Square one

Greg Wyatt • November 18, 2023

It’s only natural that recruitment has evolved the way it has.

Look at every step, and you can enhance that step through optimisation and technology.

Service built on previous foundations, iterating time and time again.

If the goal is speed and volume, that iteration leads to faster and higher volume.

Automation, CRMs, ATS, AI, or further back CV databases, job boards, emails, faxes.

All of these serve the same purpose - better efficiency for existing steps.

While service orients around the facilities available to us.

Looking much the same, despite better tech and the passage of time.

Fees are also much the same. In contingency recruitment, has that fee model changed since the 50s?

Or has it been minor adjustments by increment?

‘No win, no fee.’

These days the counterpunch that is retained has become more popular.

Pay us up front, and we’ll give you a better service.

However, while contingency has the consequence of systemically poor experience for the individual, retained isn’t without its issues.

“Oh, we tried retained and it was a waste of money.”

But the real issue is that, in many cases, service is the consequence of the fee model.

Shouldn’t what you pay be a consequence of what you get?

The first question many employers ask of their recruiters is ‘Can you match 15%’ because that’s all that matters, irrespective of whether a service might be fundamentally different.

In the last newsletter, I speculated how I might recruit within an employer, if the recruitment industry didn’t exist. You can read it here , if you missed it.

What if we did that same exercise as a recruitment agency?

With all the technology available, if we weren’t bound by the legacy of iterations, how might we go back to square one, and invent a recruitment service from scratch?

Ironically, I would iterate to invent recruitment, but it would be from other professional service industries.

Any company can employ accountants, HR practitioners, marketing teams, and so on. But there’s good reason to retain the services of 3rd party experts, whether for transactional or transformational work.

How can we steal their concepts to create a recruitment service that has the best impact for its stakeholders?

All of these service types are sold with various components - projects, advice, audits, ongoing support and so on.

A key different between them and us though is letters.

CIPD, ACCA, CIM. Chartered.

REC is hardly the same, nor are the other burgeoning membership bodies.

Should there be a charter for recruitment?

In 2008 I left recruitment for a few years.

We were planning to move to Canada, and I felt I needed to freshen up my commercial skills in a different sector, to enable a fresh start in a new country.

We didn’t move in the end - negative equity, children, Dad’s cancer, all conspired to change our perspective on what’s important.

I took a role as Commercial Manager at Workplace Law in Cambridge, leading business development of their training and consulting services.

It was a brilliant role in many ways and sharpened many aspects of my career, not least of which was how to design, propose, sell and onboard bespoke solutions for employers.

We invented an ‘annual support contract’ where we acted as part, or all, of a client’s HR or SHE team.

Working closely with the practice leads, I got to see what good looks like in a range of employers, from strategy work with cool Cambridge tech startups, through to transactional support to global corporations.

Our process was to map out their context and needs, against our capability, so that they go exactly what they needed, and we agreed services that gave us a 50% profit margin against our actual and notional costs.

In 2011, following a story for another time, I was sacked for ‘some other substantial reason’ (I think it was my good looks, or maybe what they felt was an insurmountable conflict of interest).

It proved a good thing, despite the stress of it, for which I am now grateful.

I took these experiences into starting Bircham Wyatt Recruitment.

Why should I have to follow suit with a transactional market?

Why do we do the things we do in recruitment? How can we do them differently to benefit our stakeholders - candidates and employers?

Why couldn’t I apply what I’d learnt at WPL in running my business?

What do projects, advice, audits, ongoing support look like in recruitment?

How could we make a strategic impact or drive operational improvements?

What does transformational look like in recruitment?

How might a transactional service be built from grass roots?

If a transactional industry lets individuals down, which let’s be honest we all know it does, how could we rebuild recruitment to leave candidates with an excellent experience, while in service of our work with employers?

It’s genuinely an exciting proposition to create opportunities that fly in the face of commonly accepted practice.

The only issue is one of expectation. Sometimes what is is what is expected, and it doesn’t seem broke so doesn’t seem to need fixing.

In an industry that should be built on relationships and trust, should we compromise on challenging the status quo if it allows working with people we want to help?

For me, it’s left a mix of services - from the traditional, if wonky, pricing of standard models, to opportunities to help in more unusual ways.

Nothing prescriptive, all oriented around employers, presuming they meet my needs of

Can I help?

Do I want to help?

Can I afford to help?

I just think that if we want to do something genuinely different, it has to be done with intention, not with the habits of others.

Or if you just want to do better, adopting frameworks that reach the outcomes you desire, could be good enough.

What would you do?

Regards,

Greg

P.S. you’ll have noticed these newsletters are free. If you find them valuable, rather than pay for them, why not sponsor my Manchester Marathon efforts - I’m raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support. Here’s the link.

