talked about The sixth sense you had and your experience in recruitment meant you knew that she was a good candidate.
Every, pretty much every recruitment company claims they have that differentiator. There's no way of evidencing that to a hiring manager when you're pitching to them. They're used to everybody telling them that, whether they're a like spotty 19 year old straight out of school who's just started recruitment, or a 40 year old who's been doing it for two decades.
So you can't evidence that I have this sixth sense. So that video shows. is actually just a bit of evidence to it because if you wrote a cover letter with this that candidate saying the candidate doesn't look great on paper however I've spoken to them and they said this that and the other which just seems like they're a perfect [00:27:00] cultural fit they've got the drive you asked for the x the y the zed Watch the video and you'll understand.
You're actually saying, I've used my experience and I'm demonstrating that now with this video.
Andy Simpson: A hundred percent, right? You want top marks in maths.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah.
Andy Simpson: Gotta show you're working.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah. Do
Andy Simpson: you know what I mean? It's no point getting to the right answer. You've got to demonstrate how you've got there.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah.
Andy Simpson: And I think that's the, that for me was where the root cause of the perceived Lack of value would exist. So what would happen? I was good at recruitment, right? I was a contract recruiter, volume recruiter. I was like, all about pace. And what I would do is I'd get a job and I would take the job spec and then I'd say I'll get some CVs to you.
And then I would work sometimes till midnight and then I would find three CVs and I would send them to the client and they would arrive magically in his inbox, three CVs. And of course, to the client, I've had a half an hour phone call and I've just [00:28:00] imagined five, three CVs on his desk that all look good for the job.
So the client has got no respect for the amount of effort that's gone in to that process. And therefore, when I then asked them for 15 grand, for the trouble, it feels like an absolute monumental ripoff. But if you articulate to the customer, what has gone into making this machine and say look, Mr. Customer, I spent the last five years researching and understanding my industry vertical, and I can now. call upon any one of X number of experts in this space, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't really matter how it's done. But I think the relationship between perception and reality is part of the reason that the hiring manager or the client devalues the service. Because it's blind, they're blind to it. Whereas [00:29:00] if they see you doing the work, they respect the value. They go, God, that would be me. This guy's just sent me four video interviews, each one half an hour long, and I've been reading, and I picked two of the best, two of the candidates that I think are a great fit, that guy's just saved me four hours.
And I think that's the challenge that recruiters face. It's about showing their value in real life. It's not, I don't want to diminish it. It's not easy, right? That's why it's, that's why it's challenging is because it's not easy, but we absolutely, we see that happen, time after time where the recruiter finds it so hard to articulate to their customer or justify their fee and then fee per, and then you get somebody along the road saying they'll do it for 10%.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah.
Andy Simpson: And those two things in conjunction are a massive problem.
Ben Musgrave: But I think also recruiters fall into the trap of not realizing how much effort they're [00:30:00] putting in and it becomes normal to them.
So they don't even think to explain it to the hiring manager, yeah, you've had a half hour call with me. I've in that call, I've thought of four people because I am speaking to people all day, every day. So I've thought of those four immediately. But B, I've then put out four job ads. Each one of those actually cost me 50 quid, 100 quid, whatever to advertise.
I've had, I've, proactively gone out to 20 people that I thought that could be a good fit. I've screened through the hundred applicants that I got from those four ads that I put out there. That's taken me 10 hours to do that, to come back to you with four candidates. And because it's second nature, you don't think to say, this is what I've, this is all the effort I will be doing.
And it's it's like, it's the unconscious competence, right? I'm so good at this. I don't have to think about it. I just do it. Yeah. And it, and I can't even [00:31:00] relate to someone not understanding I'm doing all this effort.
Andy Simpson: Yeah.
Ben Musgrave: So I don't even think to explain it, to explain all of the work I'm doing, that I'm taking off them.
Andy Simpson: Yeah, and I couldn't agree more, but just to go back to the point you made about when you so let's imagine you're a 10 man recruitment business or five person recruitment business. The founder is typically somebody with tons of experience. Yeah. And they say things like, Oh no, my clients trust me because I know everyone in my vertical or whatever.
And then. You say, okay but how do we grow? Because the truth is you're only one person. And you can get loads of trainees in, but as we've articulated on previous episodes, the reality is that half of them won't work out. You could go and buy experience in from other recruitment companies. But let's be fair, are they really going to be that great?
Maybe not. If they're doing okay in Recruitment Company X, are they going to do great in Recruitment Company Y? Maybe. So you end up in this world where [00:32:00] you are forever the central focal point of the business because you've got no mechanism. Unless you find a cloning machine, which, you may make some money out of that.
Unless you've got a cloning machine you've got no real way to grow. Because that proposition that's so valuable is on by is inherently unscalable. And I think that for me is where, we talk about companies, USPs, it's almost always the founders USP and they don't really separate it from the businesses.
And then we think, okay, how will you get from a five person business? I can't imagine you set the business up to have four employees, right? Most recruitment leaders don't leave a great well paid job Some do, but not many to start a tiny and maintain a tiny recruitment company. They generally do it because their ambition is to scale the business.
And when we are, when we scratch beneath the surface and say, how will you scale? [00:33:00] They haven't really got a clue apart from we'll just get more clients and we'll get more recruiters and we'll fill more jobs. And that I think is the key problem that most recruitment leaders don't really understand they have is that the minute you take them out of the business essentially falls apart.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah, I think the other thing for most recruiters, the most enjoyable part of the job is the recruiting. It's not the outbound prospecting. And so the more you can deliver a good service to clients, the more you get repeat clients, the more time you spend recruiting and the less time you have to spend outbound prospecting.
