And it's something that the marker of success in the recruitment and staffing world of old was how many consultants do you have?How many billing consultants do you have?And that was always the marker.You got 700 consultants, super successful.
But actually, in reality, that's not the way.The more that data becomes prevalent and the more that data becomes such an important commodity, It's entirely different now, right?It's about how can we do more with what we have or less?
How can we drive efficiency gain at desk level?It's not a bad idea to, similar to, what was it you say?Higher, was it?Higher slow, fire fast.So it's pretty advicey here, people.And I think in a lot of respects, could follow the same advice.
You don't need to rush in to buy everything but you should have a clear pathway of what you want to change.People go into these projects without actually understanding what it is they're trying to fix.
Welcome to the Staffing Ring, the podcast where the gloves come off and we go deep into the recruitment industry's best practices and tactics.We aim to bring you actionable insights for how staffing and recruiting agencies are winning today.
This production is brought to you by Ringover, the leading staffing communication platform connected to your ATS and CRM, empowering conversations for your recruiters.
Welcome to another episode of The Staffing Ring.I'm your host, Jason Lawson.And today, I'm sure we're going to get a load of insights, perspectives, and hopefully some spicy points of view.
Our guest today is Nick Beecroft, head of new business at Access Recruitment Technology Division.Bit of a mouthful.And Preetsi, sales manager at Mercury and head of sales also at Oddro.So welcome, Nick. Thank you.
Cheers for having us.I've been looking forward.So apologies, I had to push off a bit longer than I would have hoped.But I've been really looking forward to getting on and having a chat.
I've been enjoying the other episodes that you guys have pushed out.
Yeah, I think, yeah, you've certainly been busy and had one to tie down.But yeah, I think you're in your first year of leading new business at Access.Yeah.Yeah, so I guess, yeah, just let us know a quick kind of background to your story.
Yeah, of course.Well, it depends how far you want to go back and how long we have, right?But look, I am a mechanical engineer, if you want to ask what I am.I am a CNC programmer from the oil and gas industry, nuclear and aerospace.
And that's where I started, if you want to go right back then.So very mechanically engineering-minded.Engineer's brain is how I can operate in that respect.But I always wanted to go into sales and absolutely fell through my housemate at the time,
who just got into recruitment at Michael Page in Glasgow 13 years ago and said, oh, I was out for a drink last night in Glasgow with some colleagues and I bumped into this lady called Karen Stewart, who coincidentally worked at another agency and said, I'd love to hire an engineer who could sell.
And I just thought on a complete win with no plan, I sent my CV and then I kind of fell into recruitment.
So five, six years of recruitment through meeting Ryan McCabe in recruitment where we worked together for six months and Dougie Lone where we worked together for a year.
The opportunity came in at the very, very start as like employee number six to join Odro in its infancy.
went from there and that was me sort of plummeted into the world of recruitment tech and SaaS sales and then my career's kind of just gone from there.
Now I am head of UK new business at the access group recruitment technology division which is not to give the big pitch but essentially it is
built and acquired best-in-class tech for front, middle, and back office, all leveraged and built around Venturi as a recruitment CRM in ATS, and is built for permanent contract and temporary staffing firms, and is highly AI and automation-driven technology for the front, middle, and back office, essentially, as what we call our recruitment operating system for the recruitment market.
Yeah, yeah.And I think with all of that experience, you know, having been recruitment, recruiter, leader, and then into the software, really serving the same industry, I really look forward to diving in.So let's go.Let's go.Round one into the ring.
You've just described the many roles and companies and years you've been in this game.We're certainly going through a phase, if you like, through the industry and economic conditions.
What do you see as the key or the big forces and developments in the market that our agency leaders should really be thinking about and aware of?
So there are a couple, and I'll take us down a couple of rabbit holes maybe, but I'll start with something I've been talking about a lot of late, which is that it's not a secret that margins are typically being driven down, but cost is being driven up for business owners, recruitment business owners.