Jump the shark. A Recruitment AiDE, pt 13

By Greg Wyatt • January 29, 2026
May 2023 You’ve heard the phrase, I take it – “jump the shark”? It’s the moment when one surprising or absurd experience can indicate a rapid descent into rubbishness and obscurity. When it’s time to get off the bus. Typically in media. Jumping the Shark comes from an episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz does a water ski jump over a shark. 👈 Aaaaay. 👉 A sign creators have run out of ideas, or can’t be bothered to come up with fresh ones. In movies, sequelitis is a good example of this – an unnecessary sequel done to make some cash, in the hope the audience doesn’t care about its quality. Sometimes they become dead horses to flog, such as the missteps that are any Terminator film after 2. It’s an issue that can lead to consumers abandoning what they were doing, with such a precipitous drop in engagement that the thing itself is then cancelled. Partly because of breaking trust in what was expected to happen next. And because it’s a sign that the disbelief that was temporarily suspended has come crashing down. If you don’t believe that your current poor experience will lead to further, better experiences, why would you bother? Once you’ve had your fingers burnt, how hard is it to find that trust in similar experiences? It doesn’t have to be a single vein of experience for all to be affected. Watch one dodgy superhero movie and how does it whet your appetite for the next? You didn’t see The Eternals? Lucky you. Or how about that time we had really bad service at Café Rouge, a sign of new management that didn’t care, and we never went again? Just me? Did they sauter par-dessus le requin? Here’s the rub – it matters less that these experiences have jumped the shark. It matters more what the experience means for expectation. So it is in candidate experience. It’s not just the experience you provide that tempers expectations – it’s the cumulated experience of other processes that creates an assumption of what might be expected of yours. If you’re starting from a low trust point, what will it take for your process to ‘jump the shark’ and lose, not just an engaged audience, but those brilliant candidates that might only have considered talking to you if their experience hadn’t been off-putting? Not fair, is it, that the experience provided by other poor recruitment processes might affect what people expect of yours? Their experiences aren’t in your control, the experience you provide is. Of my 700 or so calls with exec job seekers, since The Pandemic: Lockdown Pt 1, many described the candidate experience touchpoints that led to them deciding not to proceed with an application. These were calls that were purely about job search strategy, and not people I could place. However, one benefit for me is that they are the Gemba , and I get to hear their direct experiences outside of my recruitment processes. Experiences such as - ‘£Competitive salary’ in an advert or DM, which they know full well means a lowball offer every time, because it happened to them once or twice, or perhaps it was just a LinkedIn post they read. Maybe it isn’t your problem at all, maybe your £competitive is upper 1% - how does their experience inform their assumptions? Or when adverts lend ambiguity to generic words, what meaning do they find, no matter how far from the truth? How the arrogance of a one-sided interview process affects their interest. The apparent narcissism in many outreaches in recruitment (unamazing, isn’t it, that bad outreach can close doors, rather than open them). Those ATS ‘duplicate your CV’ data entry beasts? Fool me once… Instances that are the catalysts for them withdrawing. I’d find myself telling them to look past these experiences, because a poor process can hide a good job. It’s a common theme in my jobseeker posts, such as a recent one offering a counterpoint to the virality that is “COVER LETTERS DON’T M4TT£R agree?” Experiences that may not be meant by the employer, or even thought of as necessarily bad, yet are drivers for decisions and behaviour. I can only appeal to these job seekers through my posts and calls. What about those other jobseekers who I’m not aware of, who’ve only experienced nonsense advice? What about those people who aren’t jobseekers? What about those people who think they love their roles? What about all those great candidates who won’t put up with bad experiences? The more sceptical they are, and the further they are from the need for a new role, the less bullshit they’ll put up with. What happens when an otherwise acceptable process presents something unpalatable? Might this jumping the shark mean they go no further? Every time the experience you provide doesn’t put their needs front and centre or if it’s correlated to their bad experiences…. these can prevent otherwise willing candidates from progressing with your process, whether that’s an advert they don’t apply to, a job they don’t start, or everything in between. Decisions that may stem from false assumptions of what a bad experience will mean. Instead, look to these ‘bad experience’ touchpoints as opportunities to do better: instead of £competitive, either state a salary or a legitimate reason why you can’t disclose salary (e.g. “see below” if limited by a job board field and “we negotiate a fair salary based on the contribution of the successful candidate, and don’t want to limit compensation by a band”) instead of a 1-way interrogation… an interview instead of radio silence when there’s no news - an update to say there’s no update, and ‘How are things with you by the way?’ instead of Apply Now via our Applicant Torture Sadistificator, ‘drop me a line if you have any questions’ or ‘don’t worry if you don’t have an updated CV - we’ll sort that later’. Opportunity from adversity. And why you can look at bad experiences other processes provide as a chance to do better. With the benefit that, if you eliminate poor experience, you'll lose fewer candidates unnecessarily, including those ideal ones you never knew about. Bad experiences are the yin to good experience’s yang and both are key parts of the E that is Experience in the AIDE framework. The good is for next time. Thanks for reading.  Regards, Greg

