Confessions of a Recruiter
The show is hosted by Blake Thompson and Declan Kluver who respectively own Vendito Consulting and Blended Employment. Both have been in Sales & Marketing Recruitment for over 5 years. The podcast is about opening the door to the recruitment world and creating a community of recruiters who can share funny stories, educate and have honest conversations about the industry and their experience. All episodes are powered by xrecruiter.
Confessions of a Recruiter
Ed Glover - xrecruiter | Confessions of a Recruiter #113
From martial arts champion to global recruitment leader, Ed Glover's remarkable career journey demonstrates how early discipline shapes professional success. Raised by a special forces father with a "if you're not first, you're last" mentality, Ed channeled that competitive spirit into multiple high-performance careers across three continents.
Ed's candid conversation reveals pivotal moments that shaped his path – from watching his father receive a medal from the Queen, to moving out at 15 and supporting himself through university, to being shown a £47,000 monthly payslip that convinced him to enter recruitment. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to launch his own agency after just two years in recruitment, navigating the challenges of rapid growth and cash flow management during the GFC.
The discussion offers fascinating insights into recruitment across different global markets. Ed shares how he transformed Michael Page's approach in San Francisco, abandoning pinstripe suits when meeting hoodie-wearing startup founders, and learning to "expand everyone's expectations" to create successful placements. His later roles at LinkedIn and Gartner taught him valuable lessons about enterprise sales and understanding that only two things truly matter in any deal: power (decision-makers) and urgency.
Now as Business Director at XRecruiter, Ed helps recruiters launch and scale their own agencies with the support he wishes he'd had. His perspective is refreshingly honest – addressing both the incredible rewards of independence and the challenges that held him back. For anyone considering their next career move, Ed's story demonstrates that success isn't linear but comes from continuously challenging yourself and recognizing when you're at your happiest.
· Our Website is: xrecruiter.io
Hey guys, I'm Ed Glover. I'm the business director here at XRecruiter. Just finished my podcast with Blake and Dec talking about my journey from being a fresh grad in the UK around the world all the way to where I am today.
Speaker 2:Ed Glover is a seasoned business leader, sales strategist and commercial advisor with extensive experience in enterprise, mid-market and hyper growth environments. He has a proven track record of engaging with C-suite executives and business owners across the UK, USA and Australia.
Speaker 1:One of the interviews was a Wolf of Wall Street kind of moment. He asked me how much I thought he earned last month and I was like, well, I think five grand. And he pulled out his payslip it was 47,000 pounds. That got me into recruitment. Don't miss this episode.
Speaker 2:It's going welcome back to another episode of confessions of a recruiter. We've got a very spicy and exciting podcast today. We're joined by mr ed glover. Welcome, ed. Good to be here.
Speaker 3:Gents, mate thanks for coming on. We're appreciative for for rav connecting us all.
Speaker 1:I know many moons ago yeah, should send him a message, but I don't really talk to him anymore After what he said on your last podcast.
Speaker 2:So, ed, I've got a bit of an intro here for our guests and our listeners, to give a bit of context on who we're speaking to. So I'm about to give you a pump up, mate. So you just sit back, relax and listen to the magic. Back, relax and listen to the magic. Ed Glover is a seasoned business leader, sales strategist and commercial advisor with extensive experience in enterprise, mid market and hyper-growth environments. He has a proven track record of engaging with C-suite executives and business owners across the UK, usa and Australia, and currently he's in the best position of his career as the business director at XRecruiter, a platform that supports recruiters in launching and scaling their own recruitment agencies. Ed has consistently been one of the highest performing individuals in every organization that he's worked at, with numerous accolades, including winner's circle with Gartner, flying to Rome with other high performers. We spoke before that the only way you get to the winner's circle with Gartner is you've got to do 130% of budget. If you've got a $15 million budget, that's pretty 50. 15. Oh 15.
Speaker 1:15, mate, yeah, that's 50. 50. 50, sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I got that wrong $15 million budget Millionaires Club at Page, so billing over a million dollars at Michael Page Million pound biller in the UK, so that's almost 2 million in Aussie dollars. You have started your own recruitment agency when you were much younger, 22, 23. Then you moved to Page, had an incredible career for eight years in San Francisco, in Australia, in the UK, and then held a number of roles, which includes a senior sales leadership role at Gartner, a senior level role at LinkedIn and obviously Paige Group where you specialize in building and leading high performance sales teams in numerous industries. Financial services technology and recruitment your expertise sales leadership. Financial services technology and recruitment.
Speaker 1:Your expertise sales leadership business development, capability building and strategic growth execution. That is one hell of an intro.
Speaker 2:I better stack up now, mate. Your experience is extremely impressive. We're obviously very grateful that you've chosen to bring your experience to the table at XRecruiter, so thank you for being here.
Speaker 1:It's a pleasure. It's certainly the most exciting role I think I've done, or started at least. But yeah, it's going to be good Awesome.
Speaker 3:And why don't we take it all back, mate? Because you've got an interesting journey, like your upbringing, what your dad taught you. Do you want to just sort of give us a light on what the uk's like for all us aussies?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, well, um, it's not great, it's um. I think my dad was in the military right. He's in the special forces. He was always a super high performer when it came to sport. You know, started his own martial art, became the two-time world champion in his martial art. I've got a medal from the queen um for some stuff that he did in the Special Forces. He was in the Falklands. He did some secret stuff that I can't really share too much about. But I remember being about seven years old and Queen gave a medal on stage and I was just watching him. It's like the NBA, but for soldiers, basically like what Beckham gets and things like that. So if you've ever seen Talladega Nights where the dad is like if you're not first, you're last, it was kind of my upbringing. He was like you've just got to be the best at everything. So he got me into martial arts really, really young. I became the UK champion at like 12. So that whole martial arts it's called Wado Roo Karate.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you know much about that, but it's just a style of karate, because that was it. It was the 80s right. So it was all karate. Kid, that was the only martial art that was around. Mma didn't really exist, so did that, played football or soccer for you guys at a relatively good level, and yeah, so my upbringing was all discipline, it was all sport, it was all focus. It was all you have to win, you have to achieve Very little place for not doing well. So that's kind of how it started for me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and would you say that's a positive?
Speaker 1:impact. I would say so. I think it gave me discipline, but it taught me just to make stuff happen. For yourself, I'd say. I moved out of home at 15, still at school, so I had to get a job in the evenings to pay for my rent. When I was living in this terrible like above someone's garage in the UK it was freezing cold. But I started very young, so I paid my way through university ultimately as well, and just from 15, I was working.
Speaker 3:So tired of work.
Speaker 1:I was working in like a it was called Safeway, but it's like Coles. I was working on the produce department just like stacking apples and things. That's all I could do.
Speaker 3:What did your mates is that normal over there Like, did you have a few other mates that would? Go to work as well, or were you the only one?
Speaker 1:No, you, I think it's normal. The world I existed in was fairly normal. You just went and got a job and you looked after yourself.
Speaker 2:I was about to say like is moving out at the age of 15, while you're still at school and getting a job? Was that normal?
Speaker 1:That's probably not as normal. Did something happen. I just had a fight with my dad. Basically, yeah, it doesn't sound like the boy you really want?
Speaker 3:no, I lost, I lost and I was like I'm out of here, mate.