And it's something that the marker of success in the recruitment and staffing world of old was how many consultants do you have?How many billing consultants do you have?And that was always the marker.You got 700 consultants, super successful.
But actually in reality, that's not the way that the more that data becomes prevalent and the more that data becomes such an important commodity It's entirely different now, right?It's about how can we do more with what we have or less?
How can we drive efficiency gain at desk level?And that feeds into the other talking point for me, which is go back
12, 13 years, maybe when I started in recruitment or others that are older than me that might have started in recruitment, like you had a phone, you had emails at that point, and you had your CRM and ATS.
And outside of that, there wasn't this enormous amount of tech that was to hand.So it was still a very 360 role in every part of that recruiter's business. I think what's happened is we've seen this enormous rec tech boom in the last 10 years, right?
Where every part of the recruitment process has been stripped down, stripped down, stripped down, and a bit of tech's been built for all of it.All of which drives huge efficiency gain, but also causes problem.
Because I think what we see, and certainly when I talk to my sales teams, the message is people are fatiguing with infinite marketplace partners.
They are fatiguing with eight, nine, 10, 11, I've heard as many as 17 different SaaS partners that they have to leverage and use on a monthly basis just to be competitive and hiring new staff, retaining staff, and giving them the best opportunity.
And I think people are fatiguing with that and are going, how can we drive one platform with key partners as opposed to having to choose a base product and plug a thousand things in when cost is going up.
So people are fatiguing with eight, nine, 10, 11 support routes, invoices, account managers, CSMs.And what they really want is just to consolidate their tech stack now.
And I think that's a huge trend we're seeing across the market, is that people are starting to look at how we do that.
So those two big movements and forces, I guess on one hand you say just scaling three people is expensive and not efficient and productive in many cases.
On the other hand, throwing lots of tools and technology at the problem is not also a good way to solve this.How do we balance those two things out?
So there's two, right?So I'm in no way an expert at how to run or scale a recruitment business, right?I'll make that clear.
But in my opinion, what people need to do is find the provider and the platform and the couple of key tools that allow you to drive enough efficiency gain.So we see, take a step back,
Recruiters typically have driven and scaled through a model of graduates quite often across the industry.
We'll bring in 10, we know that four are going to work really well, we understand that maybe five or six of them might just drop out because it wasn't what they expected, it's not for them, they're not for it, whatever that might be.
at large as failure on the agency, right?We should now be able to work with enough data to understand how we give more, a higher percentage of those people we bring in as new starts, a greater chance and level of success.
Some of that comes through investing in tech and the right tech, but not, not too much.
and a lot of that comes in giving yourself so yeah we can still scale but we're more efficient and we are more successful and how we onboard and upscale and drive L&D for these people to make them more effective and I think it's
embracing the big waves of change, like automation and AI, as really big high-level buzzwords, right?Like totally high-level buzzwords that oftentimes people don't actually really understand what it means.
They don't actually know what it means to go layers deep in that, and that's not their fault.That's probably our fault as salespeople and marketers to not actually drive that message down at the right level to educate.
But it's about adopting it, not hiding from it.And it's also about understanding that there's a lot more to AI, generative AI, for example, than just formatting CVs or generating some LinkedIn posters, things like that.
Actually, when you drive it down at the right level, you can actually strip out huge amounts of time from a consultant day to allow them to focus in on revenue-generating activity instead of the mundane tasks that are just repetitive.
And I think that's where, when you embrace that, change, I think we could see a lot of success as an industry.Yeah, yeah.
And I think it's that change agent, which I think is that glue, and is what I see in terms of if you're operating perhaps a more people-centric heavy model, previously you were just starting by, as I say, by those 10 graduates coming in and churning out the ones that don't work, to that really technology, AI, automation,
empowered model, really, you know, there's the people who can lead that change, be it internal, you know, operations directors or external kind of system integrators, or even, you know, just working closely with your ATS or CRM provider.
