Case Study: Recruiting To Sell The Business

“When I started working at i2, Provide was already working for the company and successfully recruiting. I was hired to grow the engineering organisation into something more professional looking – in other words, to take it from a team of software engineers to a saleable business that was larger and more fit for purpose.

We needed to increase our technical headcount significantly for our new product development team and were looking for skilled software developers – skills that we didn’t already have – and Stuart and the Provide team were instrumental in helping us find those hard-to-find developers, testers and documenters.

We didn’t need box tickers. Good cultural fit is essential. We needed a recruiter who would work with us to understand what we were trying to achieve. Stuart was able to spend time with me and others in the business to figure out what we needed and put together a solid programme.

Stuart would come in and talk through what we wanted as a business, and then drill down to the specific individuals, which made such a difference. He gave me confidence that, because he knew our business so well, he could sell our business honestly and positively to the candidate. As the first point of contact, this is very important to how we are perceived. It also helps, very early on, to identify the right people for our culture.

Provide is very good at getting hold of the brief and putting forward suitable candidates – their pre-skills testing is very effective.

As well as filtering the CVs and carrying out the first stage interviews, Provide was able to help us by giving advice on how to find the skills we needed locally. It was incredibly useful to have that insight and broad view of the market with a clear direction of where to look.

Over that year, we built the team up and found a buyer for the business, which we sold a lot quicker than expected. The buyer saw a functioning organisation where the due diligence had been done. It looked like a company worth investing in. Provide played a big role in getting us to that point.

Provide offers a very personal service. You can see they care about the long-term relationship. It means that, over time, Provide had become intuitive to our needs and knew which people would suit our business, even if we didn’t have a specific vacancy to fill.

Personally, as a hiring manager in a section of the business looking to expand very quickly, I rely on the support from a good recruitment partner. If you are embarking on something really big, as we were, having a trusted recruiter by your side is very important.”