Speaker 1:So, um, I moved out, but, um, it was actually quite a traumatic time in my life. But, um, but I was out there and I just went and got a job and, um, that was the end of it and I just fended for myself. So, even going to university, where you're studying a lot, um, had to get a job, had to pay my way. So that's just been ingrained in me and I've got an incredible relationship with my father. He's kind of a role model to me through every aspect of my life. But that's how it started Very, very firm upbringing, I'd say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and how did you find yourself in recruitment, like, what was the, what was the starting blocks for you there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, like I say, my dad was military, so he was pushing for me to join the military and I went to university and needed a part-time job and ended up going into a deco just walk in High Street Agency saying I needed a part-time job like customer service or something. And one of my mates who came with me, he took a job doing telesales for this company called G Capital.
Speaker 3:Bank.
Speaker 1:I think they're kind of not so much around anymore, but at the time, they were the largest company in the world.
Speaker 3:They were big in the Microsoft they were huge.
Speaker 1:Right, general Electric and I was selling doing telesales. Well sorry, he got signed up to do telesales and he was getting paid a pound more an hour than me, so I was like I want to do what he's doing and that kind of how it started.
Speaker 1:And, um, I've shared this with you, deck, but it was this story it was this environment of like 300 people in the call center, and when you started you'd be number 300 and every week they'd position you in this group of people in the pods based on your ranking on this leaderboard of how good your sales were the previous week. And so the goal was to try and get into the top 10 pod. So then about three months I got into the top 10 pod, became number one. You got like a leather chair.
Speaker 1:It was all like a bit American but it was fun, and I stayed there for, you know, a good year and a half until some new boy came into town and told me he was going to take my spot. And who was that? He's a mate of mine, still called Tom Sleater. He's actually like the MD of Credit Suisse between London, switzerland and New York. Now he's an incredibly high achiever, smoked me in his career, but I remember him coming up to me telling me that he was going to take my spot at number one and I was like, mate, you're not going to do that. Anyway, across the six months, I just saw him slowly moving through the ranks until he was sat right next to me and I was like geez, this guy's actually gonna take me out.
Speaker 1:Um, so I didn't let my ego get ahead of me. I actually just listened to all the things he was saying and, uh, just adopted his best lines and just stayed number one until I got promoted to be a sales coach and I guess long--winded versions. It gave me the taste for sales because I was winning like a PlayStation 2. This is how long ago it was. Right, it's a PlayStation 2 and earning like 300 pounds a week, doing like eight hours or 10 hours. So for me it was like wow, this sales world is what I want to do now what?
Speaker 2:were you selling.
Speaker 1:It was like credit card insurance. You're basically calling people who've got like a Maya card and just selling them. If you lost your jacket on a night out, you can get it insured. Or if you lose your job and you can't pay for it, pay your credit card bill, we'll take care of it.
Speaker 3:Do you remember what you did different out of the 300 people?
Speaker 1:What I did. So the target was about five sales an hour and it was a dialer system, so they just come through, come through, come through, um, and I looked at how much balance they had on their account and whether because used to get rewarded, based on how big, because it was one percent of their entire balance and I remember just thinking that's a big deal. So I'd focus on the big ones and I put more time into those ones than the smaller ones. But I also found part of the whole product suite. That was just what people were really interested in and just sold just that one bit and everyone else was spending 10 minutes trying to sell everything and I would do a call in a minute to the highest value ones, and so my sales record was like 21 sales an hour when everyone else was like five.
Speaker 3:So that's what.
Speaker 1:I did, I just narrowed it down. What people cared about? Big deals, big five.
Speaker 2:So that's that's what it does narrowed it down what people cared about big deals, big deals, inverted commas, like it wasn't huge, but that's how I did it. Yeah, yeah, how good, okay, so you were. You were selling credit card insurance, pretty much, pumping out 21 sales an hour. That must have been pretty intense.
Speaker 1:It was intense I mean you wouldn't keep that up forever. But um, I I did that for a year and then they made me a sales coach. I didn't get any training, it was just like listening to people's calls in this back office and then come out and tell them what they did wrong and make them better. So I was a sales coach for a year for this huge company part-time and then did that for a year, did really well, and then they made me a team leader. So I'm like this 20-year-old guy running a team of 30 outbound sales people having no clue about leadership, no clue about how to do this. I remember just saying to him in my first team meeting right, guys, the bottom five are going to get fired. It was as simple as that. Unless your basic level, sales is this number. And everyone just went and up their game and I became number one sales manager.
Speaker 3:That's what I've been doing wrong. That's no. So we just need to threaten people's jobs. Yeah, this is like.
Speaker 1:This is like 1999 mate this is an unscrupulous way of operating. But, um, it was a look, it's the most, it's the worst way to lead. It was a fear kind of way of doing it, but I didn't, I knew no different and I'd heard that cisco did that um in the us and I thought, well, I'll just do that. That was about as far as it went. Yeah, interesting. And so when did you get into recruitment? So sorry, yeah, I digressed a lot. So I came out of university and wanted sales and I was looking at sales jobs, um, and I looked at um I can't remember the newspaper it's not dissimilar to you guys where you were the fastest growing company startup. There was one called Progressive IT Recruitment. It's part of S3 Group, but at the time it was just Progressive and their nickname was Aggressive Progressive and I was like I want to go and work for the fastest growing, best one. So I just reached out to them and got this interview and I remember going into their offices.
Speaker 1:This was in Leeds in the UK, uk and there's like a couple of porsches parts outside and I was like I'm already halfway in here um interviewed them, got offered, and I did a couple of other interviews within the same group, and one of them, by the way, this is 2002 I think it was um off the you know dot com boom kind of thing.
Speaker 1:And one of the interviews the guy asked me it was a wolf of wall street kind of moment. He asked me how much I thought he earned last month and I was like, well, I've been earning 300 pounds a week, five grand. And he pulled out his payslip it was 47 000 pounds, wow. And I was like, yeah, all right I'm a recruiter, yeah, as a recruiter he was.
Speaker 1:I think he's a manager or senior recruiter or something, but this is like these were glory days, I think, in the uk and I was like I'm in and so, um, that got me into recruitment who is who's the donnie in?
Speaker 2:is it donnie in in wolf of wall street?
Speaker 3:what's his name? Donnie? Yeah, so you were the donnie. There was a girlfriend, did you call?
Speaker 1:your girlfriend, I think I did, but I um, I didn't join that company because I just didn't like that guy, um, but I thought recruitment's it for me now and I ended up going to a few different interviews but interviewing with this company called Robinson Keene and Richard Robinson and this is very old school so only the older school people who listen to the podcast will recognize these names. But he was the MD of Michael Page in the UK globally, I think, actually before Terry Benson, who was before Stevingham, who's before the most recent one. And I went through this interview process and it was a small firm, it was like 20 people. But he said to me you know Michael Page, the flagship in the UK at the time they were. He said you can go and work for a manager who's got three years experience on Michael Page. We can learn from me. And I was like I want to learn from you and so I joined that firm and that got me into recruitment Nice, and so that was your first stint into recruitment.
Speaker 2:Correct, where did you?
Speaker 1:recruit. It was accounting and finance.
Speaker 2:Accounting and finance yeah, and then correct me if I'm wrong, but then you moved into starting your own agency.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I learned some incredible things in that environment. As an example, we weren't allowed to send CVs. When you picked up a job you know we were taught to, you had to sell the candidate over the phone, you had to lock them into the interview and the CV was sent half an hour before the interviews took place, as an interview aid versus a decision-making tool. So it just taught you to truly understand your candidates. And he would say would you rather be trying to think of who he used as an example at the time, like Messi's agent, or would you rather be looking for a number 10 for man united? And I was like miss his agent. He went yeah, you put him anywhere you want.