How do you see that kind of third part of that still?
Sorry, how do I see that working with your CRM provider?
Yes, yeah, working with the CRM provider, but also how the operations director internally needs to manage the change in the agency and, yes, the training, the enablement, the adoption of new tools.
Yeah, absolutely.So at large, it's not taking too much too soon.I think oftentimes, again, people just go all in. And they'll go, we've not had a technology transformation in this organization in X years.And then everyone gets excited about it.
And then they go, right, cool, we're gonna do everything.And they strip all out and cause himself headaches, right? And I think it's a bit more about having a plan.So there's so much, one of the biggest SaaS challenges, right?
Any SaaS business is going to surely agree that one of the biggest challenges they have is the drop off in usage after the SaaS provider is so heavily involved in the rollout, right?So there is only so much time.
as an ops director in a business, do we have the right stakeholders internally who are passionate enough about the project, who care enough about the outcome, who know enough about the solution to act as that point of contact post
post-go-live and post-initial support.Because I think any SaaS vendor would probably say there's this big uptake because it's new and it's shiny and exciting.
And then at the point where it's handed over, like any project, there's a kind of drop-off where it then takes a consistency of support to kind of re-drive the usage again.And I think it's understanding internally.
Considering the things they don't consider, which is we need tech, we need change, we want a new CRMATS telephony system, whatever that may be, cool, that's all well and good, but actually take a bit more time to consider.
And I think that's on us as suppliers to guide people through that journey and tell them the things they don't know, because they don't know what they don't know.
And oftentimes that's when projects fail, because we don't tell them the things we know they should know, or they don't ask the questions they don't know they should ask.
And we need to find the balance in that front to go, how do we guide them through that journey at the earliest possible point? Because you actually may find some of your prospects aren't ready for change.
And the best advice you could give them at that point is maybe you guys should spend the next six months working with us to get yourselves ready rather than drive into this project of change now and find out in three months that actually you're absolutely not equipped to deliver this as a successful project internally.
And that leads us really nicely on to round two, which is all about thinking about strategies and tactics to win and seeing and speaking with a lot of agencies and leaders. Yeah, it's tough times.It's a tough business.
It always has been, you know, letting grow a business.What are you seeing as some perhaps of unconventional ways?You spoke there about, you know, planning, you know, and figuring out what does change look like?What does it need to be?
But, you know, to stand out when everybody's adopting AI and automation, what are you thinking about in terms of consulting your prospects and customers in terms of how to stand out, how to be different?
Yeah, I think fundamentally we're in a market like, excuse me, we have a pendulum of change, right?It's very much candidate light, candidate heavy, job light, job heavy, right?
And it just messaging from, if you consider us as SaaS vendors and the message that we sell with, it goes one way, right?
We pitch the value of how our product will support new candidates and engagement, or we pitch our product on how you win new business and win new clients, right?
So in that respect, it's a very easy pendulum to follow, but it's also a very volatile market in that respect, too.We feel the pain of the economy first, very, very quickly, the pain of change in government, we feel that first.
But we're fundamentally in a market that It's absolute basics.You just have to do more right now.You just have to do more to do the same.
And I know that's a bit rubbish advice, but that generally just means you have to be prepared to commit that extra to go the extra mile in order to do the same amount that you're getting right now as an output.
That also means you've got to think smart.You've got to get yourself in the right room at the right events, but you've got to adopt the things that make you feel uncomfortable because it's a fundamental fact that
The 2% that are prepared and committed to really embrace marketing as part of your sales rule and learn to understand what marketing is from a personal brand perspective, from a content and copy perspective, to a social media perspective, all of these elements and how they all feed into you as an individual, it's very much a case of if it's going to be, it's up to me sort of stuff.
