Page 145 - James Caan - The Real Deal

13 · Learning to Innovate

a bit like the milk rounds companies do for final-year undergradu-
ates, and there will be plenty of candidates all looking for a job.’
‘And what do you want from me?’
‘Just a contribution towards the cost of the advertising.’
‘And that’s it?’
I asked several clients to make a similar contribution, and then
asked another to pay for the venue hire, and another to help out
with the costs of refreshments. Normally these clients would pay
Alexander Mann a 25 per cent fee, which could often be a
five-figure sum. If they only hired a handful of candidates, they
would make quite a saving. If they hired several, they’d be quids
in.
I then hired an advertising agency to design full-page ads for the
press. It was a brilliant campaign packed with logos of companies
like BT, Glaxo and the high-street banks inviting jobseekers to a
free recruitment fair at the Dorchester, one of the best hotels in
London.
The branding for Alexander Mann was incredible, but that
wasn’t the real benefit: if 800 people turned up and our clients
hired 100 of them, we still had 700 jobseekers whose details we
could store and find opportunities for. My consultants desperately
needed candidates, and in one day we were going to find hundreds
of them. Or so we hoped. At that stage we had no idea if the plan
would work because it had never been done before.
I turned up at the Dorchester not knowing what to expect: for
all I knew, I might have been about to embarrass myself and my
company in front of some of our biggest clients. When I pulled up
and saw the queue outside, it was an incredible feeling. I didn’t
quite dare hope the queue was for our event, but I had a sneaking
suspicion it had to be.
The key for us was the registration process. Although our clients
had footed the bill it was still only valuable to us if we got the
names, addresses and phone numbers of all the attendees. So I had

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