Begin again

Greg Wyatt • November 12, 2023

When my Dad’s business imploded I found myself out of work in a competitive market.

It was around 2002, with the Cambridge market reeling from the effects of the Enron scandal, 9/11 and the dot com bubble bursting.

I found myself a nice stop-gap job at the Pickerel Inn, a spit and sawdust pub with the heritage of being the oldest traveller’s inn in the UK.

The landlord said one of the beams harked back to Roman times. Mind you he was full of fibs, so who knows?

While I used job boards, in my early career I found best success from walking into shops, pubs and receptions and asking for a job.

When I walked into The Pickerel, John was amenable to employing me and asked one killer question:

“Can you pour a pint of Guinness?”

Of course, I went straight onto LinkedIn and complained about recruiting from experience not attitude… oh hang on, no.

I said I never had, to which he said Great!

His preference was not to employ people who’d learned bad habits from other pubs, in how not to pour that magnificent stout.

Better to learn from scratch than copy the poor ability of others.

A thought experiment.

Let’s imagine you’ve been tasked with recruiting a key hire.

You work for an innovative and progressive market leader.

Before now you’ve lived in a cave, with no experience of recruitment.

While this is an important vacancy, you’re not allowed to learn anything about HR or recruitment.

You aren’t allowed to speak to anyone with experience of recruitment or HR.

You aren’t allowed to outsource any part of your process.

You aren’t allowed to look at how other people recruit.

You don’t have a job description.

You are allowed full access to the business and a budget to fill the role.

What steps would you take to fill this key vacancy?

How might that help you learn to pour a better pint of Guinness?

Funnily enough recruitment is an industry built on copying what others do, often without intentional work.

Even ChatGPT type AI does exactly this in generating words for use in recruitment.

Same same, from poor first principles.

So what might recruitment look like without the legacy of others?

This is what I’d do.

1/ Speak to the person giving me the task and ask them what they can tell me about the vacancy.

2/ Speak to the line manager of the vacancy. What do they want to achieve? Why has this come about? Is this a one-off or ongoing need? What does the job entail?

3/ I’d want to understand what success is. Do we have people already doing that? How did they achieve it? How were they rewarded? Where did we fall short?

4/ Speak to other people doing this job. If not in this business, then others. What are their day-to-day duties? What do they like about the role? What not? Why did they join the company? Why might they leave? Do they know anyone I can tap up?

5/ If this is a replacement vacancy, I’d want to understand why the previous person left. Is there something we should be doing differently?

6/ I’d want to understand if our package is right for filling the vacancy.

7/ How would I recruit it??

8/ Since we don’t have access to recruitment knowledge, I’d think about what parts of the business have a common process. Recruitment is about people who make a decision to come on board. Is that like a customer?

9/ How do we win customers?

10/ I’d talk to our sales and marketing teams and learn the steps they take to gain customers.

11/ How can I emulate those steps in recruiting this role?

12/ The sales and marketing team rely on inbound and outbound activity, such as advertising and outreach.

13/ I have the budget to do both. What does that look like in recruitment? How can I advertise our role to attract the right people? What will they find appealing? How can I get my message in front of the right people?

14/ Is the 7P product marketing process relevant? What advertising strategies, tools or frameworks can I use? Would AIDA, PAS, They Ask You Answer, Before After Bridge (Your job sucks; imagine how it could be better; here’s our job!), or AICPBSAWN be effective?

15/ When we’ve found good people, how can we both confirm they are suitable and give them good reason to join us?

16/ I’d think back on my own buying journeys for something that takes commitment, investment, qualify that it is right for my needs, and proof that I am the right buyer. House buying could be one such thing. How could I do that in recruitment?

You get my drift. Recruitment from first principles.

How is it different from common approaches to recruitment?

Is it better in any way, or simply reinventing the wheel?

That’s how I’d do it. How about you?