Yeah, and I as a salesperson in my earlier days was lucky enough to work with really forward-thinking people like Ryan and Dougie who were really in on video because we were a video product and accepted that, well, we'll take our own medicine but also
everyone's kind of laughing at what we're doing right now but at some point we believe that this is going to be the thing that sets us apart and I'm a total believer in that.Be part of the 1% because you stand out immediately from 99% of the market.
So things like unlocked and self-development reading books, watching webinars, watching podcasts, self-learning, asking questions.It's on you to go and do that as a young and upcoming salesperson or recruiter.It can't be spoon-fed to you.
It is honestly doing more to get the same outcome right now, but it will benefit you long-term when the market swings.
Yeah, no, so true.It's perhaps cliched, but when the times get tough, the tough get going, right?And think about the boxing analogy, too.If you're in the ring, you don't want to get punched in the face.You've got to keep moving, right?
You've got to find the weakness in the market that you can kind of attack.So in talking about kind of attacking the market or leaning into the market, business development is
Perhaps a skill that many agencies didn't keep getting strong through 2021, 2023, but obviously now it's an incredible success factor for those that want to survive and now thrive.
How are you seeing in terms of the REC OS and the Access Venturi playbook and support to help agencies deliver on that business development?
Yeah so I was, I think it was 2018 just when I started at Odro, someone said to me like BD when you're rich not when you're poor, right?Because when you BD when you're poor, when you go out to market when you're poor you're willing to
totally take things that you would never take into your pipeline previously because you're desperate for that.And especially in a KPI driven market where we're really held to account on pipeline generation and delivery on that.
And I think now more than ever, we're in that market where those over the last few years that continue to build one on their brand, but also two on their outbound strategy and adopted the technology as it came through and utilize it to their advantage are feeling the benefits now because
Kind of to answer your last question and maybe one of your next questions, but for me the biggest differentiator in salespeople and a sales role is going to be relationship in the next 10 years.
Because those with the ability to actually have meaningful relationship and build deep connection with other people and not rely on email or content or AI strategy or anything like that.
Those who fundamentally pick up a phone and go and see people face to face and build deep relationships and keep those people close will be the absolute winners in the next 10 years.
Um, it'll be too easy to go the way of the worlds and just kind of fall into it.
But again, that will be 1% that will be the new 1% over the people that actually fundamentally go back to basics and the way it was 15 years ago when we were just out meeting people and even five years ago when we were just out meeting people and the world and building relationship.
Yeah.And I think, yeah, that's where that kind of collaboration between the AI automation, but also allowing that to enable and empower you as a recruiter to build those relationships and foster them.
And certainly with Ringover and integrating into the ATS and CRM, it's about building those relationships over time as well.It's not just a call and saying, hey, do you have any roles available this week?
It's really also being much more of a consultative approach too.It's about adding value to the business.Yeah, first.Totally.Get first without expectation.Yes.Yeah.OK.
Moving on, round three, we're going to talk more about product innovation and really specific use cases of whether it be Access Venturi or some of your close marketplace providers.
So I guess just to start in terms of, again, your experience and how you've seen agencies redeploy technology well.
What are some words of wisdom in terms of really planning, really thinking about the order of events, getting the right data, automation set up for an agency to grow and scale?
Yep, so fundamentally it's very easy to go scattergun because every bit of tech in the market has its merits and you can get excited by all of it and they all play a part.But it's not a bad idea
excuse me, sorry, it's not a bad idea to, similar to, was it to say, higher, was it, higher slow, fire fast.So it's a bit advice-y here, people saying it.And I think in a lot of respects, it could follow the same advice.
You don't need to rush in to buy everything, but you can, you should have a clear pathway of what you want to change.People go into these projects without actually understanding what it is they're trying to fix.
So, one of the questions I'll always get our sales teams to ask when we're going into a sale is like, let's say it's a CRM project.What solution did you have now?Why did you buy that?What did you have before?Why did you buy that?
Did you fix the problems that you were trying to fix last time with your new solution?Because quite often times you find actually they didn't ever fix the problems that they went into the last project with.
