As part of our celebrations of 18 years in business, founder and CEO Tim Bashall sat down to review how we started and how that's reflected in what we are today.
We founded IT Works Recruitment back in 2004 with a clear goal; we wanted to show that a recruitment company would grow and thrive if it focused on being the expert within its marketplace, by concentrating on very specific technical market niches and job roles requiring very specific skills.
At the time a typical business in the recruitment market would concentrate on a more generalist approach, which generally resulted in a lack of understanding of client requirements and of candidates' expertise leading to poor service.
We believe, and we’ve shown that it’s possible instead for dedicated experts to make the recruitment process simple and straightforward, even in markets where key skills are really hard to find.
How We Work
It’s a simple ethos – we focus every working hour on being brilliant at finding the right people for a role and placing them in that role, within our niche markets.
How do we do that? By being the expert in the marketplace. Our consultants are constantly working to make sure we know and have access to every client and candidate in their fields, wherever and however we find them.
Eighteen years later, we are still the number one Consultancy providing recruitment services within a number of ERPs including IFS, because we’ve never rested on our laurels.
Underpinning our business we’ve built up an engine within our Marketing team which operates on a whole suite of channels to reach new clients and candidates, to show them who we are, what we know, and what we can do. In combination with our recruitment consultants, this creates a shared pool of expertise and understanding. When one consultant is working a job, they draw on all the relevant knowledge the company holds.
Thanks to Marketing and our consultants’ relentless outreach, we are now at a point where more than 50% of our candidates and clients approach us first. We’ve made ourselves well-known in every market and we’ve built a reputation for connecting the right candidate and the right client – and we do that without drowning our clients in CVs.
When our team are given a job, our clients know we’ll fill it, often without needing to go out and find a new candidate.
Where Do You Come In?
As founder and CEO, I find the most rewarding from seeing people develop their careers. Based here in the North West, we don’t have access to a pool of competitors to recruit from. Instead, we’ve focused on finding people with drive, tenacity, and the desire to succeed, knowing we can develop their skills to effectively represent the IT Works expert formula.
We’ve built up an in-house training program that has been and continues to be, progressively revised and updated. The program runs twice as long as the industry standard and by the time it’s complete, a new consultant knows how to tap into our specialist knowledge and has learned the “IT Works Way”.
As our trainee consultants continue to learn they become our expert representatives within their field – and using tools that didn’t exist when we started, a hard-working consultant can become an expert faster than I would ever have believed back in 2004! We combine traditional business development techniques with digital marketing, social media, data analytics and much more.
The sales floor is a dynamic environment that constantly challenges our team to push themselves. Our business is thriving, and that means we’re continuing to grow.
If you’re in the North West, you have the drive to challenge yourself, and you believe you can learn to become an expert within a key niche market why not reach out to us today?
