Year one: building an honest agency in a strange year
We opened the doors of Garrick Talent in March 2020, which — with the benefit of hindsight — was not the calmest week in living memory to start a recruitment firm. Within a fortnight the country had shut, half our prospective clients had frozen hiring, and the word "unprecedented" had already lost all meaning through overuse. Friends who wished me well did so with the particular gentleness people reserve for a plan they think is doomed. I understood the concern. I also thought the timing, however brutal, was oddly right.
Because a crisis strips a market back to what actually matters. When budgets are tight and every hire is scrutinised, nobody has patience for the industry's usual theatre — the padded shortlists, the junior on a script, the CV fired off without a conversation. What a frightened, careful employer wants in a downturn is exactly what I wanted to build: a small number of genuinely right people, presented by someone senior enough to be trusted. So we started anyway.
Why I left to do this
I had spent twelve years at a large London search boutique before 2020. It taught me a great deal — how to run a board-level mandate, how to read a client's real need underneath the job spec, how to tell a chief executive something they didn't want to hear. But it also taught me, slowly and then all at once, what I did not want to build.
I did not want a phone factory. I did not want a floor of talented juniors cold-calling candidates from a script they hadn't written and didn't believe. And above all I did not want a business that treated the candidate — the human being on the other end of the search, making one of the most consequential decisions of their working life — as inventory to be moved. The economics of the industry quietly encourage all three of those things. I wanted to prove the economics could work another way.
What we set out to do
Three principles went on the first page of the first notebook, and they have not changed since.
- Free for candidates, always. We are paid by employers. A candidate should never pay a penny to find work, be coached, or be represented — not now, not ever.
- Senior consultants only. The person you speak to first is the person who runs your search. No handoffs, no junior screeners passing you up a chain.
- Honest advice. Sometimes the right advice is "don't take that job," or "don't make that hire." We give it anyway, because the alternative is to be useful once and untrusted forever.
These sound simple. They are not easy. Each one costs money in the short term — the fee you don't charge, the junior you don't hire to do the work cheaply, the placement you talk someone out of. The bet of the whole firm is that they pay for themselves in trust, and that trust, compounded over years, is the most valuable asset a search firm can hold.
The numbers
We finished the year as a team of twelve, working out of one modest office in the City. We made 41 placements for 18 clients — mostly finance and technology roles that were too important to freeze, for businesses that needed a specific person rather than a headcount. Every one of those searches was run personally by a senior consultant, and not one candidate paid us anything.
| Measure | 2020 |
|---|---|
| Team | 12 |
| Offices | 1 (London) |
| Placements | 41 |
| Clients | 18 |
Forty-one placements is not a headline number. But every one of them was a real person, into a real role, and we didn't charge a single one of them a penny. That was the whole point.
What the strange year taught us
Starting in a pandemic forced habits on us that we have kept. We learned to interview and assess remotely without losing the depth of a proper conversation — a skill that later made our regional expansion far easier. We learned that clients under pressure remember who was straight with them, and several of our first eighteen clients are still with us today precisely because of how we behaved when things were hard. And we learned that a candidate treated well in a frightening year becomes an advocate for life; a good number of our earliest placements have since become clients themselves.
We also learned restraint. It would have been easy, even in 2020, to chase volume — to take every half-relevant mandate and staff it thinly. We didn't. We turned work away when we couldn't do it properly, which felt reckless at the time and looks, in retrospect, like the most important decision of the year.
The first hire, and the first no
Two moments from that year stand out. The first was hiring our second consultant — a decision that felt enormous at the time, because it meant the firm was no longer just me and a conviction. I hired someone more experienced than I strictly needed, and paid more than a start-up sensibly should, precisely to signal what kind of place this would be: senior from the second person onward, never a training ground. That instinct has governed every hire since.
The second was turning down a lucrative retained mandate in the autumn because I didn't believe the role, as scoped, was fillable with anyone good — and I wasn't willing to take the fee and send a shortlist I didn't believe in. Saying no to real money in your first year, mid-pandemic, is a clarifying experience. It told me the principles weren't just marketing; they were things I would actually pay for. The client, incidentally, came back a year later with a better-defined role, and remains with us today.
It was enough to prove the model. Twelve people, one office, forty-one honest placements, and a set of principles that survived contact with the hardest possible market. Next year, we build.
If you're weighing up a move, or you have a role that can't wait, get in touch — a senior consultant will reply within one working day.
