Our 2023: north of the border

Interest rates climbed all year, and a certain caution climbed with them. Every economic headline seemed to carry a warning, boards grew more deliberate about headcount, and a good deal of the industry spent 2023 bracing for a downturn. And yet it turned out to be our strongest year yet. That sounds counter-intuitive until you understand what actually happens to hiring when money gets expensive: employers don't stop hiring, they stop hiring carelessly. When every appointment has to be justified, clients want fewer, better options — which is precisely the thing we were built to provide.

We opened in Edinburgh in the spring, taking space on Semple Street, and finished the year with 712 placements, 158 clients and a team of sixty-three across three cities. Crossing into Scotland was the boldest move we had made, and the one I was most anxious about — but it repaid the nerve within months.

Why Edinburgh, and why then

Conventional wisdom says you don't expand into a new region in a tightening market. We took the opposite view. A cautious market is exactly when a serious, quality-led firm can win share, because the volume players are the first to struggle when clients stop rewarding activity for its own sake. Edinburgh had everything we look for: a genuine and sophisticated financial-services sector, a growing technology scene, and — as in Manchester — a talent market that wanted to be understood locally rather than managed from London.

We opened the same way we always do. A small senior team, deep local knowledge, and an absolute refusal to let the standard slip because the office was new. Scottish financial services is a demanding, relationship-driven market that can smell an outsider a mile off; the only way in is to show up properly, hire people the market already respects, and do consistently excellent work. By the autumn, Edinburgh was winning retained mandates against firms that had been there for decades.

A flight to quality

The defining dynamic of the year was what economists politely call a flight to quality. As budgets tightened, the contingent, spray-and-pray end of recruitment struggled badly — when a client is only going to make three hires instead of ten, they are not interested in a firm that measures itself by CVs sent. Retained and referenced search, our end of the market, held up remarkably well. Clients told us the same thing again and again, in almost identical words: send us three we can trust, not thirty we can't.

• Our shortlists stayed short, which suddenly looked less like a quirk and more like a competitive advantage.
• Referencing and market-mapping — the unglamorous work — became the thing clients valued most, because a bad hire in a lean year is far more costly.
• Retention of our own placements held above the industry norm, which mattered to clients who couldn't afford a rehire.

A tightening market doesn't punish every recruiter equally. It punishes volume and rewards judgement. 2023 was the year that stopped being a theory and became our balance sheet.

Building the engine room

Behind the headline numbers, 2023 was the year we invested seriously in research — the function that maps a market properly before a single candidate is approached. It is invisible to clients and expensive to run, and it is the single biggest reason our shortlists are as good as they are. In a year when everyone else was cutting, we were hiring researchers. That felt uncomfortable at the time and looks, now, like one of our better decisions.

The Scottish test

Edinburgh deserves a closer word, because it taught us something about how trust actually transfers. In London and Manchester we had grown partly on reputation that preceded us; in Scotland we were unknown, and the financial-services community there is small, tight and rightly sceptical of firms that treat it as a branch office. We could not buy our way in with marketing. We had to earn it one mandate at a time.

What worked was the same thing that always works: turning up in person, hiring people the market already respected, and being willing to tell a client an uncomfortable truth early. Our Edinburgh team's first big retained search was for a role several other firms had failed to fill; we filled it by being honest that the original brief was pitched wrong, re-scoping it with the client, and then finding the right person. That single search did more for our Scottish reputation than a year of business development could have. It confirmed a belief we'd held since 2020 — that honesty is not just the ethical choice, it is the most effective business-development tool a search firm has.

We crossed 1,200 lifetime placements in the autumn, three cities now firmly under one standard. The 2024 market looked like it would be slower still — and, strange as it sounds, we were rather looking forward to it. If you're hiring in a tougher market, get in touch; a senior consultant will come back to you within one working day.

The broader lesson of 2023 has stayed with me. Every firm claims to be quality-led when the market is booming and quality is cheap to promise. The real test comes when budgets tighten and clients start counting. We passed that test not because we're cleverer than anyone else, but because we had built a firm whose economics improve rather than collapse when the market gets serious. A downturn separates the recruiters who sell activity from the ones who sell judgement — and we had spent three years deliberately becoming the second kind. It is the clearest example I can give of why the boring principles — short shortlists, senior consultants, honest advice, free for candidates — are not a marketing veneer but the actual machinery of the business. They cost us in the good years and they earned for us in the hard one.