We both identified each other luckily at the same time, luckily at the same time as a potential business partner. Both got similar backgrounds, both engineering graduates, both worked in recruitment, both successful in recruitment. It was a great partnership, and so far, so good. It was a chance to go and do it ourselves and do it our own way. By coming together, it’s actually worked extremely well because John’s got one area of the business that is a specialist in, and my area of the business was slightly different.
So the two sides of recruitment are winning the business by gaining the accounts and the companies who are looking to recruit, and the other side of it is actually finding the candidates and obviously putting the candidates into the right positions. And Nick’s very good at the business development and account management side of things, and I’m going to breadth of depth in terms of helping to find candidates and also manage them through the process. So yeah, worked well.
We focus on the technical and technology marketplace; that’s what we recruit for, and that’s where our specialism, myself and Nick, focus on. We recruit for sales, engineering, marketing, but also executive-level positions. So we’ve helped organizations recruit for managing directors, sales directors, with finance directors, but all the way through to field service engineers. And then we’ve really started to focus on, well, the digital world.
We developed the employability training platform or portal, which was based around a local situation where we visited a school, wasn’t it? It was a local grammar school in Stratford, and it was an excellent opportunity for us to present at a careers fair. So, employability was based and devised to basically try and target the schools and education sector to improve and obscure… well, yeah, skill the students so that they are, at the end of the program, more employable.
It’s been a great opportunity to work with the University of Warwick Science Park and the Ignite project. It enabled us to come together from John and Nick forming Talent Tech two years ago, now employing six members of staff, with plans to grow that this year to ten. We’re going to be moving into some bigger, larger office space at the Business Innovation Center in Bindley. They’ve helped us fundamentally with the growth and the strategy, enabled us to have a fantastic facility here in Bindley where we’ve been able to work closely, develop, get stuck into what we do well, which is recruit and basically grow the business.
We are fortunate to have a mentor or in Dirk Schaefer, who’s been very good with us and opened many doors and given us some ideas and strategy and structure. We know recruitment; we’ve worked in recruitment for so long, we get it, we understand it, we’re pretty good at it. However, we’ve never built a business, scaled a business, grown a business, and we’ve never had a facility to work from.
So the program, the Ignite program, has basically enabled us to get into an office, take ourselves to a certain stage, and 2021, we’ve got great growth plans to grow, take on extra space here, and take the team to ten. And also take us just from what we thought we were going to be a standard recruitment company to something that is now much more tech-based. You know, and that’s opened our whole eyes to that. We started Talent Tech Recruitment as a recruitment business, now we’ve got plans with a technology portal or a SaaS-based model into our clients for automating the recruitment process, but also we have the employability portal that, again, we’re developing to help local people find work and fill that skills gap.
