Our 2021: finding our feet and our first hundred

If 2020 was about proving the idea could work at all, 2021 was about proving it could scale without losing the thing that made it worth doing. Those are very different tests. Plenty of firms have a good first year on the strength of a founder's contacts and sheer determination; far fewer survive the transition from "one person's crusade" to "an actual business with other people in it." That transition was the whole story of our second year.

We passed one hundred placements in September — a milestone we marked, quietly, with a very good bottle of wine and an early finish on a Friday. We ended the year on 124 placements for 47 clients, and the team had grown from twelve to twenty-six. More than doubling in a year is dangerous for any small firm, and I was more nervous about the hiring than the revenue. Get the people wrong and the culture dilutes before you notice; by the time you do, it's too late.

The market roared back

The context helped. After the frozen caution of 2020, hiring came back with a force that caught a lot of employers flat-footed. The "great resignation" was real, and it was loudest in exactly the roles we cover — finance, technology, and senior commercial. Candidates who had sat tight through the uncertainty of the previous year suddenly felt confident enough to move, and good businesses found themselves competing hard for people they had assumed would stay put.

That environment is good for a recruitment firm in the obvious way — more roles, more movement, more mandates. But it is also a test of principle, because a hot market tempts you to cut corners. When clients are desperate and candidates are scarce, the lazy move is to push people towards offers, to skip the honest conversation, to treat speed as the only virtue. We tried hard not to.

• Our median time to offer settled around 30 days as the market heated up — fast, but never at the expense of doing the work properly.
• Counter-offers spiked as employers scrambled to keep people, so we began keeping data on how often they actually work. The early answer, which has held ever since: rarely.
• We built out our finance and technology practices with senior hires of our own — people who had done the job, in keeping with the founding rule.

The numbers

Tripling placements while only doubling the team told me something important: the model was getting more efficient without getting more industrial. Each consultant was more productive because they were senior, well-supported, and trusted to run their own desks — not because we had turned the volume up.

The temptation in a hot market is to become the thing you set out to replace. Our second year was really an exercise in resisting that temptation, one mandate at a time.

Learning to hire our own way

The lesson of 2021 that shaped everything after it was about our own recruitment. We are, after all, a firm of recruiters — and yet hiring for ourselves proved to be the hardest search of all, because the standard was so specific. We were not looking for people who could sell; we were looking for senior operators who could be trusted to give honest advice and walk away from bad-fit work. Those people are rare, and they are almost never actively looking.

So we did to ourselves what we do for clients: mapped the market properly, approached people who weren't looking, and were honest about what the job actually was. Several of the consultants who joined that year are now among our most senior partners. Hiring slowly, and for the long term, became a permanent habit.

The counter-offer problem

One theme dominated the year quietly, and it's worth dwelling on because it still shapes our advice today. As the market overheated, counter-offers became epidemic. A candidate would accept a role, hand in their notice, and their current employer — suddenly alert to a problem they'd ignored for two years — would throw money at them to stay. We watched it happen again and again, and we started tracking what came next.

The pattern was stark. A large majority of candidates who accepted a counter-offer had left anyway within twelve months, because money was almost never the real reason they'd wanted to move. The underlying frustration — a stalled career, a difficult manager, a lack of scope — was still there; the raise just papered over it for a while. We began advising candidates about this openly, even when it slowed a placement down, because an honest warning is worth more than a fast close. It's the kind of advice you can only give freely when the candidate owes you nothing.

The discipline we set ourselves in year one held. We turned down work that didn't fit, we kept the shortlists short, and we still didn't charge a candidate a penny. On to 2022 — and, we hoped, a second city.

Looking back, 2021 was the year the firm stopped being a bet and started being a business. We had a repeatable way of working, a small group of people who believed in it, and a client base that renewed because we behaved well when the market tempted us to behave badly. None of it was dramatic. It was the slow, compounding accumulation of trust — a client who came back, a candidate who recommended us to a friend, a consultant who chose to stay. That compounding is the entire engine of this firm, and 2021 was the year I first saw it working on its own.

If you're hiring, or thinking about your next move, get in touch. A senior consultant will come back to you within one working day.