And they've just generated new problems because they never actually, they got too caught up in the shiny thing, and they got too caught up in the thing that might look a little bit nicer than something else, but actually, fundamentally, at its base, isn't fixing the problems.
Because again, you go into these projects after four, five, seven, eight, nine, 10 plus years of using the solution, and you haven't really looked at the tech landscape, and you just totally get taken in by the excitement of the products that are available.
and actually end up buying things you don't need or they don't fix the problem just because you're all excited by the prospect of what it could do for you.
But I think fundamentally holding that, knowing what the problem is you're trying to fix is key before you ever enter these conversations and then ensuring through that process you hold yourself to account on whether you're actually fixing that problem with the tech that you're buying.
Yeah, yeah.I think there's a quote, I won't
Yes, someone much smarter than me said, you know, if you had 10 minutes to solve a solution, you'd spend the first nine minutes working out what is the question and then finding the answer in the last minute.
And that's kind of almost a way of thinking about really understand the processes and are the current manual processes right and fit for the business today?Because they may have been something that the agency has been doing for 5, 10, 15 years.
Make sure that the processes fit for today's market and then how do you automate and bring the right technology Yeah, as I say, some point solutions can be useful, but sometimes they may not solve the whole problem.
So then you're left with an 80% fix, and then you've got a gap.So again, I think Venturi Access have an amazing OS system, which does solve a lot of that.But yeah, I guess curious.
agency leaders do think about their OS versus maybe a kind of, you know, more point solution portfolio of what some people might call best in breed.
How should they be thinking about, you know, that kind of mindset and strategy around, you know, what's right for their agency?Yeah.I think when, so
I think you did encourage me to have some spicy takes but I'm just deliberating whether it's too spicy.
When you consider your ecosystem of tech and what is key to you as a vendor, you must consider whether the technology that you're buying as a core base system, your ATS or your CRM, if that is a product that does not get developed in its own right and is entirely reliant on strangers in the market coming up with an idea and building something good that was never ever designed
to work with that solution that you're going to buy, then you open yourself up to a lot of risk.And you open yourself up to a situation whereby there is no ownership on whose fault the integration issue lies within.
You also open yourself up to a situation where you actually, the tool that you love in the marketplace can't possibly fit in the tool. that you want in terms of your real estate, so you actually lose key functionality.
It's something we hear all the time is, yeah, it's great.Well, we've signed up for CRMX.We've gone into the marketplace and bought seven tools that we think are going to be key to making it actually work.
And actually, if they were all standalone tools, they're great.But when you actually put them in the system, we lose loads of functionality that we actually think is key.And that's a huge consideration, which is why going for
a solution like our Recruitment Operating System, which is a core solution which is built, bought, and acquired, and then has full and deep access to private API and unlimited development from the same team that own it all, from front, middle, and back office, then all you need to do is plug in the key vendors outside of that.
So like your telephony provider. yeah you know everything else everything else is owned and there yeah and you know that the data flow never stops and is seamless and cannot break and in that respect because it's sitting inside its own
private API of information flow as well from system to system.And I think that's a key consideration for businesses when they go into the market to review what they're buying and what they're ripping out and putting in the future.
Yes.Yeah.And I think those considerations have always been important.I think becoming critical now with AI and automation, because it's that integration of data, of APIs, or whether it's in OS, or even more of a marketplace basket of solutions.
They're doing the due diligence and thinking about, again, the business processes, the business people, and the technology. How do all those things work together in unison for the data, for the AI, for the automation?
Because without that, you're going to be tying both hands behind your back.
And another point is, so Access have put a multi, multi-million pound investment into building our own Access Evo, which we've launched and is now rolling out across our, as an organisation, if you don't know, we are 8,000 plus staff.
you know, billion turnover organization, the biggest private equity backed software house in Europe, based out of the UK.
