In this interview, Hishem Azzouz talks with a senior recruiting leader (Speaker B) about the essential elements they look for when hiring entry‑level recruiters. They outline a clear candidate persona: individuals often raised around wealth but not necessarily affluent themselves, motivated by a desire to provide for others, prove themselves, and acquire status symbols. The conversation highlights non‑negotiable traits such as relentless drive, an obsessive focus on excellence, strong communication, and coachability. Speaker B stresses the importance of first analysing the profiles of current high‑performers within the organization to define the hiring blueprint. Company values—specifically a focus on "opportunity" and "excellence"—must be crystal‑clear and reflected in the hiring criteria. Transparency about the role’s demanding workload, long hours, and KPI intensity is presented as a selling point, with an honest balance of upside (career acceleration, compensation) and downside (hard work, limited flexibility). The interview also touches on lessons learned from softer hiring approaches, reinforcing the need for a consistent, high‑performance culture across brands.
Chapters
So let's get into it then. What are, and it might vary, you might tell me it might vary on the different brands that you have in the group, or it may not, what are the core elements that you assess for? What are the non-negotiables that you look for in these people then? What have you sort of landed on?
Yeah, okay, so we've got a really clear, I suppose, person type, so, We've looked at the people who've been successful in our business and there's a background that's pretty prevalent. And in a nutshell, it's somebody that has very likely not grown up with money but has grown up probably surrounded by it. So potentially family had it or like members of the family outside of their immediate family had it or friends from school had it or they went to university and met a load of rich kids from London, which is my experience. Personally. And money plays quite an interesting role in their lives and in their psyches. And so there's some combination of they want to earn to provide for people. In some cases, they want to earn to prove to people from, you know, their family or their kind of like, you know, their hometown that it's, you know, something's possible. And, you know, you've got the usual drivers, like they want to buy nice shit, like nice watches and cars and all that sort of stuff. But I think really nailing the person that you're looking for is so, so, so important. So drive is, yes, that's a huge thing. But I think a big thing for us as well is it kind of comes down to, I probably call it like an obsessive streak. So somebody who is incredibly focused on being the best person and professional that they can be. And when they talk about their future achievements, because bear in mind, we're talking primarily about, you know, early 20s, you know, men and women, they look at the future with a sense of, I suppose it's like a sense of their own kind of destiny, which is a pretty strange word to use, to be honest, but they kind of really want to prove something to themselves or prove something to other people. And they're kind of on a path, I suppose. And so we really kind of dig around motives, drivers, background, and all that sort of stuff. And then you've got the normal things like communication skills and yeah, coachability and all of those things. But really, I think if I was to summarize it, it's about the person. It's really about understanding the sort of person that works in our environment and then trying to identify those people in 25-minute conversations, which can be tricky.
[Speaker] So I want to go into that with you, but just to take a step back for a second, Would you say if I'm trying to get better at hiring entry-level talent and I haven't really got a good understanding of like what makes a good hire, that that's the first thing I need to do in terms of looking at my own business, look at my own people? It sounds like that sort of helped you really form an idea of like, this is the type of person that succeeds in our environment. I think that's something maybe that can be overlooked. Yeah. And they sometimes people don't actually do that initial work of like, actually, let's, let's actually look around us, what is it that actually has resulted in XYZ person succeeding here? And actually really thinking about that, speaking to them, understanding it. It sounds like you did quite a bit of that work to really understand that. And then you've, from that, drawn like these are the parts that matter.
Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, people talk a lot about like company values, business values, all this sort of stuff. And it can be, you know, corporate, gobbledygook, can't it? You know, like how seriously do companies, some companies take their values? I think we take ours very seriously. And that's not to say that we've got them plastered on the wall or anything. But certainly amongst, I suppose, the senior leadership team, and when it comes to our hiring profile, we're really, really clear on the sorts of people that we want. But I think fundamentally that comes from you as a leader and the people in your leadership team. And you've got to know what you're about. And what I mean by that is, you know, our business is totally, I suppose, optimized for opportunity and excellence, really. They're the two things that we, so we want people who are going to come into our business and shoot for the stars, like that, just in a very simple way. But we also want people who are going to come in and be the best or try to be the best. And what that means is that, I suppose, the environment is pretty, uncompromising. So, you know, there's a lot of work from home in recruitment. There's a lot of, not to get into that as a topic necessarily, but recruitment as an industry, and maybe we can talk about this, seems to be softening a little bit. And I understand why, you know, it's pretty punishing. And certainly if you're in your, you know, late 20s, 30s, 40s, being in the office 5 days a week, working 10, 11-hour days, it's not for the faint-hearted. And it doesn't, you know, work so well with certain commitments outside of, outside of work. But I think for the sort of person that we hire and the opportunity that we put on the table, there's a kind of, there's an expectation that whoever joins the business goes all in on the opportunity. And so I guess the advice would be, if that's what we're looking for, be really, really clear about what you're about and what the offer is. So if your business is effectively offering somebody something, What is that offer? And then, you know, what is the upside? But then be honest about the downside. You know, I do say to people in interview processes, like, it's not easy to work here. And I'm, yeah, candid about it. More often than not, it's kind of a selling point though, because I think, you know, you know this, but certainly when we got into recruitment, you would get the sunshine and rainbows, 100 grand a year, you know, Ferrari by the time you're 25. And, you know, that's not what we say. But I think just being very forthright with people is actually, yeah, a big sell.
Did you learn this by going too soft yourself and then reverting back, or have you always been this way? Because I've seen this a lot over the last— I'm sure you've seen it even more in the different brands, but a good example of this would be there's a lot of founders that I spoke to over the last 6-12 months who you would have seen them maybe saying, come work here, we're not a KPI-heavy environment, these types of bits.
Yeah.
And then they've had to go back on that because it just hasn't worked out, and they maybe lent too much into what they thought they should be versus what they wanted to be. And I mean that.
And, and you know what, mate, that's so important. And what I mean, so it's so important, there's too many people, um, trying to placate or please the crowd. That, you know, they think that candidates, whether they're trainees or experienced, young, old, or whatever, don't want KPIs anymore. So we're going to drop KPIs. They want work from home. So we're going to do loads of work from home. And there's a kind of, there's what's so unappealing, I think, in an organization or a leader is like somebody like a sense of identity. Like this is what we're about. This is why we're here. And this is what you're going to get if you join our business. Having clarity around those things is so important. And to your point, flip-flopping between different setups and policies and all this sort of stuff, it's a road to nowhere. It doesn't work. Yes, you have to adapt and evolve, but you've really got to have a strong sense of what is the business at its core. And unless you can articulate that to people at interview, unless you can stand by that through, let's be honest, good times and bad,
