A new image for our new mode: our 3-year levelling up journey

Just when you feel that you know what you’re doing, another lesson hits that makes you start to re-think everything all over again.

That’s what’s so rewarding about life in a small business. Most years, you look back on the former, and can’t imagine how you couldn’t have seen what you see so clearly now.

Reflecting on starting Hawkwood in 2016, I was incredibly under-prepared for all of this. I owe a great deal to that naivety. I really believe it’s a gift; so long as it’s coupled with hard work, a desire to learn and a little bit of luck.

2023 and 2024 – in particular – certainly demanded all of those things. Speaking to candidates daily, only to have relatively few opportunities to discuss with them, such was the market. Candidate volumes so enormous that disappointing them feels inevitable. Even if they can separate their disappointment at the situation from their disappointment with you, the paranoia is constant – you know you’re not doing enough for everyone.

Which poses the dilemma of how to resource one’s own team, within such a lop-sided market of huge candidate interest, but muted client demand and therefore revenues. Scarred from CV19 lay-offs, we resisted the urge to ramp back up when demand temporarily came surging back in 2021. “The market is running around on Red Bull, and is going to crash” an economist said on a vintage lockdown webinar I tuned into. We believed him – the market did feel too good to be true…

Taking caution, we stayed ultra lean despite the market running hot – just our few best operators; focused on doing the best we could while demand was there. Occasionally pausing to question our stance, as the latest in a long line of clients shared their intention to double (wait, triple) their headcount in 2022.

Therefore, when the market dramatically relented late-2022, it was a strange mixture of panic and relief. Our decision to stay lean had been vindicated, but still at significant cost to ourselves and other people we care about.

And so we strapped in. Two years of no growth would be followed by many more, presumably? What a compelling vision to engage the team with…

But we have grown. Internally, we’re unrecognisable from pre-CV19, and so we’ve marked the culmination of this v2.0 with a re-brand. Three years of focused effort on improving what we do and how we do it, has laid the foundation for what I think (hope) will be a successful period for Hawkwood. We’ve finally added a few new faces also, and remain open to confidential talks with others who are curious 😉

Importantly, we’ve come to some pivotal realisations. None more paradigm-shifting than acknowledging the conditions needed to do our best work…

The biggest cost to a recruitment consultancy is wasted time. Clients who alienate candidates, clients who are wholly unreasonable in their expectations, clients who ghost.

In the early days of growing an agency, I felt like we needed these clients. I felt like we needed all clients.

It took me too long to appreciate the cost of persevering with the truly unreasonable ones. In addition to wasted time, they suck meaning out of the job – heightening the risk of losing our greatest asset – our people.

And so, we embarked on a process of aligning ourselves only with clients who are receptive to a true partnership approach. These businesses know that the act of enticing high-calibre, in-demand individuals away from bosses who value and reward them, takes monumental effort and care. They recognise that there are components of that process that they – as the prospective employer – are uniquely positioned to fulfil, and they readily cooperate with us to do so. Great hires, for great bosses at great companies.

And it’s not lost on us that, for Hawkwood to be truly empowered as a partner in this way, our capabilities and application-levels must be worthy of this level of trust. In our constant and ongoing pursuit of excellence, we’ve invested in training in cultural change, a host of recruitment-adjacent skills such as copywriting, negotiation and public speaking, as well as making significant improvements to our internal operations.

Our rebrand is in support of us reaching for a higher standard. In a world of AI-generated everything, everything is now – at least – quite good. Quite good websites are built by Lovable, and quite good copy is written by ChatGPT. This also means that “quite good” is now abundant and, therefore, largely worthless.

Given this, businesses must now work harder than ever to offer something different, and to distinguish themselves from one another. We want our new brand image to act as a daily reminder to our team that we need to zig while AI zags.

Like any motivated business, we’re excited about the ways we can utilise this AI superpower, but our current belief is that there are someparts of recruitment that will remain uniquely human. The only available strategy is to become exceptional at them. We’ve got more work to do.

To those who have partnered with us in any capacity, I want to extend a huge thank you. As many of you now know, I moved to the USA to further develop our US presence IRL. Despite the distance, I’m always available and will ensure I’m in touch with as many people back home as I can be – time difference permitting.

More generally, we love connecting with innovative growth companies seeking to assemble or expand high-performing People & Talent Acquisition teams, be them in Europe or the US. If this is something you are exploring now, or for the future, let us know and we’d be delighted to discuss how we can support.

Thank you very much for reading.