Page 144 - James Caan - The Real Deal
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The Real Deal



             between ourselves about other avenues we could take, and one of
             the innovations we came up with was recruitment fairs.
                The economy was so buoyant in 1987 that we were struggling
             to find enough candidates and we had more vacancies than we
             could fill. I’d be walking round the office talking to the team, and
             they’d all be saying the same thing: there just weren’t enough
             candidates to go round. So I started to think of ways we could
             attract more candidates. One way would be to advertise, but in the
             days before the internet recruitment advertising was incredibly
             expensive. An ad in the Telegraph was something like £10,000 a
             page, and I could easily have spent £100,000 a week on
             advertising. The breakthrough came when I had a slightly cheeky
             thought: How can I get someone else to spend the £100k for me?
                I wasn’t the only person in the office trying to think of new ways
             to find candidates, and one of my team, a guy called Nick Baldock,
             had a brainwave: when he had left university, several blue-chip
             employers had come to try to persuade final-year students to join
             them. Nick’s idea was to take this concept into the commercial
             world. As ever, when you come up with something innovative you
             have to tell people about it in the right way for them to understand
             exactly what you’re offering. So I thought about the right pitch to
             use and then called one of our best clients.
                ‘What would you say if I said you could hire as many people as
             you want in a day at a fixed fee, rather than paying me 25 per cent
             of their salary?’
                ‘Sounds interesting, James, but how are you going to get me
             several candidates in one day?
                ‘Alexander Mann’s going to be holding an event at the
             Dorchester hotel specifically for blue-chip companies to find the
             best candidates. We’re going to advertise it and invite anyone
             interested in working for the best companies to come along. We’re
             inviting BT, Glaxo, IBM and others to come along to find out
             about positions from trainees to senior management. I suppose it’s




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