Speaker 1:He goes align yourself the best candidates in the market only and reverse engineer the whole process. So that's all I did. So I got into this way of operating which was a little bit more search mentality versus recruitment mentality. But I just started flying and making all this money and I was like this recruitment thing's easy man like, and so that got me into it. And then from there I was like two years in and my mate, who was in another agency, wanted to start and I said I'll just come in, I'll come and start a business with you. And that's how it all happened and I had no idea at all what I said two years recruitment experience pretty much
Speaker 3:yeah, welcome to the two-year club, brother.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah I had 14, 15 months and similar to declan. We started our own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was just incredible naivety, I think. But I was just so overconfident that I could do this because I only ever seen three years of this telesales thing where I've just gone through the ranks in the biggest company in the world and then shot the lights out in early recruitment. I was like I'm just going to rule everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's just got into it from there. So tell us about starting your own agency. What was it like? How was the relationship with you and your you and your mate. That started together. Kind of it was a bit of.
Speaker 1:I'll be honest, it's a bit of a calamity at the start because I'd done kind of polished high-end recruitment. He'd done labor hire right. So we were like let's just do the company together, which didn't really work.
Speaker 1:And he was a bit older than me, I think he was about 40 so he understood, he understood pnls, he understood the commercial aspects and I just knew how to recruit. That's why I said why don't I just come and do the recruitment, do the permit, start to fund some of the labor hire aspects that you need, and then we'll just kind of like work symbiotically together and it'd be great. But there was no kind of brand around what we're doing, it was just go for it. And you know, I was meeting with the accountant. I didn't know what we were talking about. I was just so far out of my depth. I think it took me a year and a half to kind of start to figure shit out. And I look back now and go man, if I could do it again, it'd be an entirely different way of doing it, but it worked eventually. But what happened through that one and a half years is I saw that he was doing big pitches.
Speaker 1:They used to do like call center workers and things like that, or lots of warehouse workers and I saw the margins he was making on it might have been like 150 pounds a week or something on one person, but he was picking up 30 people at a time and I was doing the rough maths on this and the effort he was putting in.
Speaker 1:I thought to myself I can pitch better than you can. Why don't you use me to go and win all these pitches rather than doing the full 360? So I ended up just being this person who went out and got in front of big companies like the banks and started to win their call center work and we want Amazon and all the warehouse people for Amazon and things like that. So it's an odd way to approach it, but we were figuring it out as we go and this is 20 years ago, right, so you know it was just we just went after the money. Really, it did that work. It did work. The UK had just come into the EU and we could get all these workers from overseas, and so suddenly our talent pool opened up, particularly for more unskilled workers.
Speaker 1:So not unskilled, but call center people, things like that, so you weren't tapping into the same resource. So I could go to Amazon and say, if you need 200 people, I can bring you 200 people in about three weeks, and what. So it was exactly like that. So that's how it started to work. And I remember winning amazon and I sat in front of this you know a couple of people in there um opened my laptop up and put and had the most ordinary presentation you've ever seen about what we could do and how we could do it. I'd built it and it was just so unpolished but it was just all we had. Um and she gave us a shot and she said that, uh, she did it because it was just authentic, which I think it was was average.
Speaker 3:Glover.
Speaker 1:But you know she liked us and so there were things like that, just learnings along the way, and we got lucky on some. You know we missed a few, but it worked.
Speaker 3:What did you learn about having a business partner that you didn't consider before launching the business?
Speaker 1:together. What did I learn about having a business partner? Look, it really was all the things like the licenses we need and just how often you speak to your accountant about certain things, and I had no idea about payrolling temps, because I'd never really done it, and we were invoice financing all the temps we were putting through, and that became a huge, huge issue because we had so many starting to come through and the bank would lend you 85% of your your invoice, but you still have to find 15, and then, when you start having hundreds of temps out there and it was that point we had to bring in an extra person who was this local wealthy guy we knew to start funding a lot of this stuff. So it became a real cash flow issue. So that would probably be the biggest thing managing my cash flow or our cash flow, putting money aside at the right time for different um tax moments and I had no clue about you're running hard and fast.
Speaker 1:And then you started finding roadblocks in your own business because you're running so fast I ended up winning too much that we couldn't sustain it and we just, you know, we didn't have a real mapped out plan of growth. It was just like go, yeah, and that was it, which sounds great, but but it just wasn't. It became more headaches, more headaches, more headaches, and it took away from the love that I had for recruitment and sales. I was getting caught up in so many different things like legal issues and, just you know when you're bringing in migrant workers in effect, lots of stuff goes wrong.
Speaker 2:So what was the outcome of that? So you got an investor in because you were making so so many placements. You're getting all this money in. Yeah, you thought okay, we need more cash.
Speaker 1:The banks aren't going to lend us any more cash the gfc and the bank started saying you know, we, they started off lending us, I think, 90 or 95 percent of the invoice and it got to 90, then it was 85, and then it was 80, and it was the credit crunch right 2008. And I was like and it all too hard, and I just split up with my long-term partner. And I was like you know what? And I sat down with the boys and I said I want, I want to get out, I just want to leave and start again. I was still pretty young, I thought I could do something something more. Um, and I just we, we agreed on a, an amount and they bought me out.
Speaker 2:Really yeah. So how did you come to this? I mean, that's a big decision. Like you went in all this business, you're killing it, you're crushing it. You get an investor in to help with the cashflow. Hopefully did that ease any of the pressure, or did that create more complications with your relationship?
Speaker 1:No, it is the pressure. We had a. We had a good relationship. I, honestly, um site is not, wasn't? It wasn't really a business decision so much I'd split up with this person and I. We had multiple houses together and we just I just wanted to get out of dodge and to the point. That's why I came to australia. I'd never been to australia. I remember thinking I just want to go as far away from this situation as I can. I was heartbroken, basically, and so I just thought get rid of everything, take the money, go and do it again. You can do this again. You've done it before. You can do it again. So it was. It was that you know and you know everything was getting tougher and the financial crisis. So there's just a few things. So I wouldn't say it was the smartest business move I made, but at the time it was necessary for my well-being. Gotcha okay yep.
Speaker 2:So big life decision, big life decision left your business, got a payout relocated to australia, yeah, um. And then you decided to join Page.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because and I'd never been to Australia and my next door neighbour was like where are you going to go in Australia? Because I'd just started talking about Australia and I said Sydney, I guess, and he went go to Brisbane. And I was like, yeah, sure. So I reached out to Michael Page and they connected me with a guy called John O'Wiles who used to be the MD of Page in Australia and he happened to be in the UK at the time. So I met with him and just a legend of a guy and he was like, well, why are you here, why? Why do you want page? Why do you want Australia? Why do you want Brisbane? Um, so I kind of gave him the bit of the story.
Speaker 1:Uh, and I my recruitment career in this business that was the ex-empty of Michael Page. So I feel like I've experienced it. I want to see if I can do it in the big pond with you boys. I want to prove myself that I can do it. A lot of my career has been doing stuff that I haven't done. Prove to myself I can do it. So they put me in to Page in Brisbane, just as the GFC started in Australia. Good times, yeah, good times, yeah, good times Okay.
Speaker 2:So you relocated, relocated. Did you know anyone in Australia? No one, so you were by yourself. Yep, the office in Page. Can you describe that Like? What was it like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was on I think it's still on Creek Street in Brisbane and they'd just done this massive recruitment drive of graduates, and so there's about 50 people in the office 35 were graduates.