And we are putting multi, multi millions of pounds of investment into our own large language model, which is now live across a lot of our products.
And that is not just taking the route which most took to get to market first, which is plugging into kind of chat GPT, or into GPT. which opens the world of risk, right?
Because you're just feeding your information into this big, massive, large language model which is less secure and just doesn't actually offer you a kind of future proof, really.
Whereas Access Evo actually points at your own information, it points at your own systems, it learns from your own users, and it learns from your own information that's in your system.So we are making a commitment to the market
that we're investing many, many millions of pounds and have done already, and will continue to be at the forefront of that technology change as we go.And that's another consideration.AI is such an easy buzzword to throw.
And you could be totally taken in by, this is our version of something, AI.But it could be absolutely built upon sand in that respect with no real strategy for growth of that functionality.Right.Yeah.Yeah.
Yeah, I think key points for any agency leader, owner, operator and Yeah, I think certainly what I've always admired about Venturi and Access is the people that are in your teams understand recruitment, understand agency life inside and out.
And so that's where it's a much deeper conversation.I'd certainly encourage anybody even thinking about, it might be six months, 12 months from now, but certainly
the Venturi Access team are always open to discussing and exploring, so I think that's a big asset.Definitely.Right, Nick, we are on to round four, Speedball.Quickfire Q&A for you, so make sure you've got your fists warmed up here.
There we go, fighting talk.That's cool.Walking into the ring, what's your walk-on music? Rang of Fire, Jordi Cash.Oh, wow, wow.Okay, interesting.I wouldn't have picked that, but that's a good tune.Yeah.Love it.Best movie then, Fight Club or Rocky?
Fight Club.Fight Club.Yeah, no questions.I'm not a Rocky guy.No.It's an old school favorite, but yeah, Fight Club is a classic. Red or blue corner?
Where are you at?Always blue in any sport because I'm a Glasgow Rangers fan.
Okay, yeah, yeah, that's um, so it's often they um, yeah, sports often drive that, don't they, in terms of that.Well, we're talking about Scotland, but yeah, beach or snow?
Beach.There's meant to be a speedball, sorry, beach.We'll go for the beach.
Beach, yeah, yeah.Yeah, and there are some fantastic beaches in Scotland too, aren't there?Not, probably not, um... Best in the world.Swimming conditions, but, um, yeah, it's beautiful, as I said.Yeah.Certainly pods of dolphins, beautiful weather.
It is there, I'm telling you.Yeah.You should come and see it.Should do, indeed.Coffee or tea?Uh, tea.Tea.
Yep. My mum is from Yorkshire, so very much a tea family.
Always brought up in the tea, so absolutely tea or coffee.Well, Yorkshire tea is my brand of choice, so there you go.What are you?Salsa or guacamole?
Guac.Not a salsa guy at all.I'll take a little bit of my nachos, but I'm not a huge fan.
Yeah.Guacamole, you can... certainly enjoy.Yeah, texting or calling, how do people get in touch with you?
Phone me, phone me.I have a thousand and one unread WhatsApp messages that I eventually get around to.Try my best.Phone me, you'll get me, I'll answer, we'll chat.There you go, there you go.
Virtual or in real life?Easy, in real life always.Yeah.Yeah, for sure. Here's probably an easy one for you, Nick.Best of breed or all in one?All in one, but best in breed.Oh, there we go.Oh, spicy take.I like it.Yeah, absolutely.I like it.Yeah.
Rustic or modern?Rustic.Rustic.Yep.So e-books or physical books?You have physical book?Physical books.
The smell of a book is excellent.It gives you an experience more than just a little screen with some writing on it.Turning of the page and all that.Yeah, absolutely.
So yeah, thinking about your journey through recruitment, I'm sure you've had a lot of advice along the way.Is there anything that's really stuck with you that's helped you get to where you are today?
Yeah, couple of things.So I've said a couple of them before, but I give first without expectation for sure.That was a big odd role mantra.Um, eat the frog was a big drive from, from Ryan.Always.