How To Network For A Job - Jobseeker Basics XIV

By Greg Wyatt • January 26, 2026
The following is Chapter 42 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . In a sense it's a microcosm of how any commercial activity can see a better return - which is to put the needs of the person you are appealing to above your own. It feels counterintuitive, especially when you have a burning need, but you can see the problem of NOT doing this simply by looking at 99% of job adverts: We are. We need. We want. What you'll do for us. What you might get in return. Capped off by the classic "don't call us, we'll call you." If you didn't need a job, how would you respond to that kind of advert? In the same vein, if you want networking to pay off, how will your contact's life improve by your contact? What's in it for them? 42 - How to network for a job Who are the two types of people you remember at networking events? For me two types stand out. One will be the instant pitch networker. This might work if you happen to be in need right now of what they have to offer or if mutual selling is your goal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but it’s a selling activity pretending to be networking. If you want to sell, go and overtly sell rather than disguise it with subterfuge. Lest we mark your face and avoid you where possible in future. The second is the one who gets to know you, shows interest and tries to add to your experience. You share ideas, and there’s no push to buy something. They believe that through building the relationship when you have a problem they can solve, you’ll think to go to them. It’s a relationship built on reciprocity. One where if you always build something together there is reason to keep in touch. And where the outcome is what you need if the right elements come together: right person, right time, right message, right place, right offering, right price. Job search networking is no different. The purpose of networking in a job search is to build a network where you are seen as a go-to solution should a suitable problem come up. In this case the problem you solve is a vacancy. Either because your active network is recruiting, or because they advocate for you when someone they know is recruiting. It is always a two-way conversation you both benefit from. Knowledge sharing, sounding board, see how you’re doing - because of what the relationship brings to you both. It is not contacting someone only to ask for a job or a recommendation. A one-way conversation that relies on lucky timing. That second approach can be effective as a type of direct sales rather than networking. If you get it wrong it may even work against you. How would you feel if someone asked to network with you, when it became clear they want you to do something for them? You might get lucky and network with someone who is recruiting now - more likely is that you nurture that relationship over time. If your goal is only to ask for help each networking opportunity will have a low chance of success. While if your goal is to nurture a relationship that may produce a lead, you’ll only have constructive outcomes. This makes it sensible to start by building a network with people that already know you: Former direct colleagues and company colleagues Industry leaders and peers Recruiters you have employed or applied through Don’t forget the friends you aren’t in regular touch with - there is no shame in being out of work and it would be a shame if they didn’t think of you when aware of a suitable opening. These people are a priority because they know you, your capability and your approach and trust has already been built. Whereas networking with people you don't know requires helping them come to know and trust you. Networking with people you know is the most overlooked tactic by the exec job seekers I talk to (followed by personal branding). These are the same people who see the hidden jobs market as where their next role is, yet overlook what’s in front of them. If you are looking for a new role on the quiet - networking is a go-to approach that invites proactive contact to you. Networking with people who know people you know, then people in a similar domain, then people outside of this domain - these are in decreasing order of priority. Let's not forget the other type of networking. Talking to fellow job seekers is a great way to share your pain, take a load off your shoulders, bounce ideas off each other, and hold each other accountable. LinkedIn is the perfect platform to find the right people if you haven't kept in touch directly. Whatever you think of LinkedIn, you shouldn’t overlook its nature as a conduit to conversation. It isn’t the conversation itself. Speaking in real life is where networking shines because while you might build a facsimile of a relationship in text, it's no replacement for a fluid conversation. Whether by phone and video calls, real life meetups, business events, seminars, conferences, expos, or in my case - on dog walks and waiting outside of the school gates. Both these last two have led to friends and business for me though the latter hasn’t been available since 2021. Networking isn’t 'What can I get out of it?' Instead, ‘What’s in it for them?’ The difference is the same as those ransom list job adverts compared to the rare one that speaks to you personally. How can you build on this relationship by keeping in touch? Networking is systematic, periodic and iterative: Map out your real life career network. Revisit anyone you’ve ever worked with and where Find them on LinkedIn Get in touch ‘I was thinking about our time at xxx. Perhaps we could reconnect - would be great to catch up’ If they don’t reply, because life can be busy, diarise a follow up What could be of interest to them? A LinkedIn post might be a reason to catch up When you look up your contact’s profile look at the companies they’ve worked at. They worked there for a reason, which may be because of a common capability to you Research these companies. Are there people in relevant roles worth introducing yourself to? Maybe the company looks a fit with your aspirations - worth getting in touch with someone who may be a hiring manager or relevant recruiter? Maybe they aren’t recruiting now. Someone to keep in touch with because of mutual interests. Click on Job on their company page, then "I'm interested" - this helps for many reasons, including flagging your interest as a potential employee Keep iterating your network and find new companies as you look at new contacts. This is one way we map the market in recruitment to headhunt candidates - you can mirror this with your networking The more proactive networking you build into your job search, the luckier you might get. While you might need to nurture a sizeable network and there are no guarantees, think about the other virtues of networking - how does that compare to endless unreplied applications? I often hear from job seekers who found their next role through networking. This includes those who got the job because of their network even though hundreds of applicants were vying for it. While this may be unfair on the applicants sometimes you can make unfair work for you. It can be effective at any level.