Steve Jobs said “Don’t be better, be different” and I agree and disagree.
When I started Permanent People in 2013, my aim was to create a Rec2Rec agency that listened and acted on what people wanted. I wanted us to be different to other Rec2Rec’s and also better.
After all, how do you reinvent a sector that’s established and successful for many people, and how do you become different?
Essentially, there isn’t a difference between various agencies, we all do the same thing, get vacancies from clients and find people that are interested in them. This is the same for all forms of recruitment, a very stripped down way of looking at it, but it’s the truth.
So now onto the part of why we are different. And I think the answer is in the people that work for us. There is myself, Mandy my co-director, Amy a consultant and Anita and Louise who painstakingly resource for the business. And we all work very hard.
Now I know every agency and Rec2Rec can claim to be different because of their people, and there are some very good ones out there who do a great job and who we fully respect, and their staff are of course unique. They will say that they will work hard for your benefit, have all the best contacts and vacancies, truly have their finger on the pulse of the recruitment sector, and that may be so, but those are claims that anyone can and do make and mostly, they are fundamental basics that all of us should have and do as a minimum.
But there is something that’s different at Permanent People, and it’s a bit strange and unorthodox. We run as a consultative company first and foremost, not a business. There are no targets or expectations on staff, meaning no pressure. Everything that we do is about doing the right thing, professionally, not the right thing to earn money. Some might read and think “yeah alright, so you don’t want to make money”, and of course we do, but in the right way and not at the cost of the people we deal with.
I know this is unusual in recruitment, but it’s an ethic that we live by and it means that we offer candidates and clients the the right advice from the word go, and they know this, so they then trust in the way we work, we get results and that keeps everyone happy. The main pressure we work to is the one we put on ourselves.
Ask anyone who has dealt with any of us in the business and they will all say the same thing, we treat people as people and that pays off.
Simple. Better. Different.
