Love It Listen to how recruitment talks about recruitment. It is "just a numbers game." It is a stepping stone to something better. It is a trade people fall into rather than choose. Even the people who are brilliant at it will tell you, with a shrug, that they did not exactly plan to end up here. We find that strange. Because recruitment, done properly, is one of the most human jobs there is. You change lives for a living. You put the right person in the right place, and a c

Nobody warns you about the quiet. They sell you the rest of it. The growth. The title. The team you'll build, the culture you'll shape, the number you'll put on the board. They tell you leadership is the reward for being good at the job. And then you get there. And the job changes completely. In recruitment it's worse, because of how most of us arrive. You don't get handed a desk. You earn it. You're the best biller in the room. The one still on the phone when everyone else h

Own It Plenty of investors will take the credit when things go well. The board deck looks great. The numbers are up. Everyone is delighted to have been involved. Then a quarter goes wrong. And watch what happens. The same investor who claimed the wins is suddenly very interested in what management did. The questions get sharper. The distance gets wider. The capital that felt like a partner in the good times starts to feel like a landlord in the bad ones. Money in. Hands off.

Earn It There is a ritual in our industry. A business gets acquired. And within a year, the thing that made it worth buying is gone. The founder is sidelined. The name changes. The systems get ripped out and replaced with the buyer's own. The team that built something special is told, politely, that this is how it works now. The culture, the very asset that was on the spreadsheet, quietly dies. The buyer calls this integration. We call it vandalism. Because here is the uncomf

Picture your best biller. The one who lands the deals nobody else can get near. First in, last out, phone welded to their ear. The desk runs through them. Now picture what you're about to do. You're going to promote them. Give them a team, a title, a step up. Reward them. And in doing it, you're going to break two things at once. A very good person. And a very good desk. Here's what we forget in the moment. Billing and managing aren't the same job with more responsibility bol

I spent years running marketing at News International. The Times. The Sunday Times. The Sun. Three of the most recognisable mastheads in the country, sitting under one roof. And here's the thing nobody in a rebrand meeting wants to hear: the masthead was never the point. Those mastheads are iconic, yes. But that recognition was earned. Not designed. The Times masthead doesn't carry weight because of the typeface. It carries weight because of what got printed underneath it, ev

Three words. You've typed them. We all have. Thrilled to announce. And the moment your reader sees them, something happens behind their eyes. A little shutter comes down. They know — before they've read a single word more — exactly what's coming. A new job. A funding round. A panel you sat on. A badge, a milestone, a journey. And they know it'll arrive in the same packaging as the four hundred posts that opened the same way this week. So they scroll. Because you've just told

"We've got forty thousand contacts in the system." I hear it in every business I walk into. Said with pride. Like it's a line on the balance sheet. Like the size of the database is the same thing as the strength of it. It isn't. Most of the time, it's the opposite. Because a contact you collected and never called isn't an asset. It's a headstone. And a CRM full of them isn't a goldmine, it's a graveyard. Row after row of people you once meant to do something with, and never d

Ask any recruiter what they sell and you'll usually get the wrong answer. Candidates. Roles. Placements. A service. No. What you actually sell is trust. A candidate hands you their career — about the most important thing they own, after their family — and trusts you not to drop it. A client hands you a hire that, got wrong, costs them a year's salary, a stalled project, a missed quarter, and their own standing with the board. They aren't buying a CV. They're buying your judge

Because People Still Hire People There’s a lot of noise right now about how AI is going to "revolutionise" recruitment. Automated screening, chatbots doing first-round interviews, algorithms matching candidates to roles before a human even lifts a finger. Sounds slick. But here’s the truth: recruitment isn’t a data problem. It’s a people business. Yes, AI can process CVs faster than any recruiter. It can rank applicants by keyword, screen for qualifications, even run sentimen

Your CRM is full of the wrong data. Not bad data, just the wrong kind. The easy kind. Name. Title. Company. Salary band. Start date. The tidy, structured, drop-down stuff that slots neatly into a field. The data the forms were built to hold. And almost none of it is what actually wins the deal. Because the data that wins is the data nobody ever types in. It's the throwaway line at the end of a call, between you and me, I don't think I'll still be here this time next year. It'

At Meraki Capital, we invest exclusively in recruitment businesses. One factor we always look for—often before growth metrics or brand equity—is liquidity. Because in recruitment, cash isn’t just king—it’s survival. Recruitment is a working capital-heavy business. You pay your staff monthly, sometimes weekly, while clients often operate on 30, 60, or even 90-day payment terms. Without strong liquidity, even profitable agencies can run into serious problems. A few late payment