In this interview segment, Speaker B explains how they handled daily operations during the peak of their recruitment business in 2021, when billing and team size were at their highest. They describe a fast‑paced environment focused on filling jobs for key clients, extensive client meetings, and intensive team check‑ins. To sustain performance, they emphasized hiring experienced, motivated recruiters who are on an upward career trajectory, valuing good values and industry potential. By placing these hires in a supportive environment, they could develop them into specialists, delegate responsibilities, and grant autonomy, creating a self‑managing team. The discussion also touches on setting boundaries, maintaining reputation, and ensuring time is used effectively while scaling the organization.
Chapters
How the hell did you go about just managing your day at the height of things, maybe compared to when you were just like maybe a bit more all over the place? And like, what did your day plan look like on that when you're like 16, 6.5?
Yeah, it's a really good question. I'd love to have a really good answer to this.
Just give us what— yeah, just what a typical day would look like.
Yeah, absolutely. I, I guess at that point it's probably very resourcing heavy.
Okay.
Because we kind of had like— we'd got to a point where we'd won the clients that we needed to win. Yeah, yeah. So it's very much just 100 miles an hour trying to kind of like fill the jobs. There was a lot of kind of meetings with clients discussing like, right, like this demand or like this project coming up. I guess at my peak of billing was the time I had like the biggest team from management perspective.
Right, okay.
So I guess 2021 is when I had my kind of best book, but that's when we kind of grew the team and I was managing the most people. So a lot of, I guess, was like checking in with the team, making sure that everyone had—
but how did you manage that with all that? That's what a lot of people struggle with. Yeah, like did you set boundaries with the team? Did you like, like how did you go about making sure all your time didn't get— obviously it should hopefully benefit you and everyone else involved in the long term, but you're responsible for that. And like you said, you clearly take your reputation seriously. How did you manage that whilst also growing and managing the team time-wise?
I want to say lucky, but I guess we've done it time and time again. But whenever we interview people, we try and get people on the upward trajectory of their careers.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's quite hard to know who is an SR2 person, quite hard to define it. But I think we've done a really good job of hiring people. Most of them have been experienced, experience, yeah, but that are like motivated, that want to do well, and they're like kind of good humans, they've got kind of like good values and stuff. So I think hiring people that have got experience, putting them into this environment, kind of showing them what's possible, showing them standard, like, yeah, getting them to become like an industry specialist, and then I guess like kind of delegating responsibilities to people and empowering them.
And obviously with it, if you're getting them on the upward trajectory, they, they probably value autonomy quite a lot, don't they?
Yeah, absolutely. And they're super motivated, they want to do well. But I think we just kept delegating and empowering people and kind of giving them responsibility. So it's not about me at all, it's about everyone else, and everyone else is kind of like manage their own stuff. And also I'll check in and kind of help and sitting on calls and meetings and stuff, but you kind of want to get to a point whereby you almost don't need to be there and the team's like actually kind of managing itself. And if someone's having a tricky call, someone's going to jump in and be like, actually, this is how we do things, or this, we should do this.
