THE FOUNDER of a Glasgow recruitment consultancy has handed day-to-day management of the firm to a newly hired managing director at the same time as launching a fresh onslaught on the Edinburgh market.
Hilary Roberts, who founded HR Consultancy in 1995, has moved from being managing director of the business to chief executive and has hired former SafeDeposits Scotland chief executive Jen Paice to fill her old role.
“The plan is that Jen will run the business and I will spend a lot more time looking at our strategic growth plans,” Ms Roberts said.
“I’ve been looking a lot at where the future of recruitment is going and it is expected that 50 per cent of recruiters won’t exist anymore.
“I need to spend time looking outwards but I’ve been spending all my time looking inwards.
“Jen will take a lot of that on and I will look at how we can be strategically positioned to deliver the best possible experience for candidates and clients.”
Ms Roberts said that she had chosen Ms Paice, who is spearheading the firm’s move into Edinburgh, because she is “very focused, driven, analytical and measured”.
In terms of Edinburgh, Ms Roberts said the firm, which had an office in the capital between 2004 and 2012, had decided to move back into the city after seeing a renewed demand for its services there.
“After 2008 it was hard yards in Edinburgh as all our business had been in the financial services sector,” Ms Roberts said.
“We are looking this time round to build in professional services, financial services and IT.”
Ms Paice will initially be spending a large portion of her time getting the office up and running with the support of client engagement manager Stuart Stenhouse and legal search specialist Paul Steven. That said, Ms Roberts said the long-term aim is to appoint someone to lead the base on a full-time basis.
The office, which opened last week, is currently staffed by six recruiters, all of whom have transferred from HR Consultancy’s Glasgow headquarters.
“We’ve been focusing on the Edinburgh market for the last 18 to 24 months and had a small team in Glasgow who had been targeting the Edinburgh space,” Ms Roberts said.
“We’ve now gone back in and it’s been quite a soft landing for us.
“The starting point for this is that we are in a really great place this year. Despite the concerns around Brexit we are having a very positive year - we’re at about 140 per cent of our budget year to date.
“I wasn’t expecting that but we’ve been in a really good place to take advantage of that.”
Part of the driver of the growth is HR Consultancy’s move into the technology sector, which it did not previously recruit into.
“The world is changing at a pace and technology is driving everything,” Ms Roberts said.
“We’re constantly being asked if we have someone who can help with it. We started out with digital marketing and it has grown arms and legs.”
HR Consultancy itself is benefiting from the increased use of technology in the recruitment space and one of 15 people the firm hired in the past year is focused specifically on online marketing.
“With the development of social media, recruitment is changing and it’s all about the candidate experience so we’ve got to position ourselves in a different way,” Ms Roberts said.
“Around 91 per cent of candidates are passive candidates who are not looking for a job. We have to work really hard to get to them in the first place and then to build candidate loyalty.
“We’ve now got a very strong social media presence in a way that 18 months ago we weren’t even at the races.”
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