Regards,

Greg

p.s. I read from time to time that fresh salespeople are sometimes more effective at opening doors than those who are experienced. Because they are curious, ask loads of questions, and don’t have an expectation of how things work. That’s kind of how I was in my first sales role.

p.p.s. Begin Again is a brilliant, beautiful, brilliant film. You should watch it, and if you disagree, maybe we can still be friends.

Why five? Innovation from Iteration, pt 1

By Greg Wyatt • February 26, 2026
So here were are, the start of a new series. This series may be around 10 editions, looking at the things other industries do that we can implement into recruitment. These were written 3 years ago, right at the start of the AI zazzle, and in some ways have dated quite a bit. In others, the way in which they haven't dated at all, because the principles of how we live our business lives can be universal. So, I'm not sure yet, how much editing I'll do, whether there will be any inclusions, or whether I'll leave articles intact, as a moment in time. I've learnt all of these notions from candidates and clients, as I came to understand the function of their vacancies. Hearing about the daily practice from people doing jobs, I couldn't help but notice the same relevance in recruitment. So while these articles are hardly comprehensive, perhaps they'll make you look at your candidates differently, in what we can learn from them, and how that might improve our recruitment. Why five? December 2022 Ask anyone involved in active recruitment what their key problems are, and they’ll likely talk about skills shortages and candidate behaviour. On the face of it, problems which are out of our control, worthy of complaint with little opportunity to find improvement. But what if these were issues that weren’t entirely out of our control? What if we could apply a replicable process to understand what’s really going on, and how we can make a difference? Fortunately, we needn’t invent the wheel, as other industries have already done this for us. One such is 5Y, or Five Whys, a problem-solving technique that was developed by Toyota in the 1930s. It's part of the Toyota Management System that has inspired much of my work. Five is the general number of “Why?”s needed to get to the root of a problem. Often you can get to the heart of the issue sooner, sometimes later. Often there are multiple root causes. More than just solving problems, it’s about establishing practical countermeasures to prevent these problems from coming up in future. 5Y is an example of Toyota’s philosophy of “go and see”: working on the shop floor to find out how things work in practice to find ways for iterative improvement. This isn’t a theoretical idea to try out on a whim – it’s based on grounded reality and almost always works. There are two costs – time and accountability. Here’s a practical example, then a recruitment one. (Names have been removed to protect my identity) Problem 1 : The children were late for school. Why? Traffic held us up. Why? We left the house late. Why? The children weren’t ready on time. Why? Their school uniforms weren’t prepared. Why? We hadn’t set them out the night before. Here the countermeasure is to get everything ready the night before, rather than blame traffic for being late. Perhaps we might have gotten to school on time without heavy traffic, but that is an element out of our control. Of course, here there is another root cause – very naughty children – but better to focus on the simple changes. And sometimes traffic is the root cause after all, once you’ve ruled out other elements in your control. (2026 note: my eldest now often drives my youngest to school. A time laden solution I hadn't considered three years ago. Now I don't care if they're late 😆) Problem 2: Candidates keep ghosting us. Why? They weren’t committed to responding. Why? They didn’t accept my requirement for a response. Why? They saw no value in my requirement. Why? I didn’t create an environment where this requirement has value ( root cause 1 ). Or because they are very naughty candidates, with a bad attitude. Why have we allowed someone with a bad attitude in our recruitment process? Because we didn’t prequalify them well enough ( root cause 2 ) The first root cause is something we can work on by giving candidates what they need, building trust, and working to mutual obligations. There are many ways to do this – I’ve already talked about examples in previous newsletters. It comes down to good candidate experience and reciprocity. The second root cause requires us to work harder at understanding candidate needs, aspirations, behaviours and attitudes at the outset of a recruitment process. There’s a reason for their behaviour. We can be accountable for finding it. That’s no mean skill to develop, yet an essential one for anyone whose core responsibility is recruitment. And it’s hard to do in a transactional volume process, so the question then becomes, does your process help more than it hinders? You can apply 5Y to any issue you come across, as long as you are prepared to be accountable. At worst you may find that the things that were out of your control are at fault. In this case, you are at least armed with good information to report to your stakeholders, by ruling out other possibilities. What’s the point of doing all this? For me it’s continually improving how I recruit, with the consequence, in the example above, that I am rarely ghosted at all. And you can 5Y any issue you come across. Are poor agency CV submissions their fault, or in part down to your briefing and process? Are skills genuinely scarce, or is your requirement unrealistic? Is it true that your agency hasn’t listened to you, or do you engage the right partners in the right way? 5Y has the answers. Regards, Greg

