Charlie Walker wants to change people's perceptions of the recruitment industry—not just of its clients and candidates but of employees, too. He believes the sector acquired a bad name in the late 1990s when a big boom and the lure of making lots of money attracted aggressive sales people.
But he reckons the recent recession has helped root out many of these characters. "Generally, the quality of the people doing the job now is higher than it was around that time," says Walker.
Three years ago when the 27-year-old Yorkshireman launched his own recruitment company, Vivid Resourcing, he implemented a rigidly selective hiring policy that has stood the business in good stead through the downturn.
"We're not interested in your stereotypical, cheesy sales types," says Walker, explaining that picking the right employees is the key to forging strong client relationships. "We get a lot of repeat business."
Walker wants to set his firm apart from the "revolving door model" of graduate recruitment. "Staff turnover of graduates in many recruitment companies is 70 to 80 per cent within the first 12 months, which is crazy. Ours is just under 10 per cent, which is high but for the sector it is exemplary," he says.
He believes this retention rate is due in no small part to Vivid's investment in its people. The company's initial employee training programme involves 13 weeks of classroom sessions plus on-the-job training.
And it looks like the investment is paying off. Last year's annual turnover was £7.5m while profits stood at £1.6m. This year Walker is seeking to double profits again. "We've more than done that in the last three years, so I think it's perfectly feasible," he says.
Despite headlines about high unemployment, Walker says that in some of the markets Vivid works in, including renewable energy and mechanical engineering, there's a shortage of suitable candidates. "The market has gone from being client-driven in 2008 to being candidate-driven again-and rates are back up too," he says.
Walker is cautiously optimistic about the future. "I think we're going to see growth here, but we are really keeping on our toes in terms of which markets we focus on. The NHS, for example, accounted for 65 per cent of our business in 2009 and we've now reduced that to 15 per cent."
He has recently set up a
team to focus on the North Sea oil and gas industry. "The opportunities there are massive because unfortunately for us all I think the oil price is going to go up relentlessly," he says.
"Renewable energy is also an area of massive growth as is the transport infrastructure market-the coalition is continuing with a lot of Labour's transport plans."
Walker is also seeking to exploit the "fairly immature" European recruitment markets, starting with the Netherlands. He has just launched a limited company there and plans to open an office in Amsterdam within the next 18 months.
"The Netherlands is a big market," he says. "A lot of international firms have their headquarters there so the spend is high on the kind of staff we supply, but the market is not as saturated as in the UK."