Speaker 1:Right Less than no recruitment experience, no life experience. But I think they've got a bit overconfident about how good they could be and how quickly it took to get these people up to speed. So they all landed and within about a couple of months they all got made redundant and a lot of the remaining people got made redundant and I remember thinking I'm gonna be going straight back to the uk here because I've just landed and you know a bit more of an expensive resource than a grad.
Speaker 1:But they kept me and they got rid of lots of other people and at that time there was probably like eight of us left well out of 50 out of 50. There was finance one person, there was me doing sales, there's one person doing marketing and we just went through the GFC, just recruiting.
Speaker 2:What did you learn about going through the GFC that you wouldn't have learned otherwise?
Speaker 1:Hustle, I think, because I remember you know you'd add Chase, right, you'd go and see, you'd see an advert and it would say posted at 1041. And you're like, oh, it's 1046. You call and you'd like the third agency to call them and you're like, geez, um, it was just an intense. You just had to be on your game all the time. Um, and even when I became a manager and built, started building a team back up after the GFC, I remember saying to them and again, not the best way to to leave, but I remember saying if there's an ad in your market and it's not been chased by you within the day, anyone else in the team can go after it. So it was just on the phone hustle, chasing things down, and it just the team was like you know, probably because finance is always Michael Page, but it was right up there with them. It was a good operation. What did you recruit within sales as in like the roles, it was anything from sales execs to sales directors. I've recruited probably one of my favourite ones. I recruited a global sales manager for a private jet business. And do you want me to share the story? It's a fun story.
Speaker 1:We get to the final stage. It's like a 400K a year job, something like that. We get to the final stage. They've got one candidate they want and they call me and say right, we want to get you and this candidate onto our boat. On Tuesday morning we're going to go out a bit to sea and see some of our jets take off and you're going to truly appreciate what we do and how we do it. So me and this candidate stood there in Hamilton at this kind of dock I think it is waiting for this boat to come up and we get on. It's like 9am on a Tuesday. We get on and there's a couple of girls there. They start giving us some beers and we're like this is awesome right, so we're there this is how I want to close every deal.
Speaker 1:And um gets to about midday and we've seen this, and then the owner of the business sits down and starts negotiating on salary and we're pretty cooked by now and all these beers and I remember thinking schooled us here. They totally schooled us. Then the candidate took like 50k less than he wanted because we're a bit tipsy and that was it. And I was like, oh, that's what I know yeah, great 50k, day it's awesome. What a genius move from the guy. But, um, that was a fun one to recruit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow that is actually. That is actually a genius move.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:We should have taken him out on a boat ride. We should have.
Speaker 1:Apparently, we knew that, yeah, so you're recruiting sales, you're building the team up, sales marketing digital Started with just sales but yeah, I started building the team up from sales, then added marketing and you know the guy who's running marketing left and so they put under me and then we launched digital under that, because at the time digital wasn't really a standalone thing, it was kind of marketing digital. So we kind of bumped it together. I grew that team to about 10 people in Brisbane and I've got to say at the time there was no one really competing with us. We were, you know, you hadn't really done much, had just started. No one was out there doing it, so we were kind of owning the show. We had someone at walters, um guy called callan who was doing marketing really well, but sales was kind of owned by us.
Speaker 2:What was the strategy to grow the team? Was there any kind of secret formula, framework process like how did you go from one person to know to hire the second person to know to hire the third person? What was that strategy to build?
Speaker 1:the team. I would love to say it was all my strategy. But you're kind of in those big organizations you kind of just have to adhere to their strategy and and their strategy at the time was, if you can get a desk to do 25 to 30k a month for like six months, you add a new person and it's probably a good thing to scale a business, but not so great if you're that recruiter. I remember adding someone. They did an amazing job. We split your desk, sorry, but we got a new person split your desk and it kept doing that and so you'd lose a lot of momentum. You lose a lot. People didn't love it, right, but it was just. That was their formula.
Speaker 3:What would you have done differently? Like? Would you just get people like, say, instead? Get people like, say, instead of having 10, 500 K people billing, would you then run the risk of having $5 million billers?
Speaker 1:No, I think what.
Speaker 2:I would have done is how would you do it now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I think I would have. I would still obviously look to scale up in the same market, but I wouldn't just split it in half vertically, if that makes sense. I'd have kept the person who'd done all the work to retain some of the higher ground efforts and control the sea level, those kind of things and rain make, and then add below them and groom them up, um, and then eventually have that person just doing just exec, senior exec stuff in the market because that's really what you want to do when you start in recruitment in a big firm.
Speaker 1:You want to work the top of the food chain at the end, and so that gives you a bit of a path for everybody. I'd say so that's potentially what I'd do. Um, yeah, going after other verticals and other areas is is good, but you run the risk of just dropping somebody into a new space and it not working and then you think they're not good when it could be the market. So I think I'd look at it a bit like that how'd the us opportunity come about?
Speaker 1:with page. Yeah, so, um, I'd reached a certain level in Brisbane. The regional director wasn't going anywhere. I didn't really fancy Sydney and one of the previous guys in the office had moved over to the US and was raving about how great it was and it was kind of the Wild West, but it was just uncharted territory. And so I started speaking to some of the internal senior MDs of Michael page around the world on opportunities and if you're a good performer, you could. Everyone wants you right. And so there was opportunities in China. There's opportunities in different parts of the world, but the U? S seemed like the coolest one to do because they wanted me to launch a new office in.
Speaker 1:Dallas and Texas. I had visions of going to these American football games and just doing this and it'd been really fricking cool. And the guy who sold me the dream was just this Brazilian guy. Latino made everything exciting. I won't say much more about him, but you know, he just really sold me this opportunity and I thought, why not? Let's just do it, Cause I was convinced that I wanted to be the senior MD of Michael Page. I just thought I want to get to the top of the chain, top of the food pile, whatever you call it, in the company that I respected the most.
Speaker 1:This is how I'm going to do it, and so that's. That's how it came out.
Speaker 2:So what was the offer specifically? Like, what did they paint for you that got you really excited, other than like football games? Yeah, that was mine, my own picture cheerleaders way.
Speaker 1:I mean, um, no, it was, you know this guy. Um, he'd started the first office michael page in brazil and he'd grown it to 20 offices or something and he was a bit of a legend and his pitch was I scaled businesses, I find mds, I groom mds into you know, running big parts of michael page, and I was like, okay, well, that's tick one. He goes we're in houston already. You know we're flying in houston, we're going to start there, you're going to map it out, we'll go and choose an office, we're going to choose which disciplines we're going to do and then, two months in, we're going to send you there. You're going to hire people, you're going to choose what you're going to recruit and you're going to go and we're going to protect you from Houston while this launches in terms of covering costs and all that kind of good stuff.
Speaker 1:So it was a low risk thing to say. I started an office for a business like Michael Page and so that's what I did. I get there, everything's going to plan. Start mapping it out. Start, you know, connecting with senior execs and there was so much business over there You're like, connecting with like senior people at Coca-Cola was easy, you know. They'll just connect with you. Let's chat. Americans have a slightly different view of doing business. They're just really open to it. And then about two months in, the guy just said I'm not doing Dallas anymore and I did not like Houston and I was like I just don't think what didn't you like about it.
