3Search in 2020 - what's on the agenda?!

With another year now officially ‘in the books’, we start 2020 going into our seventh, yes, seventh year of trading!

It sounds a little cheesy but it really does only feel like yesterday that Joe, Charlie and I would bicker about which one of our front rooms to work from and which music station would be on the TV while we started 3Search.

It certainly does feel like we’ve come a long way since those days and the overriding feeling going into 2020 is that we are growing up!

The most obvious sign of our graduation from primary school to secondary school is around our people. We’ve written some pretty ambitious budgets for 2020 around our headcount growth but have worked hard in 2019 to get the foundations in place. Hiring our first marketing hire, Mike Thompsett, and bringing our finance function in house, being led by Louise Whitton will make sure we have the engine room in place to enable us to really kick on.

Talking of hiring plans, the work that Amelia Sordell will be doing in 2020 to build the 3Search employer brand is really exciting. To have someone focused on our employee engagement, both internally and externally will hopefully help us continue to stand apart from competitors and give us the edge to really kick on to the next level.

As is always the way at this time of the year, we’ve had a bit more time to pause, reflect and reset our goals and objectives for the next 12 months. Overall, we’ve had a great year, with our revenue up over 50% year on year. Building on that, we think we have a real opportunity to continue our growth in our core areas of focus, which is marketing and digital recruitment.

This year we’ve continued to beat our competition and help a range of clients by combining our deep sector knowledge with continued investment in the latest technology and don’t see that changing as we go into 2020.

Given we have traditionally been a London-centric business, we are often asked about expanding into different parts of the UK and where is next on the agenda. Off the back of some great success in 2019 in the USA, we are going to make significant investment into growing our business stateside.

Within recruitment circles it’s one of the worst kept secrets that British firms seem to do well in the States and we’ve found that our methodology and intensity to generating top talent has gone down really well with American clients. It’s something I’ve personally loved being involved in growing 3Search in the States and it’s an area I’m going to be focusing on in 2020. Watch this space…

We learnt a huge amount in 2019, arguably more than in any other year since we started 3Search, and one of the key themes for us in 2020 is around driving a high-performance culture internally.

We have always set ourselves extremely high standards and 2020 represents a real shift in mind set for us. The work over the last few years has meant we’ve shifted from a plucky underdog to an established agency with a pretty impressive client list (even if I don’t say so myself…)

With that in mind, we now need to focus on driving exceptional results for our clients and offering the best possible customer service to both our clients and candidates and going to the next gear.

With all that being said, we’ve been doing this for long enough now to remember what got us this far.

Continuing to recognising success and top performance within the business will remain at the heart of everything we do. It’s been fantastic and hugely rewarding to see Jasmin Eastwood, Florence Crabtree, Jaemien Serrano and James Weighell be promoted in 2019 and being frank, we are going to fall well short of our goals over the next few years if we don’t continue to promote our talent and move people through the business into bigger jobs.

We’ve had another great ‘intake’ of graduates in 2019 with Lucy Matthews, Harry Wilkinson Roberts, Oli Gittings and Gabriella Chapman hitting the ground running and will be kicking off our 2020 graduate campaign in the coming weeks.

It goes without saying, we owe a huge thank you to everyone who has worked with us, for us and believed in us since starting 3Search and 2020 is another huge challenge that we are really excited to get started on.

There is so much we are looking to achieve over the coming years and we are only just getting started!