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How to Scale Your Recruitment Business Through Innovation and Constant Improvement, with Edward Chamberlain, Ep #95

Sep 16, 2021

For a lot of recruitment business owners, going to the next level and scaling their business can present unexpected challenges. But no matter how difficult you’re finding it to grow your recruitment business, I hope today’s episode will inspire you to never give up!

My special guest, Edward Chamberlain, shared that by far his biggest challenge was scaling the business. In this episode, he shared how he was able to overcome a lot of obstacles you may also be facing now and build a really successful recruitment business from scratch, with no external investment.

Ed is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Altus Partners, a market leader in Private Equity search with a team of 30 people. Ed also co-founded C&C search with his sister Lucy, an HR and business support recruiting firm. Both of these firms generate multi-million pounds in revenue. Previously, Ed was a founding member of Investigo (a Virgin fast-track business), which grew from a team of 4 to over 250 people, before its sale. He recently launched Stryve, an ATS that can help SMEs grow their businesses faster.

Episode Outline and Highlights

  • [1:52] A serial entrepreneur: Ed reveals how he started Altus Partners.
  • [3:41] What is the ‘hybrid search’ model?
  • [7:57] What is the map and track approach?
  • [10:08] Enhancing your selection process with the Hogan Psychometric Evaluation.
  • [12:16] Ed’s biggest challenge and lessons learned. 
  • [22:28] What a robust People Plan looks like.
  • [24:28] Two keys to replicating your effectiveness as a recruiter to your whole team.
  • [27:51] Why Ed believes that retained recruiting is the best approach in favor of the client.
  • [33:17] Good business books recommended by Ed.
  • [37:10] Ed’s advice to recruitment business owners who want to scale their business.
  • [45:47] Recruiting and building a community of like-minded people .
  • [51:49] Training as a key pillar of the business during the pandemic.
  • [56:54] What motivated Ed to create their own ATS (Applicant Tracking System).

Innovative Tools to Add Rigor to the Process

As we talked about best practices, one thing I noticed is how Ed is constantly innovating and striving to add rigor to the recruiting process on behalf of the client. Ed breaks down his unique search methodology and highlights a few of the key elements: 

  • The Hybrid Search model
  • The Map and Track approach
  • Creating an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
  • The Hogan Psychometric evaluation tool

You will definitely enjoy learning about how Edward’s focus on constant improvement has helped with client acquisition and scaling his businesses.

The Challenge of Scaling A Business

Ed is definitely a serial entrepreneur, but you might be surprised that one of the biggest challenges he had to overcome was scaling his business. He was very open about sharing his failures and learnings. You may be able to relate to some of these challenges. You will hear Ed’s advice on how to create a robust People Plan, replicating your effectiveness as a recruiter to your team, and why the retained approach works best for you and the client.

Ed’s Advice If You Want to Scale

So if there was one key piece of advice he would give to a business owner who wants to scale, what would that be? Ed said, “If you are going to start a recruitment firm, generally speaking you are going to be a salesperson or recruiter before that. Inherently what goes hand in hand in that is individuals that don’t like planning and often don’t like the administration piece. The bit of advice I would give to anyone is to make sure to go back and do that. Put it together, put your finances together, put a really good business plan.” 

Our Sponsors

This podcast is proudly sponsored by i-intro®. 

i-intro® is an end-to-end retained recruitment platform. Our technology and methodology allows recruiters to differentiate themselves from the competition, win more retained business, bigger fees and increase their billings. Be sure to mention Mark Whitby or The Resilient Recruiter for a 25% discount. Book your free, no obligation consultation here: www.recruitmentcoach.com/retained 

Edward Chamberlain Bio and Contact Info

Ed is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Altus Partners and has built an enviable track-record, over many years within Private Equity search. He has placed from Partner to Analyst level with a range of high-profile funds to emerging managers. His guiding principles of honesty and integrity have enabled him to build long-standing, trusted relationships with key figures in the Private Equity industry.

Ed graduated with a BA Hons in Architecture before starting his career in Search in 2002. He was a founding member of Investigo (a Virgin fast-track business), which grew from a team of 4 to over 250 people, before its sale. He helped establish another search firm in 2006 (rather this name isn't mentioned ;) One Search) – before identifying a gap in the market and setting up Altus Partners in 2009. 

Altus Partners has become a market leader in Private Equity Search and continues to thrive today, placing c-suite professionals into Private Equity Backed Companies and also Investment Professionals into the funds themselves.

Further to this he co-founded C&C Search with his sister in 2014, which places HR and Support Staff Professionals and has a training academy (launched to counter the pandemic), which has seen over 5,000 people enroll in their courses and has won corporate training contracts with the likes of Sony, Warner Brothers, Amazon and Campbell Soup. 

More latterly, and out of a desire to see small and growing companies recruit better, he launched an ATS - Stryve. He raised seed funding of £500k in March 2021 and launches the Beta product this month!

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