Speaker 1:You have to go to know what you don't like about it, but it's I'm trying to think of the best way Like it's huge, which is great, but I just didn't love there was no culture there. I run a lot, I do a lot of exercise. There was no culture there. I run a lot, I do a lot of exercise. There was no greenery, it was just kind of industrial oil, you know that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:I didn't love it and honestly, taking that opportunity away from me really annoyed me, like, and I was like I've left my entire life to do this, um, and it's not there anymore and for you it's just a decision, whereas for me this is a life-changing decision. So he was like we'll just stay in houston. I was like I'm not, and so I started thinking about going back to australia at that point. So then they had to find a role for me and I think I think they punted a guy in san francisco and just said we've got, we found something for you, and that's how it all came about okay, so san fran back then was like the holy gra, like the holy grail of like tech startups.
Speaker 2:Correct, it was like I think it was the highest. San Fran back then was the highest income per person on average across the whole entire country. Yeah, the housing was crazy expensive. Salaries were off the charts because there was, like all these massive tech companies. So when you landed in San Fran, was it the same strategy? Let's like map the market, figure out what verticals like. What was the plan of attack for San Fran.
Speaker 1:San Fran had always failed for Michael Page historically. They'd put big MDs in because it's a glamorous office to run. Right, you've got San Fran and LA and California and they're both pretty cool. But San Fran was tech, startup, hyper growth world right, it was cool, um, but it always failed.
Speaker 1:And I ended up meeting the regional md, the guy who ran all of it, um, and we had a good. He was english, so it was easy just to connect with him and we had a good conversation and I said I think you're just putting the wrong people into running. You're putting people in who are so far up in the business that they don't know how to get into it anymore and actually realize what's happening. You get out in front of clients and change your model a bit. As an example, everyone wore pinstripe suits, you know, white collars, white cuffs, red ties, like like it was wall street in the 80s.
Speaker 1:But you're going and meeting startups. Ceos are 22 wearing hoodies in a starbucks and there was just they just did not connect and so we were just not getting a piece of the right market that was there. And so the first thing I said is to my boss I said we just can't use the old Michael page model of how you present yourself over here. We need to really change our talk track, change how we approach the market. We need to be stable, organization. It's going to support them being creative and and going to the hyper growth thing, but we'll make sure you get the right people. So we had to change a bit of how we approached it.
Speaker 3:How did he feel about that? Was he like glover, come on, mate.
Speaker 1:Or was he like look, it's not working what we're doing, let's he was yeah, he was like that, like he was um really fiery, emotional kind of guy.
Speaker 3:He threw a table at me once um because a table, flipped a table at me because what'd you do?
Speaker 1:well, there's a in texas. There's a? Um, you can, it's called fire at will policy. You don't need a reason, you just pull out a gun. No, well, you could. But I'm actually carried a lot of guns around there, which is freaky for me but you could just say it's not working, see nothing, no reason, and it's just just a state kind of policy. Right, it doesn't always sit that ethically with me, because I think people deserve a chance and all the good stuff, right?
Speaker 1:Um, he made me fire somebody that he'd hired and then he said she's not working. She's like three weeks in, had no recruitment experience and had no time with him, wasn't even in my team, and he said to me you need to fire her. And I said you need to fire her because it's your hire, she sits over here and just because I'm one of the more senior people in your business here shouldn't fall on me. I was like I just didn't agree with it and he went okay, I'll be in on monday and I'll do it with you. He just called in sick, um, so I had to do it and I was ropeable about the whole thing and when he eventually came back I had a bit of a disagreement with him. I was a bit more fiery at the time and he flipped the table and just we had a bit of an argument as much as I can give you
Speaker 1:on that, um, he was a great operator, um, but no longer with michael page. Yeah, just don't give him too many tables. Yeah, pretty much, but it's just the latino kind of you know, energy, I guess but ultra passionate ultra passionate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there we go exactly. And self-sipping tables, brother. So what was San Fran like? Did you turn it around? What was? The outcomes yeah we did what were the strategies.
Speaker 1:They did a lot of finance. I pivoted more to the sales and marketing side. We started to go after like some smaller VC funds and like different private equity type companies rather and say you know who's on your list. Can we type companies rather and say you know who's on your, you know your list? Can we support them and start to go a bit more to the top rather than just trying to feed it the non-decision makers? If that makes sense, go a bit more to power. So we started to do a bit of that. We focused on sales and marketing heavily, did less finance Cause Robert Half were in San Francisco and Robert Half were in like the building opposite us and they had 4, 4 000 people in the us and they're just finance pretty much. They do a bit of other stuff, but it was like we're not going to take them down right, but we can build out from this market. So we, so we did that, um, but it was an incredible place to be and I remember.
Speaker 1:I remember walking to work and because obviously san fran itself is not where all the businesses is all like in you know, silicon valley but there'd just be these buses lined up and it would say things like uber and lyft and mtv, and you see people getting on different buses, going off to do their thing and I remember getting a meeting with like um, you know, cfo for um ebay which I'd never, would have, never get that in a million years and in some other parts of the world.
Speaker 1:But he, he wanted to meet and I went to their offices and had like beach volleyball courts in the middle of their complex and it was just this amazing thing and he said ed, we just can't find people and I was like why? He said because everybody wants to go and work for a startup and take a piece of the pie, um and be like early in there he goes. So nobody wants to be a part of ebay anymore, um, unless they just want a job.
Speaker 3:And nobody here wants a job, so that's when I was like, okay, we need to change the messaging for a company like that, Um and as in, how do I change his kind of recruitment strategy? Yeah, when you go to market. How do you overcome that objection when everyone's got this fixed mindset that you know you need to only be in a startup to you know, get your big payout and when they sell like what did you? Did you have a success story.
Speaker 1:Like no, I didn't, which is why I'm hating this question, but it's. But not everyone becomes a success story. That's the first thing. But everybody still has a life. They need to, you know, maintain and things like that. So you just to him it was like we need to change the profile of the person we're going to get. Like, you know, if you're not going to get these rising hotshot stars which you probably don't want in the business, then anyway, correct, correct. So the biggest thing I've always learned about recruitment is you've got to expand everyone's expectations. You expand the client's view of what they're going to get, because everybody wants that unicorn right. Then you expand the expectations of the candidate. You want 200K, it's more likely going to be 150.
Speaker 1:So let's just sit somewhere in the middle, and once you've got more of an overlap you'll land right. And so it was those. It was just pushing the client a lot more on. How did you do that?
Speaker 3:Because how did you do that? Because I know there'll be a lot of recruiters being like mate. That sounds all well and good. I'm going to focus on expanding, but what's the first step to showing someone how to expand a conversation? Like if we have a client and they give us a brief and they're hell rigid. Maybe the example could be you know, you're a software company, you've taken the contingent approach, you've flooded the market with your briefs to all the recruiters and you're saying, hey, best recruiter wins, and then you're trying to reposition that as trying to win it retained or exclusive. Like what would you do?
Speaker 1:So I mean, typically, when people from the client side work at a company, they're there for a number of reasons and when you ask them why they're there, why they join, what are some of the reasons for keeping them there? Very rarely you hear just the financials, right, and but that's a thing that recruiters get hung up on, which is, oh, it's not paying the right amount, they won't be interested. That's the more experience I've got in my career. I've realized that there are so many other dynamics to it, and so when you speak to your clients and understand you know why they're there, then you can use that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so why did you join ebay? I mean, might have been money, been money, but why are you still here? Okay, what if I get somebody who you know is paying a bit more or paying a bit less, but these are the things that are important to them. Do you think we can have a real conversation about that kind of person? So it's just opening their mind with their own story. I'd find, because you know I've joined XRecruiter, as an example, because of the lots of things that I think I want to be a part of that doesn't look exactly like what I should be doing as my next move. Sometimes, you know so, there's lots of reasons, um, but it's a huge thing and particularly when you first start the process, you do it. Then you don't wait until a candidate wants something at final stage to do that you know so.