And so if you can get yourself into a repeatable process that where you're demonstrating and delivering value, and you build relationships that way, as opposed to, [00:34:00] I'm the founder, this is my mate, I play golf with him every Friday, so he'll use us, but I can only play golf so many times a week to keep these relationships going.
Then, you can build that business where I have brought in these 5, guys, They enjoy the job more because they're spending their time recruiting, not outbound prospecting. Now some people do like outbound, but most people don't. So they're spending their time recruiting, which is good for them. I have better, I have happier employees, which makes them more productive.
They're doing that in my repeatable scalable way, which means the clients see the benefit and keep coming back, which means we get more word of mouth business. So we have to do less outbound, which means when we do have to do outbound, we have our repeatable scalable process, which makes it easier to win new clients.
So I'm getting one in 50 as opposed to one in a hundred. And [00:35:00] so it just makes everything easier.
Andy Simpson: And that is such a well made and a well articulated point because people separate winning business and then delivering the service. But I'm like, no, The reason it's so hard to win business because you haven't really got anything to sell.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah.
Andy Simpson: So therefore it's much more difficult to new business. And existing customers that kind of one in the same. And to that point, I was with somebody last week and they'd had a penny drop moment. And what they were saying is that they're locked in a forever cycle of employee churn.
And the reason that is so is because they don't have enough customers with quality business. So they fill about 25 percent of their jobs, which means they're constantly having to hunt for new business, [00:36:00] but they spend so much time hunting for new business that they have less time to work on the jobs they have.
The net result is the recruiter doesn't make enough money or they don't make the money they possibly thought they might make in year one or two. Maybe they thought they'd be making 70K and they might be making 35.
Ben Musgrave: Surely they've not been quoted some ridiculous OTE. Who would ever do that?
Andy Simpson: What kind of person would do that?
But the recruiter, but it's not just about the money, right? It's about the experience. And then they go, do you know what? This isn't really working for me. I don't really like this part of the job, but I do this part of the job, but I can't be on this bit, but I've got to do this bit because this bit's a bit crap.
And I tell you what I'm
Ben Musgrave: going to do. And if that bit, it becomes 80 percent of your job because you're having to do so much of it.
Andy Simpson: Exactly.
Ben Musgrave: It's just not fun.
Andy Simpson: It's boring. It's horrible. Yeah. It's horrible. And then so you end up leaving the industry. Normally people leave and that's why people go in house because they say, do you know what?
I love the candidate. I love the delivery piece, but I hate this new business piece. And the irony is that [00:37:00] if they worked in a better business, they could love the whole job. Yeah. Because not only would they spend 80, 90 percent of their power servicing customers who are grateful for the solution they provide, but the 10 percent of new business prospecting they do, they actually have something to sell.
And so it's not as hard as, hi, got any jobs? Yes. I've got some CVs. Yeah. And I think for me, That is a classic example of how, recruitment companies enter a spiral of destruction. And, backwards momentum has a whole momentum of its own. And I think that's what we've seen in the last 18 months because you start to lose a bunch of people and then it all of a sudden people go, God, do I really want to do this anymore?
And the, and your answer sometimes is more. And that is just that sometimes just enhances or accelerates the spiral because asking a, asking somebody who's not motivated to an hour of BD a day to do four hours. That's just not gonna work.
Ben Musgrave: Someone who's been earning less because there's less [00:38:00] placements out there who now is now earning less and doing a worse job.
Andy Simpson: It's really difficult. And it's, and look, some people, they, when that kind of scenario occurs, they go, yeah, like we're, I'll step up to the plate, but it's generally a temporary thing.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah.
Andy Simpson: They can face it down for a period of time, but eventually the fatigue sets in.
Ben Musgrave: Yeah.
Andy Simpson: I guess finally, Ben, I ask all of my guests the same question at the end of these episodes. What do you see the future of the industry being? It's what November 2024. What lies ahead?
Ben Musgrave: Look, 15 years ago when I was working in a recruiter. LinkedIn was really on this ridiculous upward trajectory.
And there was all this chat about LinkedIn is going to take our jobs because everyone can find everyone. And why are they going to need people to search? And clearly that hasn't come to pass because there's so much more than a, that a recruiter does and just. identify people that match a skill [00:39:00] set. So I'm slightly wary of predicting like too far ahead.
I do feel like what's happened in the last three or four years is a focus on automation to allow each person to do more. So can I have automated cadences to send stuff out to, can I automate that, make it easier to search, to find these thousand candidates that have the right skillset and then email all thousand of them and do some basic automated screening of them, et cetera.
And that's definitely been helpful, but it's a double edged sword because the more you automate. And the more you can do the more everyone is doing the more noise there is makes it harder to cut through and so and then we've spoken about before with the rise of AI that it's gonna be harder and harder to understand how good someone is from their CV because.
They can just run it through ChatGPT or Anthropic or whoever, to really [00:40:00] understand the to make it look good, but actually everything ends up looking the same and good. And so you've got a, I think it's going to come full circle and personalization is going to become a bigger deal and it's personalization of what I do as a recruiter.
So that candidates trust me to apply to jobs. I've got cut personalization. What I do so that hiring managers trust me to work with me and helping my candidates personalize and really show their personality so they can stand out to get the job that really is suitable for them over and above these three dozen other people that have identikit looking CVS because everyone's chucked them through the same AI generator.
Andy Simpson: A great ending. I think. Thank you very much for joining me today, Ben. I really appreciate it.
Ben Musgrave: Thank you.
