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.

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).