Speaker 2:So this is something that I have always naturally done in my recruitment process is push the boundaries of expectations, regardless of whether or not you know the outcome. Yeah, so, let's say a candidate comes in, they're like, oh, I'm looking for a hundred K plus super Okay, okay, cool, no worries If I, even if the brief that I'm recruiting might be 110, naturally just to do the expanding process is okay If it was 90, what are your thoughts on there? Okay, do the expanding process is okay if it was 90, what are your thoughts on there? Okay, 95, what are your thoughts on there? And constantly just trying to see how far you can push someone from a salary standpoint, from a type of business standpoint, from an interest standpoint, and at least that way you've got, as you say, you've got so much more of a broader aspect to be able to try and place them. And if you do that both sides like that's where the magic's made.
Speaker 2:I think so. That's. That's where recruiters get all the deals. Done is and you put it really well is expanding everyone's expectations slightly until there's an overlap and you can land it.
Speaker 1:I used to just one question I'd always say or conversation I'd have with candidates when they said I want a hundred K, all right, so any jobs that come across my desk at 90, I'm not even going to call you about them, I'm going to say no straight away. They'll be like, oh no, no, at least run them by me. I said, well, let's just, let's just create a baseline, right, and they go anything over 75k All right, so over 74k?
Speaker 1:no, all right, 70k. You know those. I need to know what's a real conversation to be had If we talk about opportunity costs. I'm not going to spend 20 minutes with you and it's just going to be a no, right. I need to know when I call you, we're having a real conversation about what might be. So you set all those things up right at the start and Paige were brilliant I've got to give them credit and they trained you exceptionally well around these things. So you know location, salary, career prospects, what's most important to you, and you'd start ranking them and then you'd pull bits down and push bits up so you could really pull on the triggers when you got to that stage the things they first said when they first met. You could anchor them to that.
Speaker 2:Ed, something that recruiters struggle with is using the CRM. How did you go at Page specifically with updating your notes, tagging candidates, making sure that everything was perfect? Are you a CRM type of guy or are you just pulling memories of the conversation you had with that guy six months ago? I'll give him a call. What's your method of recruitment?
Speaker 1:I've evolved over the years, but I was terrible at the CRM recruitment I'll. I mean, I've evolved over the years, but I was terrible at the crm. Um, but when I started to get good was I started looking at, uh, when people start looking for jobs again and it's usually a three-year cycle or something like that right, I started thinking, oh, maybe there are people that I met three years ago who'll be suddenly in the market now. And going back to my earlier conversation around attached to the best candidates, I was like who are the best candidates I was working with three years ago going to the crm? Oh, who were they?
Speaker 1:So then your memory starts failing you and I was like I need to do this better, because it's okay living in the moment, knowing who your candidates were, who you met in the last three months, because everyone can remember those. You can remember what you got for christmas a few weeks after. But if I said, deck, what'd you get for christmas last year, you might struggle to remember. Remembering a candidate from three years ago is an impossible task unless they were just the one. So I started to think like that and then I started to use that example to people that were in my teams and saying what if I could tell you the best five candidates in industrial sales in Townsville?
Speaker 1:Now who would be looking? How valuable would that be to you? I'll be a game changer, ed. So now who will be looking? How valuable would that be to you? I'll be a game changer, ed. So let's start thinking like that. They need to see how it impacts them, because crms are usually what people think that the managers just want to look at to see what they're doing. But actually you can use it to your advantage.
Speaker 2:So I had to change my mindset on that for it to become valuable how would you change your recruiter's mindset today if someone's listening and they go oh I'm really shit at the crm. I'm great at making quick placements in a three-month window, but when it comes to recalling candidates from two years ago maybe it's they're dug in my email somewhere. I've got to remember their name, or linked in them like what. What are some of the strategies or the processes that maybe someone can take away right now to start being more organized?
Speaker 1:I think for me something I used to do all my notes at the end of the week, which is a really bad call, because you get to your candidate notes and go tier two.
Speaker 2:You just can remember.
Speaker 1:Do it in the moment, honestly, because you're, you come out from a candidate interview, you're excited about them, you remember it. Do it then, and there, um, and then you go back on your notes and I used just put like little code words into my notes which just help me kind of trigger what they're about, and I'll go all right, that's it. So do it in the moment. It will be valuable to you in the future and even if it's that extra two placements a year that could take you to you know the next high achievers thing or it could be that extra 30 grand you need for that deposit.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is, attach it to something that's important to you, um, and stay focused on it and do it in the moment. That's probably the best I've got to answer that love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's. That's really really good. Um, so you've had a really successful career at page. Why did it end?
Speaker 1:um, I had to go back to the uk like, um, some family stuff, um, mum wasn't well, just things like that went back to the UK. And then I was in London. It was cold, it was miserable. My partner at the time got mugged and I was like I really want to go back to Australia.
Speaker 1:And so for me, at the time I was talking to my old MD of Michael Page, a guy guy called Simon Meyer, who was just brilliant, brilliant human but really entrepreneurial type guy, and he'd said I'm starting a new company and I want you involved in it, but I can't say what it is right now, cause there's some legal standpoints and things like that. And he said, just stay, just stay ready to go, pretty much. And I was like, well, how long is it going to be fuzzy? His nickname was fuzzy. I was like, how long is it going to be fuzzy? His nickname was fuzzy. I was like how long is it going to be? He goes can't tell you.
Speaker 1:And so I was kind of like just in limbo waiting, um, but it came around and it was a company called future you and literally I was in london in my kitchen at like 5 am talking to him, one of the other founders and just three or four people in the background were like hi ed, hi ed. These are people that I really respected through my career. We're all joining and I thought to myself, oh, he's bringing the band back together. This is amazing. I want in on this. And it was just a dream, that the hopes and dreams of what that business could have been just really got me. And then it was back in Australia and it was all this good stuff. So that kind of pulled me out, because the other option was to go to a big, big organization.
Speaker 1:But again, challenging myself, I thought yeah, it's a startup, but with people who are people who know me, my capabilities.
Speaker 3:Why didn't it live out to its full potential?
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a number of reasons and I want to be very delicate around this because I've still got an incredible, incredible amount of respect for all the people in that business that I work with and I think they went a bit too hard too soon. They brought in a lot of firepower and, like some of the people that are bringing in, you'd be like they could be running this business.
Speaker 2:I remember at the time I was gobsmacked. It was like wow, this, this agency. Was that when we just got into recruitment Slightly after, was it 2016?
Speaker 1:2017, 2016, around there, yeah, true, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm looking at the-. I'm pretty sure I copied one of the videos on the Future U website because I was like, well, there's like a skydiver or something and it's like pink and blue or something like that. And I looked at Future U, looking at all of these absolute guns thinking these guys, everything they touch just turns to gold, yeah, yeah. It was like it felt like a shoe-in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think the concept was creating a super boutique which was just the best recruiters in their market. We'll do less disciplines, if you like, than, say, a Walters or a Page and we'll just be like slightly bigger than a boutique, but not as big as a multinational and we'll just have the best people, right, that was the concept. And then we went out pretty hard and I was based in melbourne and the guys who ran melbourne um guy, I'm still really good friends with a guy called joe vise um and a guy called mark richardson. They were incredible operators and melbourne kept to like a size. They kept it to like 15, 20 people and Melbourne was just shooting the lights out and Sydney they added so many people they were just getting a bit overexcited and I think that part of the business wasn't doing its bit, I think. And we ended up doing like 19 disciplines and I remember saying at the time that's more than Michael Page do, actually. So I don't think we're a super boutique anymore. I think we're a super boutique anymore. I think we're just a watered down multinational um, and at the time, you know, a few partners were having similar thoughts and um, there's a little bit of an exodus, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Because, why? Because it wasn't, let me think of the right way to frame it. Look, there are some promises that are made along the way that probably weren't going to happen. Um, we're all feeling a little bit of of that. And then I'd know it just wasn't quite. It just didn't start to wash out like it was told at the start. If it stayed to the model we were told at the start, I think we might have all stayed. I think, um, but it just wasn't quite playing out. Yeah, that for my and again, I can't speak for anyone else that was just my perspective. Are they still around?
