Seven Years & Resisting The Itch

Happy Birthday to us

On 31^st July 2015 a new company was incorporated with Companies House.  That company was Curtis Recruitment Limited and seven years later, through good times and bad, highs and lows and a global pandemic for good measure, we are still here providing our loyal, and very much appreciated client base with [hopefully] top notch candidates, many of which, become fantastic employees.

Debbie Curtis opened the doors of Curtis Recruitment in 2015 and Paul Phipps (that’s me) joined in 2016 and together with several partners agencies we have become a successful team, and much of that success can quite reasonably be attributed to Debbie’s 36 years  of recruitment experience.  (It may be 37 years – accurate records don’t go back that far!  Only joking Debbie.)  She is sometimes referred to ‘the Barney Rubble of recruitment’ although Betty Rubble would be more appropriate.

Experience is worth its weight in gold

She does feel that she is “getting quite long in the tooth” but experience comes with age, and as a fine wine improves over time (usually), Debbie’s in-depth knowledge and experience has become finely honed and resilient to ride the often-tumultuous waves of the recruitment process and the industry, which is sometimes extremely fickle and nuanced.

After seven years of trading, the agency prides itself on providing a professional, one to one service to clients and candidates alike, taking time to get to know what type of role a candidate is looking for, and the skills, experience and personality that the clients need for their teams.

Playing to our strengths

When Debbie opened the doors of Curtis Recruitment, she chose to play to her strength, which is accountancy recruitment, having worked within this specialism for much of her time in recruitment.  There have been times that we have considered diversifying, indeed, at the start of the Covid pandemic, we were advised by a business ‘guru’ that we may not survive and that we needed to go out to other markets.

Luckily, after due consideration, we decided against this course of action and maintained our niche position in the accountancy practice sector and although the pandemic and the ongoing acute candidate shortage has given cause for concern, we are content that we made the right decision.

But we can’t take all the credit

We do, on occasion, recruit outside of practice, which is usually when a practice client recommends us to their clients for finance roles, and we have had multiple successes, most notably, recently recruiting a Financial Controller, with the assistance of a partner agency that focusses upon industry finance roles.

As we prepare to indulge in a little self-congratulatory celebration on our seventh birthday, giving ourselves a pat on the back for surviving another year (there may be gluten free cake) we are looking ahead to the next twelve months trading, aiming to continue to provide high calibre candidates to our clients.

Trying not to sound too much like an awards acceptance speech …

We would like to take this opportunity to give heartfelt thanks to everyone that has worked with us, clients, candidates and partner agencies, as well as service providers.

This year we have changed our CRM database moving over to JobAdder, which was a massive undertaking, and being slightly on the mature side and not amazingly technical, learning a new (and quite different) system has been challenging.  That said, we are now getting to grips with it.

Also, we have just renewed our Odro contract, which to be honest, we haven’t used nearly enough.  Making videos is scary, and whilst Debbie has, somewhat reluctantly put her face out there, I have a great face for radio and have left it to her!  If Debbie has her way, you will be seeing my radio-friendly face on videos soon.  I apologise in advance.

There are a whole host of service providers that make the running of our business possible including website hosting and marketing support from Green Umbrella, IT support from ITSA, accountancy services courtesy of Fern & Co, recruitment networking and support via TEAM and job board advertising through Candidate Source.

As already mentioned, we do partner with a select few other agencies on a split fee basis and this year we have successfully placed candidates in roles in conjunction with Cripps Recruitment and Plumstead Consulting.

And finally …

And then there’s Beau, the loyal office dog.  Her IT skills and resourcing ability certainly needs some attention; however, she has proved to be an invaluable team member, providing dribbling, snoozing, snoring and trip hazard services, along with the occasional bad odour, which she is quick to blame on us.

So, it’s Happy Seventh Birthday to us and we look forward to working with you in the future.