Building on Singularity

 

There was a role that had been open for a year before it came to us. Five agencies had worked on it already, and the candidate we placed had turned down every one of them.

What changed was not that we tried harder than the others. We have a great relationship with the hiring manager, and that relationship meant we understood what the business was actually trying to build rather than what was written on the job description.

All five firms had his number, and any of them could have found him in an afternoon. Finding him was never the difficult part. What made the difference was context, and context is not something you can search for. It is something you accumulate, in one market, over a long period of time.

This is the reason we narrowed down to five specialisms, being Advanced Manufacturing, Aerospace, Industrial, Energy and Corporate Functions within these industries. This was never about how we market ourselves. It was about deciding which markets we wanted to be the best at, and accepting that we could not do that everywhere at once.

Saying no to work is never comfortable, and we turned down many opportunities last quarter that sat outside those five. Revenue matters, and none of that was easy to walk away from. But the roles we take outside our expertise cost us more than they bring in, because they take the same hours from the same consultants and we deliver them slower and less well. Turning them down is not us being principled, it is simply the better trade.

Honestly, I thought the risk of narrowing down would be fewer jobs coming through the door. What happened was the opposite. The deeper we went into these five markets, the more we were referred, and word of mouth within a specialised community travels much faster than it does across a general one. We ended up with more work, not less, and the work was better matched to what we are actually good at. The inch wide, mile deep approach seems to have paid off here.

We intend to be the market leader in Engineering and Manufacturing recruitment in this region, the firm that clients in these five specialisms come to first. Which is why expertise is one of the values we hold ourselves to. But what I believe matters more is that the consultants here are building knowledge that belongs to them, in markets they will still know deeply in ten years' time.

#TeamEntal #Expertise #RISEwithEntal