Speaker 3:They're still around 30 staff.
Speaker 1:They're doing really well Like run by Emily, who is an ex Michael Bajan. She's incredible, yeah, and she thinks she's got some really strong people. They're just in Sydney now, yeah, and I think they've and keeping it a good size. I think they're doing really well, it wouldn't surprise me.
Speaker 3:She's an awesome leader, because Matt took over their office in Melbourne with. Oreck yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting, he knows it well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then made some interesting like learnings you got from LinkedIn. Like to be the head of sales for mid-market at LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, there's a couple good guy. But yeah, at that time, having come from San Fran, seeing all this kind of tech, linkedin was just blowing up and at the time I think I'm trying to think how many people they had on board. It was like they used to say that somebody joins LinkedIn every three seconds or something like that. So it's going through this incredible growth. Microsoft had recently acquired them.
Speaker 1:It was really cool and to come on board and kind of technically leave recruitment but staying close enough that you still you can touch and feel it had a team of you know ex-recruiters who were selling into you know mid-market companies and small, medium-sized businesses in australia which makes up most of australia and selling against recruiters.
Speaker 1:You're selling linkedin recruited job slots, things like that. I thought this is going to be a walk in the park. And then when you get into it and it was a wonderful time, incredible people you realize selling against recruitment is quite hard because dealing with mid-market companies, they've probably got like one HR person or talent acquisition person here's 10 grand for a LinkedIn recruiter license and it will save you all this money. But they're like, yeah, but it's a lot more work for me and also I only recruit one marketing person a year and I haven't said the opportunity cost of them doing that actually started to really make sense Because so many companies like now we're just happy to pay the money to recruiters because we know what we get. I haven't got the time to do all this. It's not the best use of my time and use of my time. And then you start. I started to remember all the reasons what about the key part.
Speaker 3:when you said about um, they wanted someone to blame and keep accountable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that was like I had numerous conversations with um people in talent saying, no, if I don't get somebody and I've used Michael page to do it. Uh, we can say we hired one of the, the, the. What well, we used one of the best recruiters out there and they couldn't deliver on it, Whereas when it's them, they failed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, recruiters out there, just add that to your pitch. Guys, I will be your scapegoat If this goes wrong.
Speaker 1:Come to me.
Speaker 3:You can blame me.
Speaker 1:But you know we used to talk about it a lot in recruitment you do 10 interviews a week with candidates specifically in your niche. So over the course of the year people, your view on the market versus an internal talent person when they go to market once a year and just see who's active is way different.
Speaker 3:so the quality you get from a recruiter versus kind of using you know your talent person is just worlds apart yeah, I think talent acquisition will have, like when we're talking about ai and all this type of stuff, there's a lot of um, like what you said on the podcast, there's a lot of heavy admin that talent acquisition do. That's much different to recruitment. So I think, like either their roles will get more redefined or there'll be certain softwares that will be able to do a lot of the heavy lifting and then to remain successful as a talent acquisition specialist, you will have to be able to communicate to hiring managers better, be able to fill more jobs. Otherwise, like recruiters as like the skill of them will just keep getting greater and greater because of what we're doing.
Speaker 1:Um, and I see that being a real shift. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, there's always going to be a place for recruiters whilst we still use interviews to hire people. Right, that's a person to person interaction, and so that will always be there as long as it can be the most valuable thing.
Speaker 3:As long as there's people around, you need someone to connect everyone Exactly.
Speaker 2:So how competitive was it to get that role at LinkedIn? Because I see LinkedIn as a little bit of like a not like a boys club, but like a bit of a prestigious you know, you've got to really be at the top of your game. They only accept really high quality individuals.
Speaker 1:Clearly not Blake.
Speaker 2:Like every person that I've met with at LinkedIn, generally operate at a level that is impressive, and so you, being head of sales, that would was that a competitive role to, I assume. So I mean what?
Speaker 1:how they split the markets up was kind of geographically. So you'd, you know, you'd run an acquisition team, which is me, which is all signing people up in mid-market, but then we'd pass, once they're signed up, you pass them over to a team who were just account managers, so they used to look for people who just really hunters basically in that space. And so I think that part makes it competitive, because I think the more experience you get in recruitment or sales or whatever it is, you naturally deviate a bit from being a true hunter because you kind of feel like I've done the hard yards, I've done my hunting, I'll hire people who hunt around, you know around me or you know in my teams, and I'll just be kind of glory kind of person. I love sales and I love hunting, and so maybe that came across. I don't know who else was in the process, who else was in the mix, but maybe from that perspective it was. But the new business acquisition is I don't know if it's a dying art, but I don't think many people do it that well or do it with a lot of science behind it.
Speaker 1:What did you learn at LinkedIn? Well, some of those things. I learned that there's a true place for recruitment and actually the pitch can't be replacing recruitment and it's something that I've learned since in the job that I've done most recently. You have to learn how to coexist in the market with these people and these organizations or whatever it is, uh, and find your place and find your niche. So it's not just a cost exercise. It's cheaper than recruitment, so you're going to buy.
Speaker 1:It's not just a. You have access to everybody now, not just who's on um, a company's database. You know you have to change and tweak your approach because people don't always buy in the way you think you need to sell, so understanding that. So what I learned at LinkedIn was the discovery aspect has always been the biggest part just really qualifying and what we talked about, the initial kind of interview, really digging in there, or the initial job brief or whatever it is. That's the quality there and the rest of it. If you do that right, we'll just flow through. So it refined my skills, um, about asking second and third level questions and digging deeper.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 3:And then Garner mate, like that's, that's a heavy hitting business. Can you explain the size of it and the yeah, so yeah who's?
Speaker 1:Gartner is such a unique, unique business it's sometimes hard to explain, but there's about 20,000 people globally and they are an advisory company. So I guess the easiest way to explain it is if I'm a CIO, as an example, and I've got some big projects or transformations that we're doing or whatever you can, you can have your own people do it and you know you're limited by their capabilities in many ways, like they might not be great in ai because it's so new. Right, you could hire a big consulting firm like a mckinsey or a bain or someone like that to come in and you pay them millions to come in and do this and they do it and then leave and take all the ip with them. Or you you can hire a Gartner, which is you sign up to them and they basically advise and build capability in your own team so they can do it themselves. So it's almost like if I'm driving and you jump in an Uber and you say take me to the valley, you're probably just on your phone the whole time. You're not seeing how the drivers get in there, but your GPS will show you how to avoid the roadworks and the traffic and Gartner is helping them avoid the pitfalls that you might face if you're doing it yourself. So it was a business that would sell access to our people, our geniuses basically we used to call them analysts, but they're just like super smart people in certain parts of technology. We'd sell access to those people to help them do things themselves. That was the concept of it, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so I got brought on um running a sales team in in melbourne. Basically it was a regional sales manager team of four um and then within about a month the other one of the other sales managers moved on and, um, they asked me to run both teams. So then I was running the state and it's just a bigger job, uh. And then and that was right at the start of covid, so I was doing this all remotely and hadn't met half the team and it was a really challenging time did well. Then I got promoted to run Queensland and I actually got told by the old GVP that he wanted me to at some stage run a country. So he gave me New Zealand to run to, kind of New Zealand's. Okay if you mess it up, but just kind of learn your trade.
