The challenges of regional recruitment

There are five offices under my remit, London, Birmingham, Weybridge, Reading and Bristol.

Weybridge has a team of three and covers the South East which spans from Kent, through Sussex and into Surrey and Hampshire. The Reading team cover Hampshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and our Bristol office covers the South West. Our London and Birmingham teams are very city-centric and do not venture outside of their location. Although there is a large coverage from these offices, we try to keep local as it helps to manage candidates that are often found having to service key clients in these locations. Our biggest two competitors have 31 and 24 offices covering the South, so you can imagine the extent of our opportunity in this space.

Good customer service is probably the most important thing to Page Personnel Human Resources. We find that looking after a bigger area means we can align a consultant to a candidate and they’ll stay with us throughout their job search. There’s nothing more frustrating from a candidate’s perspective than having multiple consultants helping them from one firm; the internal workings of an agency are not important to a candidate, they want their job search to be as smooth as possible. If you’re prepared to go outside the town you live nearest to i.e. from Maidenhead to Slough, engaging and registering twice is not an ideal use of valuable job seeking time. Also, we want to partner with clients long-term, so a regional contact has responsibility for recruiting across a number of sites and will also generally have one point of contact. Having said that, we’ll grow naturally and probably add a few more locations to our capability, it’s nice to be in the position of opening more due to demand.

As I’ve pointed out above, we always try to build long-term relationships with our audience but this is also one of the challenges. Being stretched for resources at the ends of a region can mean that some relationships are difficult to maintain as the roles aren’t always local. However, we’re very efficient at this and ensure candidates still get a ‘local’ feel from us.

We are a new discipline and my job is to establish this brand as a key part in Page Personnel’s future. We don’t have any direct competitors, i.e. agencies that operate in the junior HR market, so we want to cement ourselves in this space by ensuring that everyone, be it clients, candidates or internal contacts see us as an important ally moving forward.

To find out more about how our regional recruitment capabilities can help your job search or hiring process, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.