You can’t be credible without a website?

Just under a year ago I set upon a journey, a journey that has created laughter, sometimes tears, stress and yet pure joy and a true feeling of admiration with and without those around me at the beaumont table today.

Having just reached 500% growth in the first year, seeing people grow, people succeed, people fail, but celebrating and commiserating each other as a team, I’d just like to say how proud I am of the team I have around me who spur me on to be my best every day.

I left a comfortable job with a very good company in order to embark upon my biggest challenge yet (apart from fathering two daughters – but that’s a story for another day), to walk into the unknown and start a new business, one without a name, one with just a 12 page business plan; oh how that was wrong, with the premise that if I knew I could do it, I couldn’t fail.

We all have to fail in order to learn and grow.

Thinking I couldn’t fail was probably an oversight on my behalf, under no illusion that the task I had set out to do was an extremely difficult one little did I know the hours, blood and sweat that were coming for me. I’ve learnt through a number of failings over the past year that 1) I don’t know everything and in fact don’t know anything, 2) some ideas just can’t be saved and 3) sometimes you just need a little help.

One failing that really sticks with me actually involves this very website which is why it was so apt for the first blog during the website release, whilst I’m sat here at stupid o’clock writing content (yes it never ends and I love it)! So… having won some new business, done an exceptional job to get a client onboard only to be turned away at the 11th hour because we “Don’t have a website therefore lack credibility and the ability to attract talent,” now my thought process behind this mostly returned my thoughts on how often I’ve actually received a well-fitting candidate profile from an advert on the website of the recruitment company I’ve been working for; in ten years, I can tell you, I need just 2-3 fingers. Bear in mind some of these were / are some of the largest recruitment companies in the UK who you would assume would have some of the best websites / candidate draw in the industry.

The last thing on my mind was a website!

I’ll be honest, as a start-up recruitment company the last thing on my mind was a website, especially spending a few thousand pounds on one. I mean I could have knocked up a cheap rubbish one only to have another built 12-18 months in but everything inside of me told me to concentrate on what I am good at and do some recruitment. As is often the case with life, when you are concentrating on something else you consider more important everything else gets left by the wayside which was much the case with the website.

On reflection, my mind spiralled from this clients comment, even kept me up at night, I began to think about how wrong this whole premise is… Is it me? Is it my advert writing? Is it just ‘the way things are’ or are we really missing a trick here as recruiters? I mean in reality we should be marketing our clients to the point that candidates come to us, surely there has to be a way to make this work?

An impossible brief?

Cue our web developer Aaron, I was pretty brutal on the brief, I didn’t want another recruitment website just so we have a website but I wanted to create a place where technology professionals could go to see their process with our clients (by linking it to our CRM system), they could apply for roles, we could market roles back to and we could hopefully push traffic to our website rather than relying on the various job boards in order to gain traction. I knew this meant writing good quality adverts, doing marketing and spending more of my time doing things that I don’t necessarily enjoy doing, I guess mostly because we don’t get instant gratification from this way of working.

I wanted to build the go to technology recruitment website for professionals looking for a new role – OK we are a company of five right now, maybe I’m looking way ahead, but you have to have goals, you have to have dreams and at some point you have to start the wheels turning on those dreams becoming a reality – which is kind of what got me here in the first place.

Will it work? I don’t know, time will tell. There is a chance that this could be another failing, but if we don’t fail, how will we learn? We rebuild, we start again and we have another go. Maybe beaumont-it.co.uk iteration 73 will be the one that finally reaches my dream.