Speaker 1:And then did that for a while and then and it was running the sales, basically had sales teams, had account directors or all managing businesses, and and then they said, like the flagship part of Gartner, the most important part we have is the financial services vertical. It is the banks, and if we're talking to any other company in Australia and we're dealing with your CBAs and your A and Zs and we're supporting them and providing to them, it's like it just the flow and effect of doing that, so he goes, we want you to run the big flagship part of it. And so that's what I did and had to create this entire vertical and pull these accounts together, pull these people together and build the entire team and go to market strategy for that part of the business.
Speaker 2:And, uh, it was really tough yeah, well, you were there for a while yeah, you obviously did a good job did a good job, like what's the different uh way of selling for Gartner that you weren't familiar with from page, from running your own recruitment agency from LinkedIn, like what was the style difference, I guess?
Speaker 1:the main thing when you're doing big, complex enterprise sales is there's more people involved, and so you used to historically talk about power the person who makes the decision or the person who can veto the decision but you've probably got six or seven people who've got power and they've all got different opinions, and so rounding that together takes time, and then you want to point towards an end game of a closed meeting, but it's so hard to manage that, so it becomes very strategic in terms of managing the dynamics and you end up talking about individual key stakeholders. You might have a 15-person deal to get passed for it to get signed, and then there's all these different variables and so what happens there is you need people who can just keep focused when they're not getting wins. You know cause. You might do three deals a year right, but they're big deals and imagine going a month or two and you're not getting that validation of doing something good. So it was actually helping them understand that you get you doing a good meeting. There is the job we've hired you to do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's what's interesting, why they target so many recruiters because you can turn a deal around in a week, a couple of days, so recruiters need that. I don't think.
Speaker 2:I would last. With a sales cycle that long, I feel like I would almost get a bit bored and sad, I love-.
Speaker 3:It reminds me of your printer days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, printer days were very similar Three five year agreements. You had to just sit around for three years, until you could call them back up again and go. Are you ready?
Speaker 1:And, yeah, you can't be an anxious person in that environment because you overanalyze every single thing you might've done wrong and then you can just hang on to the thing that wasn't actually the reason, but you've. You've dissected a meeting so much with your vp and all these different people and you could be spinning your wheels in the wrong area. It's hard sometimes, um, but it ultimately taught me that there's only two things that matter in sales. There's only two things that really matter um, in in not recruitment, but power, people who make the decisions and the urgency. Why is it happening now? All the other stuff doesn't. Does someone want to leave a job now? Are they making the decision or is their wife making the decision? Those things. So that's what I love about the journey with XRecruiter is you can connect those two dots really quickly. Speaking to the people who make decisions, why now?
Speaker 2:Why did you join XRecruiter, going from Gartner top of the game awesome business getting paid well to then going down to Cruder for a smaller business completely?
Speaker 3:different. Don't laugh at us, mate. It was all you guys, mate.
Speaker 2:It was you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But I get what you're saying, but it's like. So I resigned from Gartner based on a number of reasons, but part of it was I was losing my love for sales right, and for some of the reasons we just talked about, losing my love for sales, just wasn't enjoying some of the things that were happening there. And I decided to take some time out and just reassess. When was I the happiest I've been in my career? Basically Because I'm just obviously getting older now and I've decided that I'm not going to be the MD of these companies. So I need to do a job that I just feel fulfilled in. And I look back and thought it was actually in recruitment. So you know, cards on the table.
Speaker 1:I started to explore what my recruitment career might look like again If I was to go back in. Was I going to, you know, join a Michael page again? And I was talking to them and I was talking to all these companies again. And then I came across you guys, companies again. And then, um, I came across you guys and then it just got me excited because I flash back to all the you took your advice from 20 years ago. That's what got you here. I did, I did.
Speaker 1:I look back at the things I um got wrong and if I could do it again, what would I do? So there was that um. But it's exciting seeing you guys in the afr, seeing how you're truly changing people's kind of careers and path, and I wish I'd had you guys to hold my hand when I did my own company, to be honest. But it was those things and and I just felt like it was an environment I could actually make a difference. If I'm honest, you know you guys are doing incredible stuff, but there's things that I can bring from my experience that can help and I thought I journey with you and that's the true reason is I wanted to be heard in an environment, a career, um, that I was having and fulfilled in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah have being in our side of the fence. We've almost created a new side of the fence, I guess. You know you've got being an employer, as a, as an agency owner, you've got being a recruiter, as a payg, you know, but now we've got like this third fence where it's we're an ex-recruiter, where we're helping facilitate both sides, whether you're an agency owner to run a better agency or you're a recruiter wanting to start your own agency.
Speaker 2:Being on this side has anything surprised you or changed the way that you look at recruiters or the industry or like what recruiters are going through? I think I was.
Speaker 1:I thought more people would be keener to do it themselves, really, cause I mean, you've got these incredible recruiters who making a lot of money for someone else and even when I was at these big companies, you know you kind of tell yourself, oh, it's the brand that's got me's not, it's you. Your, your clients deal with you. So with that knowledge, I'm surprised there is just not every single recruiter who's billing over 400k should think about going on their own. That's so. There's that part, but I also recognize that, um, there's lots of other factors that are involved.
Speaker 1:But I love the fact you're adding this new dimension to recruitment. It's like recruitment didn't exist. It was just a company and an employee and they used to join the dots themselves and then recruitment went hey, we can do this for you, you know. And now you're saying we'll remove those barriers for you guys, so you can do it, and I love that, um, but I just wish more people believed in their, their capabilities and that they can do this for themselves, because actually the daunting part is all the stuff that you guys take care of truly, because otherwise you're just doing what you've been doing for the last, however many years, but you get more of the pie.
Speaker 3:That's awesome and um quickly, like what's your, you know, 30 second, one minute vision of what you see for extra creative.
Speaker 1:Um, look, I would. I would say, if I did my career the other way around, if I did Michael Page first, did this big corporate. It's hard to leave that environment. And Blake, we've been chatting about this it's hard to leave that environment because you know there's so you think there's so much that's involved. I was fortunate that I did my own thing first and it was just easy because the concept was go on your own. I went on my own, on your own, go on your own. So, um, I would like you guys, or us, now just to change the game even more significantly than it is and and change it not just in australia, but overseas. I think the us is ripe for the picking. Like the mentality of people in the us is go for it, bro, you know, and that's what you want, there's no fear.
Speaker 1:Uk is a little bit risk averse, but the us is an amazing market, so I want to be on this rocket ship with you.
Speaker 3:You are mate and just see you change the game. Awesome. Well, let's go for it bro.
Speaker 2:Yo great conversation mate, appreciate it, appreciate you coming on Pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another Confessions of a Recruiter podcast with Blake and Declan. We hope you enjoyed and got a lot of value and insights out of this episode. If you do have any questions or you would like to recommend someone to come on the Confessions podcast, we would love any introductions and remember the rule of the podcast, like share and recommend it to a friend. Until next time, bye.