Everyone that ever joined the business was eat the frog, do the hard tasks first.Um, for sure.And tackle them head on.Um, advice I got early on in my career as well.A lot of
sales people by nature are typically hungry for career growth and what have you, but don't take on too much responsibility too soon.Allow yourself to grow into that, to be ready and don't overwhelm yourself, but don't drown yourself.
That's probably some of the good advice that I've had and I would encourage and I've fed back to my teams. in the past as well, like just be very good at something for a long time and the next thing will come.
And then the advice that I'll give everyone that took me too long to take myself was just focus on your own race.Just forget.
forget what's happening in the lanes next to you, forget the person internally you're wanting that might get the promotion over you, forget the competitor in the market that's just constantly talking about you, forget all of it and just focus on your own race.
You'll get to the finish line faster.
Yeah, I love that.Control the controllables.What's in your area of influence that you can really direct your communities to?
Yeah, I love the idea, too, that I think a lot of people, myself included, you have really clear success and you want to get into management, yet some of those individual contributor roles, there are a brilliant opportunity to learn and strive and not have the extra
Burden, if you like, of managing teams and being more in that management sort of layer.So I think that as a really top piece of advice, whether you're in recruitment or in sales, I think it's equally important.Yeah, absolutely.Right.
Any particular books or podcasts that you'd like to share with the audience?
I mean, there's loads of... There are loads of the ones that everyone talks about.Never Split the Difference did fundamentally change how we sold at Odro.We were big on self-learning, you know, up there, and we were big on outdoing.
We all just tried to outdo each other.We tried to run further than each other, faster than each other.We were a very competitive environment, and that really helped our growth.
But, you know, Never Split the Difference, I would encourage any young salesperson to read and apply it into their own life.
I tried to use all the Never Split The Difference techniques in my family, my kids and my wife before I applied it at work and see whether I could get it to work.My wife can see through me, but I would apply that elsewhere.
So Never Split The Difference for me is one of the best, most transformative books I've ever read.The Chimp Paradox
is my biggest recommendation, tying in what I just said in terms of reflection on me and my growth over time, just focus on your own race.
Chip Paradox was huge for me, I was not that guy, I was very much focused on the others around me and it held me back in the end. And it was my own doing, even though at the time I felt an injustice, it was my own doing, right?
And when I read The Chimp Paradox, and I read it again, it fundamentally changed how I thought about everything.
That we're not due anything, that we are very primitive in how we process our information and how we respond to it, and how if we could just learn to control how the information is in and is processed and how we emotionally respond to it, things get an awful lot easier for you in every part of your life.
And apologies, I should have put my notifications off, someone's trying to call me there.
And there's another really good book that I would recommend called The Outcome Generation, which Nick Thompson, who's my general manager who hired me into access, recommended to me during the interview process.
And I kind of only bought it because I wanted to turn up to my second interview and show him that I'd bought it.
Actually, when I got reading it, it was fascinating and it was a really good read and something I would recommend anyone who has been in sales for a long time or is new to sales to actually understand how this generation operates and the outcomes that we're looking at, an outcome generation.
So, a really, really interesting read.I could rhyme off a thousand books, but those are the three or four that I would stop at.
Yeah, no, great.I'll drop all those in the show notes.But yeah, there was a bit of a difference.Chris Voss is the author there.He's an FBI negotiator.He also has a podcast, which is a great listener as well.But yeah, awesome book.Jim Paradise.
Yeah, I'd certainly recommend it.The third one I haven't read, so I'll certainly take note.
That sounds definitely- Oak Cove Generation, a guy called Paul Henderson.And just while we're at it, there is a fourth, which is a friend recommended to me a couple of years ago.And it's sell the way you buy.And it's a really interesting read.
And really, it really makes you think about how you buy, and then reframes that into how you sell.Yeah.
