Friday. If you follow me on twitter (@MDangerfield) then you will have spotted some of my tweets moaning about my journey.  In the main I am a great traveller, every week I am on a train or plane somewhere and have become ‘acclimatised’ to travel, airports and the waiting room at Milton Keynes station.

That said, Manchester to Birmingham via Crewe and the random stations in between is a novelty even for me, making me realise just how spoilt I have been on virgin pendolino’s ploughing up and down the country.  Don’t get me wrong I have had some of the worst travel experiences, some of the dullest but occasionally funny too.  Today was not one of those, just slow and grim.

I am heading to Birmingham to meet two interesting people.  This is part of my philosophy that I cannot do this on my own and collaboration with recruitment industry types sometimes brings me down with the focus on transaction and CV.  It is also good to spend time with people that I respect, get on with and give that kick up the arse I need creatively sometimes, too easy to get stuck in the can’t do this/can’t afford this/that won’t work rut.

First meeting was with Kathryn Lennon (@TTBookClub).  We first met when we both worked for different parts of Severn Trent Plc.  Kathryn was marketing manager for a non-regulated division looking at the delivery of services as diverse as telecoms, building roads and managing schools.  I was the then head of sales for Severn Trent’s IT division looking to take the inherent IT infrastructure we had and repackaging it as a commercial proposition.  When we met we both knew that Plc wage slavery was not always going to be our thing.

Zoom forward a number of years and Kathryn is a successful business author (buy her book here), an acknowledged marketing business leader and all round good egg.  Our meeting was specifically to look at an idea she has been working on for a while – it’s at the final stages and is very very exciting.  If it works. When it works it will be a great business model and whilst outside of recruitment will offer me the chance to contribute content and even sell some of my more packageable services.   As these things work we also talked about another one of her ideas and both got to the same point that it would be a great offering for the recruitment industry.  No plugs here, it’s an idea and I need to talk to a techie called Jamie to see how long/much/cost etc. it will take to make it a reality.  But without that meeting it wouldn’t even be on the back of the envelope.

Next up Lyndsey Michaels (@lyndseymichaels) joined us for some more strange coffee.  Lyndsey is part graphics whizz, part marketer, definite social media expert.  I have a lot of time for Lyndsey, she has always been there when I need some help and I know that if we could pull our collective fingers out we would make a fortune but also do some real good (Both Lyndsey and Katherine are true social entrepreneurs willing to put their money where their mouth is).  Lyndsey and Kathryn hadn’t met before but it was like they knew each other for years and with my cynical input we had a really useful and fun afternoon putting the world to rights but also coming up with some great ideas.

This experience reminded me why I do what I do for a living. I love the delivery element of recruitement, the engagement, the conversation and the self satisfaction that I am doing a good job, helping organisations to grow their businesses by attracting good people.

Over the next few weeks I will be working more with Kathryn and Lyndsey to formulate a better proposition than the one I have today.

Recruitment business owners spend time doing this kind of thing but how many front line recruiters in or out of house get the chance to think differently, spend time with people from adjacent industries.  Not too many I bet.  Traditional recruiters and traditional recruitment organisations deliver traditional results and their days are numbered.

The challenge is whether I can develop the alternative that can scale, deliver true value to clients and support the skill set our industry has created.

The week of daily posts has made me think about our industry.  Not the crap stuff that’s a given.  But the new stuff.  As an industry we lead the way in social media.  We understand the concept of engagement yet undo all that good by chasing the money and getting x number of candidates into a client who is barely engaged.

If we could pull it all together we would be seen as leading the global economy.  How many organisations get to be good without good people?

But can we pull it off?

That, as ever, is up to you.

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about mckinley|resource® and Martin Dangerfield

mckinley|resource® is an innovative recruitment practice providing executive search, recruitment, talent advisory and project resourcing services.  Delivering full UK and European coverage, we focus on identifying and engaging talented individuals within the IT services, IT outsourcing, management consultancy and technology marketplaces.

We can deploy for a day, a week, a month or longer.  This means we can support your recruitment peaks, deliver spot advice or have an on going engagement.  All we need is a desk in your office and a brief that we have agreed and signed up to. We won’t ask you to sign any long term contracts either.  We have already proven to be a great success for our clients and are happy to work completely autonomous or alongside your current HR team/recruitment agency.  Not only can we help free up the process to help find great new people but help you to look after the great people you already have.

To learn more about our approach give Martin Dangerfield (email, linkedin, twitter) a call on +44161.955.3647.