October newsletter

Beaumont Wood Newsletter
October 2008

This is the Beaumont Wood newsletter published for Directors & Managers within the interiors and building product markets.

Current state of the market!

We live in interesting times (to say the least!). So how do I see the prospects for the recruitment market in our sector after all the high profile shocks in the Banking & Finance sectors; with knock on expectations about possibly serious downturn for the overall economy?

Well at the micro-level I have had one assignment postponed (not due to any downturn in that companies sales but due to concern about what might happen) and one client where I placed a good guy in January that has just made 50 % (yes HALF!) of their entire staff redundant.

So you picture your correspondent panicking and about to leap off a high ledge do you?

Not a bit of it!

One candidate started his new role last week after a successful and short recruitment campaign using Beaumont Wood. I have had several enquiries about brand new recruitment in the past two weeks.

Also I think the supply / demand balance of vacancies to candidates over the past 10 years has been much skewed with a shortage of good candidates. As more people come onto the job market it should ease this position. If a company feels comfortable to invest in new or replacement staff they may be pleasantly surprised at the level of talent and experience now becoming available.

Clearly it would be naïve, and perhaps insensitive, of me to portray things as overly positive; but I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the media are portraying.

What is evident is that it all depends which sector of the economy you feed off. House builders and those who supply this sector are seemingly in big trouble. The education sector is buoyant and seems set fair to stay that way. Luxury interior finishes seem to be doing well too. The Commercial Office market is patchy and depends on who the end use client / occupier is.

Behind all this come the Olympic Games which simply have to happen along with all the attendant infrastructure work. The fact that the Government may well decide to invest heavily in public sector projects to help keep the economy going is a possibility too.

So what about the “pool of talent” that you may wish to hire from?

Well obviously, like the rest of us, they are somewhat nervous!

However whilst some are going to stay put ‘till things get better some are open to a move. These guys will be cautious, but if they see a chance to move to a secure and dynamic company with a “step up” in their career they could well change jobs. Also if they see your role as more stable than their own (perhaps shaky) employer then that too could precipitate a move.

One interesting area that crops up regularly is the area of specialisation (or not) needed in ones choice of candidates for a given role.

The question is: to find the best staff, is it better to specialise within your own narrow product area, or to broaden out and consider people from new product groups occasionally?

Before analysing this within the context of our industry, let’s consider examples from other walks of life where people have taken on radically different careers.

Comedian Bill Oddie is now an ornithologist; Blackadder’s Tony Robinson is now an archaeologist; ex-footballer Gary Lineker is now a TV anchorman and so on. All of these people have started out in one field and then moved when opportunity knocked into other fields. Their careers have been extended, rejuvenated, and prolonged as a result. Their employers have found successful staff by thinking “outside the box”.

In business, Richard Branson doesn’t seem to have suffered too much by moving on from selling records!!

Frequently I hear those recruiting within the interiors and building products industry telling me that they could not hire someone experienced in say broadloom carpet as they “must have staff with narrow loom experience”, or they could “only really ever hire a vinyl flooring specialist”, rather than other types of contract flooring or products!

The same applies for within the glass, furniture, fabric and wall coverings markets etc!

Frankly this astonishes me! It seems so insular and restrictive. Consider this as an example - dial in geography for a given sales position, and then you may have a total prospective candidate pool of perhaps only 10 people maximum. Of these ten, 3 are very happy where they are now; one retires in 6 months; one only started last week; one is pregnant and another hates your company because you (quite rightly) fired his mate! That leaves 3 people as the entire possible candidate pool on the entire planet!

There are, actually, rather more people out there:

http://www.internetgeographer.co.uk/popnclock.html

I do concede that specialising within your own market can be a good idea – obviously people need to understand the technicalities and market dynamics wherever they work. But these things can be trained and learnt! Surely you are better off having a very sound individual with a positive attitude to learning rather than a bit of a duffer with a bad attitude who has been in the trade for 15 years (same one years experience repeated 15 times perhaps?)

I guess it’s all a matter of balance where you need to have sufficiently expert staff plus fresh blood with new ideas too.

Don’t get me wrong – this is not a one sided issue because employees can be just as bad – “We only want to work within our own industry” they cry!

So how does my service work?

I specialise in search. My methodology targets not just the c.10% of people who are actively looking for a new job at any one time but also the c.90% that are not actively looking. Usually you will get a better candidate(s) from this method and you can relax knowing that I am completely committed to finding the “best available” people for you! I have a 95% success rate. For the 5% where there simply is not a suitable candidate to meet your initial parameters then you will get very valuable feedback and good, practical ideas for a new plan to achieve success.

So finally, if you are recruiting or planning to please call me for a discussion about how I can help.

I hope you have found this useful & thought provoking.

I’m off to the Bank now to make sure it’s still got my cash in it; I may make an offer to buy it for a tenner! This weekend I’m grubbing up the lawn to plant carrots – just in case!

Kind regards

Jerry Wood

jerrywood@beaumontwood.com

Please forward this newsletter to anyone who you think may find it interesting.

Tel: 01295 720365