Yeah.I think with the recruitment, sales, marketing, I think that is a mindset that
It's often hard too, because you're so into what you're doing and what your role is, but actually just flip the script and think about, okay, what's the person on the other side of the table?What's their process?
What's their pain points in this journey?So absolutely. Awesome.Well, yeah, a lot of great takeaways there.Mindful of time, Nick.Let's get the cool down.Let's wrap up.Yeah, just a few closing questions.
If you could kind of point to what's one thing that really excites you about this industry, staffing, recruiting, the agency market going forward the next kind of six or 12 months?
What excites me, I am hopeful, and the messaging seems to be fairly consistent now, where I was very, excuse me, sorry this little dry cough will go away, excuse me, the last 12-18 months has been a very mixed bag of some people doing very well, some people feeling the pain, and you know, it's not been consistent.
Whereas I feel the consistency is starting to align where people are hopeful of next year.People are hopeful in December, January moving forward.People are feeling things are more positive.And that excites me.That excites me.
And a big market again where everyone's winning, everyone's helping prop up the economy and do good things.
And that really excites me because when the recruitment and staffing industry is doing well, it's actually one of the most exciting places to be.
Because we're such a social persona in this industry, you see a lot of social positivity coming through that.A lot more meet-ups, a lot more people in the city.I'm excited about that.
Yeah, yeah.Now, it's that positiveness and energy that rubs off to each other, right?And I'm sure, like, Recruitment Agents Expo in Birmingham in the UK later this year.Well, not later, it's October, it's not far away now.
I'm sure we'll feel that buzz.Totally.All right, so any questions I should have asked you, Nick, or any sort of key takeaways from today that you'd like to kind of share with the audience?
So key takeaways for me is eat the frog and do the hard things, self-learn, self-develop and do that early.
It is be highly considerate of what you're actually trying to achieve in the project that you're about to undertake as a buyer when you buy tech and keep that at the forefront of your mind every single meeting that you have with every vendor so you don't get taken down the path of excitement on
something that you actually don't care about or don't need at the end of the day.And a third takeaway for the day would be that you should absolutely buy what I sell.
At the very least, give Nicky Cole contact and have a chat. Again, like, you know, be able to really pick your brains.And yeah, I'm sure as the agency owner, I would have, you know, a thousand questions and insights to gain from you.
So finally, Nick, where can people reach out to you?How do they get in touch?
We have a big sales team across the UK, across Asia, Australia.So get in touch with me.I'm on LinkedIn.I am obnoxiously on everyone's timeline.I've really embraced LinkedIn as a brand builder.So find me on LinkedIn.
I think there's only one other man called Nick Beecroft.He's an old man who's far more accomplished than I am.But you should be able to differentiate as when you see our photo. So search me on LinkedIn, you'll find me.
If not, nick.beecroft at theaccessgroup.com and I can loop in one of our product specialists across our front, middle and back office solutions for recruiters.So for clarity, what that means is we have
We have ATS CRM technology, we have automation technology, LinkedIn RPA technology, we have the most powerful website technology for recruiters as well, we have chatbot technology, we have highly complex time interpretation and pay and bill solutions.
which basically means that regardless of whether you're a single user or you are 10,000 staff, you can enter into the recruitment operating system that we offer at any level and we can scale with you as a vendor.
So regardless of the tech you're looking for and your process, you should get in touch because we can typically offer you a best in class, best in breed solution owned by one person.
Well said, very well said. I will drop the links to your LinkedIn in the show notes for everyone to connect and reach out.Nick, thank you so much for being a guest on The Staffing Ring.It's been immense.
I'm sure the audience has got a ton of value from your insights and some of those spicy takes as well.So yeah, thank you again. Thanks for having us.Cheers.Thanks, Jason.Speak to you soon.Great.All right, everyone, that's a wrap.
Thank you for listening to The Stifling Ring, and we look forward to joining you on our next episode.
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