Just last week we held our first Directors Only event of 2013 at the RBS offices. These events are small group learning and networking events specifically for Directors of recruitment businesses.
This one, with around 60 Directors in attendance, focussed on strengthening your recruitment business. We were joined by Ann Swain of APSCo who gave an absolutely excellent presentation. It was filmed and we’ll share that once it’s been edited, however, one of the takeaways was the five fundamentals of surviving and thriving in a recession. These are: know and track your goals, manage your cost-base, develop your people, ensure you have profitable and satisfied customers and mange your working capital.
We also ran a group learning exercise around the main obstacles in your business. Some of the points from this included.
- Availability of experienced recruiters and quality staff. There were mixed options within the group as to how much “quality” is out there and how best to source it. It seems likely we’ll cover this issue at our July event. What was interesting is that someone actually said the problem is “attracting young, energetic staff”; see my post on discrimination in the recruitment process on that one!!
- The problem of introducing change to your business and the challenges of feeding this through to the team. The necessity of firm action plans, goals and giving accountability to people.
- General staffing problems; managing, rewarding and retaining.
In our networking break we ran the usual “speed networking” as a way for even the most nervous networkers to make fresh contacts. It’s also a great opportunity to chat with sponsors (at this event we had Arithon, Bullhorn, Fish4, Parasol and LaunchPad Recruits).
If you want to know more about the speakers or be alerted when the video is ready please drop me a note. Our next event is on the 23rd April and we’ve got “early bird” tickets at 75% off until the end of Feb!
