Choosing an advisor
What’s right for you?
There are a lot of people out there offering their expertise to recruitment business leaders. Finding the right partner for your business can take time but will supercharge what you do and help you articulate and achieve your goals.
But with so much on offer, where do you start with choosing an advisor for you and your business?
Here’s a run down of four key considerations when you’re choosing an advisor…
1. Don’t confuse trainers with business advisors
No-one is a bigger fan of great L&D than me. I’ve won an award for it. It’s an essential component of achieving your goals.
But being a great recruiter is not the same thing as running a great recruitment business. It is very rare that trainers have had all-round responsibility for running a recruitment company of any scale. And improving skills is just one component of changing your business.
2. Suppliers of tech or membership organisations – there is no silver bullet
Suppliers often have a good understanding of the issues their customers face. But they are fundamentally in the business of selling a product or a membership subscription where the other members provide the content.
If that’s what you want, good. If you want hands-on involvement in your business, and implementation support, look for someone whose business model is centred on that instead.
3. Are they up-to-date?
I know a lot of people who did extremely well out of recruitment trade sales and MBOs in the late 90s and early 2000s. The market was great. I remember the 50% mark-ups!
If a business leader hasn’t had actual first-hand experience of running (not advising) a successful business since the turn of the century, they simply will not appreciate – at the real coal-face – how much a recruiter’s job and environment has changed in the digital age. Client expectations, candidate behaviour, channels to market; they are all hugely different from the 20th century.
Make sure they understand your day-to-day challenges as well as your strategy.
4. Will they give you the close attention you deserve?
I’m often bemused by advisors claiming to be Non-exec directors for 40-plus companies. Just spending one day a month with my clients, plus the prep and important follow-on actions, means that I can only do this with a select group of clients at any one time.
So I make sure that those businesses are clear on expectations, and I insist on minutes and actions from every meeting. If you don’t get this, you are only getting off-the-cuff support- which is at worst, dangerous!
So if you are looking for…
Genuine, recent, demonstrable success (to trade sale)
At MD/CEO level, understanding the whole of a business,
That is hands on and specific
Plus award-winning…
Book a discovery call
Use the contact form to send a message to Alison Humphries directly or book an telephone consultation.
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