Map the Market. Jobseeker Basics XVIII

By Greg Wyatt • February 23, 2026
What follows is Chapter 21 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . It's a good example of how a job search is an inverted recruitment exercise, but also how the same principles from recruitment can be applied in a job search. Market mapping is one of the first steps of a search process in what is often called headhunting. Here though, instead of an exercise that helps find a person for a job, you help find a job for you. This can be in one chunk, at the outset, and iteratively, as you learn more information. It's a great example of how LinkedIn can be used as a data repository, given the vast majority of professionals are present here. And if they are present here, the insight that is their careers is too, allowing you to identify potential viable employers, who works there, and therefore where else they may have worked, with further potential hiring managers. The snake that eats its own tail. Try doing the iterative work above, every time you come across someone new, whether in an application or in networking . You can use this to build out your network, identify companies to contact proactively. Simon Ward and I will talk more on this in our LinkedIn Live on Tuesday February 24th at 1pm GMT. You can join us, and view the full recording afterwards, here: Is The Nature Of Networking Changing for Job Hunters? If you happen to read this as a hiring authority, market mapping is one of the invisible processes in a structured search. It can often take me 80 to 100 hours to fully map a role for potential viable candidates, given I try to find non-traditional candidates as well as those that are easier to find through sourcing. 21 - Map the market Market mapping is a common activity in executive search. Why wouldn’t you adopt the same approach in your inverse of a recruitment exercise? The idea is to fully understand your market, so that you are better able to navigate it. This is a summary chapter because market mapping is both a strategic and a tactical exercise. I’ll cover some of the How of mapping in Part Three. There are three ways in which to map the market. The vacancies you are qualified for This is about determining which vacancies you should focus your attention on. In which domains does your capability directly apply? This could be context related, if your expertise is in start-ups, growth, downsizing or other contexts. It could be industry related - your process manufacturing expertise might directly apply in food, plastics or pharmaceuticals. It could be job related, with the right applicable skills. Establish where there is a market for you, and if what you offer is needed by that market. Advice on the transferable skills trap (p55) and whether you are qualified (p178) to apply will help. The geography of your job search Where are all the employers and vacancies that you can sustainably commute to? A geographical map can help you target opportunities by region. What resources are available to help you with this map? Searching online for local business parks, even driving around them, can give a list of viable companies to contact. Directories and membership hubs. Local newspapers, social media stories. If you see a company you like the look of, say from an advert, search on their local post code. Who else might be there? The chapter on doorknocking (p241) has more ideas. The people of your network Every time you come across someone you might build a relationship with, connect with them on LinkedIn. Then check out their career history. Who else have they worked with? Where else have they worked? This works for peers, hiring managers, and recruiters - a headhunter in one company may well have worked in a similar domain in a previous one. Is there anyone at these previous companies you should introduce yourself to? What about their listed vacancies? Building out a map of relevant recruiters to develop relationships with (if they answer the phone) can lead to vacancies. Treat it as an iterative exercise. Check out the chapter on networking (p236). This map isn’t just about potential opportunity. It’s also about information that might be helpful now and in future. This might be for job leads. It might be industry insight you can share through content. It may even be topics for conversation in interviews or with peers. Make sure you track it in the right way, whether through Notion, Excel or other resources you have available. With any information, check it is accurate, then prune appropriately. Prioritise on degrees of separation (closest first) and context fit (where what you need is most closely aligned with what you offer).