Hishem AzzouzHost Of Recruitment Mentors Podcast

The Positives and Negatives of Working with SME's

Name: The Positives and Negatives of Working with SME's
Uploaded: 2023-12-06T17:00:40+00:00
Duration: 52 s
Channel: Hishem Azzouz
Description: In this monologue, a tech staffing professional discusses the advantages and drawbacks of partnering with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). He…

6 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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In this monologue, a tech staffing professional discusses the advantages and drawbacks of partnering with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). He highlights that SMEs can quickly open doors to numerous developer vacancies—sometimes dozens at a time—making them valuable sources of placements during market booms. However, he warns that this reliance is fragile because SME hiring is tightly linked to market confidence and funding; when capital dries up, recruiters become overly exposed. Reflecting on the previous year’s boom, he admits his team ignored diversification of their client portfolio, focusing instead on celebrating placements and posting on LinkedIn. He suggests that a more diversified client base would have mitigated the impact of the subsequent funding slowdown.

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And the SMEs are great because you can open the door with them. You know, they've got 50 developer vacancies, whatever it may be. I'm certainly not filling them, but it's— and you can ride those coattails and it's really, really good in the boom time. But so much of that SME tech market is reliant on market confidence and funding and so on. So when that dries up, you can find yourself a little bit more exposed. And I think we found that this year when the market was going great last year, just ignored it. You didn't care where the deals were coming from. You're just doing, doing placements, celebrating. Posting it on LinkedIn and like everyone does, not me, but everyone else. And, you know, if I'd have sat there last year and gone, let's look at the diversification of our client portfolio, everyone laughed, but we should have looked at the diversification. Because when that funding dries up in that sort of space, we were a little bit more exposed than we would have liked to have been.