The Resilient Recruiter Disrupting the Recruitment Industry: Radically Rethinking Our Client Relationships, with Steven Street, Ep # 51
If you’re tired of being treated as a “vendor” and want to forge true partnerships with your clients, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
Many recruiters would like to shift from a transactional business model to a more consultative, value added one. The challenge is that both the recruiter and the client are constrained by old patterns -- outdated ways of thinking and doing things. They recognize their recruitment process is incredibly inefficient but they don’t know how else to do it.
Listen in to my fascinating interview with Steven Street about how he’s disrupting the ways recruitment services are traditionally sold and delivered and creating joint-ventures with client companies to solve their talent acquisition challenges.
Since 2015, Steven has been the CEO of Cubed Talent Management - incorporating Cubed Recruitment, Indigo Healthcare Recruitment, and Cubed Academy. Cubed Talent Management brings a new approach to strategic talent management for the engineering, FMCG, electronics, manufacturing and supply chain sectors. Steven started his recruiting career over 25 years ago.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [3:00] Steven shared his humble beginnings
- [10:18] What is Steven’s “person-to-person” principle?
- [20:30] How to establish a true partnership with your clients
- [29:05] An interesting discussion about repositioning in the recruitment sector
- [32:10] How to make ‘in-house’ an opportunity instead of a threat
- [42:30] Learn more about the joint-venture and gain-share business models
- [55:21] “Be an individual” - how this advice relevant to help your recruitment business
Person-to-Person Principle
How much value do you put in professionally building real relationships with stakeholders? Steven believes that collaboration, strategic alliances, and joint ventures with clients can be an effective strategy. Explaining his guiding principles when doing business, he explained: “I’ve got high standards as an individual, and one of my many guiding principles, what I recognized very early on, was not to be a function to function, a recruiter to the hirer, supplier to customer, nor be brand to brand. I link up to whoever it might be, the client, company, but for it to be person to person. Steven to Mark. Steven to whoever it might be.”
As he further expounded, when you strip away the person’s function and the person’s position, the core of that is a person were in all likelihood, “you have shared values, world views, commonality, family, what you think, what you believe, all of that.”
Steven’s authentic relationship with clients resulted in having partners for 20 to 25 years and some of them starting as customers to ending as business partners.
Radically Repositioning the Recruitment Sector
Steven sees the current sector as being somewhat ‘undignified’ in a sense and generally having a need to mature. When recruiters are cannibalizing over each other as they go out for opportunities and leaving clients somewhere in that melee, it can be perceived as something really unprofessional and self-centered. Instead of disrupting the way recruiters work using technology or other fundamentals, Steven pointed out that very valid inputs and some of them are below:
- Treat your client with respect and dignity - get in their shoes and feel what it is like in the receiving end of the experience.
- Be collaborative and open-minded.
- In line with the above, Steve shared a very good example on how to explain to clients more advantageous options versus just going ‘in-house.’
- Partnering with clients and the game-share model.
- Rethinking our relationship with clients.
To summarize, Steven stated “That’s what I mean about disrupting how we do things. It’s really nothing about the technology. It’s really nothing about the fundamentals in recruitment. It’s really about rethinking our relationship with our clients.”
Martin House Children's Hospice
Hear about this amazing charity work and how this inspires Steven to have a sense of community and keeping himself grounded. You may refer to the link below to know more about this organization and how you can help out.
Steven Street Bio and Contact Info
Got into recruitment on the ground floor - fortuitously, with Larry Gould's business Link Up in June 1993 - followed by a successful stint with Pertemps (which would have been my forever career - had I not launched Relay Recruitment in 1996; subsequently sold in 2011. Now working with an amazing handpicked team at Cubed Talent Management.
As stated on my LI profile: a human Swiss Army knife, problem solver, acquirer and nurturer of World Class talent, therapist, wine drinker, believer in a brighter future and, most importantly- lover of dogs. 🐶 Yorkshire born and bred - dragged up in Bradford.
A vociferous enemy of mediocrity, shabby service, average aspiration, poor standards and negativity.
My own personal mission is to launch a community enterprise supporting young people with Autism, Aspergers and other additional needs into dignified internships, work placements, work experience and ultimately, quality career pathways.
- Steven on LinkedIn
- Cubed Talent Management website link
- Cubed Resourcing website link
- Cubed Resourcing on Facebook
People and Resources Mentioned
- Martin House - “Hospice care for children and young people” website link
- Darren Ledger on LinkedIn
- Plamen Ivanoff on LinkedIn
- Natasha Makhijani on LinkedIn
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- Mark on LinkedIn
- Mark on Twitter: @MarkWhitby
- Mark on Facebook
- Mark on Instagram: @RecruitmentCoach