Page 108 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

going to be dead in the water. Without a differential you are just
a ‘me too’ business, and ‘me too’ businesses are notorious for
failure. So, I tried to think about what I could do differently in the
recruitment field, and remembered my time working in agencies
where there hadn’t been a sales culture and looked for chinks in
their armour. I was constantly looking for ways in which I could
apply what I knew about business to what I knew about
recruitment.
My experience of recruitment companies in the eighties had been
that they were essentially order-takers. Clients rang in vacancies, and
they simply matched requirements to candidates on their books. I
was wondering what would happen if I hired the kind of salespeople
the financial services industry hired. In an industry that was very
average saleswise, what difference could brilliant sales skills make?
In those days, salaries in recruitment were very mediocre in
relation to what you billed. The average recruiter probably took
home £10k to £12k a year. With the margins recruitment agencies
made, I was thinking that you could comfortably pay a consultant
who billed £100k a year as much as thirty or forty grand. So then
I started imagining the calibre of consultants you would attract if
you paid that kind of commission. I started to get really excited
because I’d seen what Reid Trevena had done with its staff: if you
put them into the right environment with the right spirit and the
right culture, they performed. And, of course, I knew exactly how
to recruit the right kind of candidate.
At that point in the mid-eighties the recruitment market was
very specific: you had high-street operations like Alfred Marks
doing clerical and manual recruitment and typically charging 25
per cent of the first year’s salary as their fee; then you had the
mid-range agencies offering executive selection, where they adver-
tised vacancies and selected a few candidates for interview by the
client. These agencies charged for the advertising – often as much
as £10k for a big ad in the Daily Telegraph or the Financial Times

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