Where we stand in 2026
Six years ago I sat in a rented room off Gracechurch Street with a laptop, a phone and a single conviction: that the recruitment industry had quietly stopped serving the people it claimed to serve. This is a mid-year note rather than a year-end review, because enough people — clients, candidates, and a few competitors who are kinder than they need to be — have asked where the firm actually stands now. So here is the honest picture, halfway through our sixth year, with the numbers laid out plainly and nothing rounded in our favour.
We are a team of around 115 people across four offices — London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham. We have worked with 275+ client companies, from FTSE constituents to Series-B scale-ups. We have made more than 7,800 placements since 2020. And we have still, to this day, never charged a candidate a single penny. That last sentence is the one I am proudest of, and it is the one that took the most discipline to keep true.
The headline numbers
I have always thought a firm should be willing to publish the figures it uses to judge itself. Here are ours, as they stand in the middle of 2026.
| Measure | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Placements since 2020 | 7,800+ |
| Placements (2026 run-rate) | 2,000+ |
| Client companies | 275+ |
| Consultants | ~115 |
| Offices | 4 |
| Median time to offer | 28 days |
| Candidate satisfaction | 93% |
| Still in role at 18 months | 86% |
Two of those numbers matter more than the rest. The 28-day median time to offer tells you we move at the speed a good hire actually requires — fast enough to keep a strong candidate engaged, slow enough to do the work properly. The 86% still-in-role-at-18-months figure tells you the placements hold. Anyone can fill a seat. Filling it with someone who is still thriving a year and a half later is the only outcome worth measuring.
How we got here — the short version
For those who haven't followed the story, the arc is simple. We started in London in 2020 with twelve people and forty-one placements. We doubled the team and tripled output in 2021. Manchester opened in 2022, Edinburgh in 2023, and Birmingham in 2025. The growth was deliberate, and at several points we turned it down on purpose.
| Year | Placements | Clients | Team |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 41 | 18 | 12 |
| 2021 | 124 | 47 | 26 |
| 2022 | 386 | 96 | 44 |
| 2023 | 712 | 158 | 63 |
| 2024 | 1,048 | 214 | 81 |
| 2025 | 1,517 | 261 | 96 |
| 2026* | 2,000+ | 275+ | ~115 |
*2026 figures are a mid-year run-rate, not a final count.
We said at the very start that we would rather be the best firm in four cities than a mediocre one in twenty. We meant it, and turning down the twenty is harder than it sounds.
What six years has actually taught us
You learn a great deal running two thousand searches a year. Most of it is unglamorous. But three lessons have earned their place as operating principles, and they are the reason the firm looks the way it does.
1. A short, honest shortlist beats a long one every time
The industry's default instinct is to send more — more CVs, more options, more activity to demonstrate effort. We do the opposite. A Garrick shortlist is three to five genuinely qualified, properly referenced people a client could actually appoint. It takes longer to produce and it looks less impressive in a status update, but it is the single thing our clients mention most often when they renew. A hiring manager does not want a pile of maybes. They want a small number of yeses.
2. Seniority is not a luxury — it is the product
Every search we run is led by a consultant with nine or more years in their market. There are no junior screeners passing CVs up a chain, no handoffs between the person who won the work and the person who does it. This is expensive and it caps how fast we can grow, because you cannot manufacture a senior consultant in a training programme. But it is the whole point. When a candidate takes a call from us, they are speaking to someone who understands their world well enough to be useful, and honest enough to tell them when a move is wrong.
3. Free-for-candidates is not charity — it is the foundation of trust
We are paid by employers, never by candidates. No fee for placement, no fee for coaching, no fee for anything, ever. People sometimes assume this is a marketing gesture. It isn't. It is the mechanism that keeps our advice clean. A candidate who owes us nothing can trust that when we say "this role isn't right for you," we mean it — because we have no financial reason to say otherwise. Remove the fee and you remove the conflict, and once the conflict is gone the whole relationship changes.
Where the UK market sits in 2026
The wider picture is steadier than it was. After the genuine slowdown of 2024, when UK vacancies fell and everyone learned to be patient again, hiring through 2025 and into 2026 has been more confident without being frothy. Salaries at the senior end have held their gains; the scramble for scarce specialists — data leadership, regulated-industry finance, commercial technology — continues to push packages up, while the middle of the market has normalised.
Candidates, meanwhile, have become more discerning. The reflexive job-hopping of a few years ago has given way to something more considered: people want to understand a business, a leadership team and a trajectory before they move. That suits us. A considered candidate is a candidate who stays, and a candidate who stays is the only kind who improves our 18-month retention figure.
Four offices, one standard
People sometimes ask whether the culture thins out as you add locations. It is a fair worry — plenty of firms grow by franchising their name to teams who share little beyond a logo. We were determined not to become that, which is why every office is staffed, trained and held to the same standard, and why partners still move between them constantly.
London remains our largest office and the home of our executive and board practice; it is where the firm began and where our most senior retained work is still run. Manchester, opened in 2022, has become a genuine second hub rather than a satellite, serving the North West's fast-growing technology and professional-services employers. Edinburgh, our 2023 opening, gave us real depth in Scottish financial services and a foothold in a market that rewards firms who actually show up rather than fly in. Birmingham, the newest, opened in 2025 and is already ahead of where Edinburgh was at the same age — proof, I think, that we have got better at opening offices.
What ties them together is not a process document. It is people who have worked alongside each other, a shared refusal to send a lazy shortlist, and the simple fact that a candidate in Birmingham gets exactly the same senior attention as one in Mayfair.
The people who did the work
A recruitment firm is only ever as good as its consultants, and ours are the reason any of these numbers exist. We now have around a hundred people organised into specialist practices — finance and banking, technology and digital, life sciences and healthcare, legal, sales and marketing, and executive search — supported by a research function that maps markets properly and a client-services team that keeps every mandate moving.
We have hired slowly and kept people. Median tenure among our consultants is now over four years, which in an industry famous for churn is close to heresy. We think it comes down to the same principle that governs everything else here: treat people as though the relationship matters more than the transaction, and the relationship tends to last. That is as true of our own staff as it is of the candidates they place.
What comes next
We are not planning a fifth office this year, and we are not planning to double the team. The near-term focus is depth rather than breadth: strengthening each of our four locations, deepening our specialist practices, and continuing to invest in the research function that quietly makes every shortlist better. If the right opportunity to open a fifth city presents itself, we will take it — but on our terms and at our pace, the same way we opened the first four.
We will also keep publishing. This year-in-review series began as a note to ourselves and became something clients told us they valued — a plain account of what worked, what didn't, and where we think the market is heading. We intend to keep writing it honestly, even in the years when the numbers are less flattering.
Thank you
None of this happens without people. Thank you to every candidate who trusted us with a career decision, to every client who trusted us with a mandate that mattered, and above all to the colleagues who have built this firm with an old-fashioned belief that reputation is earned one introduction at a time. Six years in, that belief is intact — and the next six start now.
If you'd like to talk about a search, or simply about where your own market is heading, get in touch. A senior consultant will come back to you within one working day.
