Read: Recruitment role model’s mission for change

Rt Hon Justine Greening talks to Pertemps Network Group Chair Carmen Watson about the recruitment empire’s journey and its efforts to make a lasting difference in changing times. 

Despite being one of the UK’s largest recruitment firms, Pertemps retains the family ethos it started out with in 1961.

It was then that Connie Watts opened up her business above a dress shop in Birmingham, with £500 borrowed from her husband. In time her son, Tim, took on the mantle to oversee the company’s growth and, as Lifetime President, still has an active interest in the success of the beneficiaries of the Employee Benefit Trust that he set up.

 The business now employs just under 2,000 people directly with another 36,000 managed and payrolled for clients. Its consultants place up to 12,000 people in permanent positions each year.

This has been achieved while maintaining a focus on impact and purpose, says Chair Carmen Watson. She spoke to This is Purpose about the business and the changing dynamics of working life.

JG: Tell us about Pertemps’ family ethos and why it matters to the business 

CW: It’s very much embedded. Connie Watts had a really strong sense of community and family. It was instilled in people right from the get-go. We want the people we recruit to have personal values aligned to our business vision.  You can train for skill, but you can’t change people. Over the years we’ve become our own community. We call it a family, which we are in terms of community spirit, striving for common goals and serving the wider community. 

You joined the business over 40 years ago. How did your career progress from there? 

 When I joined, there were only two branches, in Birmingham and Wolverhampton. It genuinely was a little family company then. I never set my sights out to work in recruitment, but I left school at 16 and went to secretarial college. The climate was very different then and girls saw their careers as a trajectory from receptionist to administrator and office manager, or into a typing pool and you’d really made it when you became a secretary. In those days, typing was a real skill as there were no computers. I walked into the local Pertemps and they found me four jobs. I took the one that represented the best challenge. I took it because the interviewer had said: “I’d love to offer you the job but I’m not sure you’re going to fit in here.”

It was an all-male environment [at] a heavy manufacturing engineering company making towing brackets for cars. What the MD taught me was that it doesn’t matter what you’re selling, the service you provide and the way you treat your customers is paramount. I was there for a couple of years and then I asked Pertemps for a chat about a career change and they offered me a job within the business as a secretary – again in an all-male environment in the technical division. Before I knew it, I’d fallen into successfully putting people in front of people and into jobs. 

And your career blossomed as the company also blossomed? 

I started as a secretary and at the age of 24 I was running a branch operation. I saw nine of my competitors out of the town doing what we do well, and everything was coming up roses, with lots of established clients. Then we hit the 1980s and the recession came. I went from lovely conversations and positive and supportive mentoring of people into work to spending my life coaching and counselling people who’d lost their jobs. There wasn’t much opportunity to offer to people. I felt great empathy for breadwinners of the home having to not just deal with their own personal disappointment but also feeling that they’d let their families down. Knowing that the economy is cyclical, we had to use that time to build really strong relationships, staying in touch with businesses and supporting them and holding onto our own teams. 

Eventually the market started to turn, we were back in a boom time, it was around that time that Tim, our now-lifetime president, came to see me and said: “Anybody can manage in boom time but to hold onto those key relationships through difficult times is worthy of a board post.” So, at 30, I was invited to join the board as commercial director. In 2000, I was invited to become MD and I took up the chair’s post in 2021. Those basic values and beliefs that were instilled from our founder have absolutely carried through to this current day. 

How has the company been able to achieve such strong growth while maintaining these values?  

 Our culture is one of promoting people to look for new opportunities and to go for growth. We have an internal term – the mushroom effect – where, as you are successful, supporting your staff along the way, you are always encouraged to replace yourself. Look for the next sector to break into. Look for who you can merge with or acquire. As you are going up the rung of the ladder, so too are you bringing your people up. So, if you can widen your region, you are giving opportunities to people that are supporting you to have that successful business. That has worked really well for us, keeping the knowledge, skill and loyalty within the business while also creating those new opportunities to bring younger people into the firm. We say that the most important person in the organisation is the one that joins us today. They are bringing in fresh perspectives and the reality of what is going on in the big wide world. We absolutely embrace that. 

Are you seeing purpose becoming an increasingly important factor in recruitment processes? 

 Yes, and there is a really strong business case for levelling up. Today there are plenty of opportunities, but organisations are really struggling to fill them. We live in extraordinary times, because of Brexit, climate change and the pandemic. What we’re seeing is a real sea-change in how potential employees view their future. It has changed their perspective on life, how they want to work, the type of roles they want to do – and the types of organisations they want to join. People want to work more flexibly, with more work/life balance and they appreciate that family is really important to them. People want to know more about the company they are joining and see evidence that they have purpose. They really want to know what that organisation is doing to help solve challenges in the community. They want to know before they join what is in it for them – and that the organisation is on a journey and making strides to impact positively for the good of the future. 

How can businesses adapt to this? 

 Organisations need to recognise now, more than ever, that it’s important to do things differently. As a recruitment company we have all the standard legislation and a whole raft of policies and procedures on equality and so on. The real shifting of the dial, however, comes when the organisation is able to look at all those things through a different lens. Look on a practical level at some of the small things you can do to have an impact. For example, when we’re going through our recruitment process, of course it has to be fair, but I often say “would you give a pair of right-handed scissors to a left-handed person and expect them to perform in the same way?” We are more diverse than ever now, and sometimes people need help, with forms for example. How much of the workforce are we losing through small, practical interventions? There is a major issue with vacancies going unfilled and this labour shortage is not going away anytime soon. The onus is on businesses, and especially recruitment companies, to really start to tackle this problem. Adapting your service and looking at things through a different lens is all about how you reach the widest talent pool and really identify the spark of genius that is in all of those people.