A short blog to sing the praises of a Manchester recruitment company.
This may be a first, after all, most people have a negative view of this trade, which is often characterised by a sausage factory approach to candidates and roles and I have been on the end of more badly targeted emails from recruiters than I care to remember.
Orchard is a cut above and today celebrates 20 years in the business of working with employers and candidates in the field of digital communications.
I had the pleasure of being based in their offices for about six months in 2010 when I was setting up BrandAlert.
You can only really get an idea of how good someone is at their job when you have seen them cope with the bad days as well as the good ones. Recruitment is a binary business. Did you like the candidate – yes/no? Did you like the employer – yes/no?.
The simple maths of recruitment is that for every pool of candidates for a role, all but one will be rejected, so the result for the Orchard team was dealing with a constant flow of deflated individuals and sometimes employers who didn’t really know what they wanted in the first place and were angry that the team hadn’t second guessed.
That isn’t easy to deal with day in day out and the temptation to get someone off the phone or out of your inbox must be ever-present.
What I heard instead was a patient, committed approach from people who actually gave a damn about what was at stake, someone’s career and wanted the best result for both parties in the conversation.
This way of working might explain why they are celebrating 20 years in business.
The culture of Orchard isn’t for the faint hearted, Mike Carter who runs the show treads a fine line between running a tight ship where the numbers must be hit each quarter and making life fun for a young team.
He does so with a bracing mixture of rapid, honest communication and a style of office chat which Malcolm Tucker would admire.
So to Mike, Matt, Andy, Rick, Di and the rest of the team – happy birthday, I learnt a lot from working alongside you.