An example of true TEAM work

Friday 24th March saw the 5th annual TEAM conference. Wagstaff Recruitment joined TEAM in 2011, our business was less than 12 months old when a fellow recruiter introduced me to the TEAM concept and I am not ashamed to admit that initially I was taken aback and was very sceptical. Let me explain:

The TEAM network is a network of independent recruiters throughout the UK who work together sharing best practice, service providers, training and …… business, and that final point was where my sceptical side lay. I had been in recruitment for 17 years before establishing my own business in 2010 and for those 17 years I had never shared anything with another agency never mind sharing business with my competitors. The recruitment sector can be known as a transactional and highly competitive sector and I was being asked to attend my regional meeting and sit with other recruitment owners including one recruitment business which was a huge competitor to me. At first I felt unsettled and with any relationship it took time to build trust, establish a dialogue with individuals who shared my values and delivered the same recruitment service to the same standard as I did, but slowly and steadily I did just that. I continued to attend the meetings, have conversations, understand the concept and start to share business. The TEAM sharing concept expanded the offering to our clients, we had customers who had always trusted us to recruit their engineers and manufacturing professionals and we were now confident to offer the wider service of recruiting marketing professionals, financial specialists, IT guru’s and various other positions. We could offer our clients the unique opportunity to work with their trusted agency but now with access to specialists in other disciplines. We really could now offer a complete recruitment solution to our clients.

So TEAM’s 5th annual conference was full of learning, development, sharing and celebrating.

• 350 agencies sat together in various conference rooms sharing great training workshops.
• We heard from our service providers on the latest employment law updates & regulation changes.
• We celebrated the amount of business we had shared, heard great stories of agencies being able to support their customers and deliver them the best possible opportunities.
• We raised fabulous amounts of money for Comic Relief by our suppliers offering great raffle prizes – our very own Steve Lapham came away with a new TV, a weekend away and a cuddly toy – just like the generation game!!

But most importantly, the most important result of the TEAM conference was more trusted relationships were built, competitor agencies sat together, learnt together and built relationships that would enable us all to deliver an excellent recruitment service to our individual customers.

Reflecting on TEAM I realise that our business is at its most successful when we are working with people we trust. We can deliver so much more when we work collaboratively, not just with other agencies but also with each other within Wagstaff, with the schools we help support on careers events, with our customers to deliver and exceed their expectations.

So, thank you Simon Garbett for coming up with the TEAM concept 23 years ago when 5 of you sat in a room and decided to work together, you have created an amazing network which now sits at over 500 recruitment businesses. Jackie Bennett and Liz Longman have developed an incredible head office team and put on an amazing conference.