10 Year Anniversary
It’s been 10 years now, on the 1st December 2014, that Crescent Consulting was created. Andrew and I sat in our newly painted office (that was the crucial team fit test of painting the walls together!) on our $1 chairs and tables bought on Trade Me, looking at each other, wondering what we have done, going out on our own and starting a Recruitment business! We had no idea what an amazing ride it would be. We both had worked successfully in recruitment and management roles for many years, it made sense to use our personal brands and our commercial nous to continue the success.
Having learned from previous employers’ lack of closeness to their markets, we wanted to be different. It was important to us to truly partner with our clients and candidates to ensure we understand their needs, not only seeing them as a one-off transaction of hiring and developing talents but also remaining alongside them as business needs were changing.
Today, 10 years later, we look back at a rocky ride. Initially our focus was on building a new client base that appreciated our partnership approach and many of our old clients moved with us, which was great and gave us the confidence to take on our first staff members. In building our market we focused on clients who were here to stay, wanted us to continue partnering with them and who wanted to deal with ‘the personal brand’ of a recruiter, knowing they provide high quality service because of who they are.
We had some awesome team members who helped us to establish a reputation of providing top quality outcomes for talent needs, across a range of different specialization areas including Civil & Construction management, Sales and Marketing, Accounting and Finance, HR and of course, ICT and Engineering. Some of these areas came about because of the Consultant’s previous experience in these areas but we also saw some market gaps and took advantage when the time was right.
During the initial years of our operation the recruitment industry faced some interesting challenges: The rapid revolution of digital tools in the process of talent search and skills matching, the impact of social media on hiring practices, the constant changes in many talent areas that suddenly needed digital skills as opposed to the old-fashioned manual processes.
Online job platforms became a thing, LinkedIn became a main identifier of people’s profiles. One of our clients suggested: “If you are not on LinkedIn, you don’t exist in the commercial world”.
Companies had to adapt their hiring strategies to account for online branding and candidate engagement, a new trend was born: how is your Employer branding?
Then came the overall skill shortage with talents moving off-shore, the only way to get them back was to track them via LinkedIn, shoulder tap them and make NZ an attractive place to return to. The skills shortage was particularly pronounced in areas such as ICT, Engineering, Health Care. Our diversification across other areas of industries and talent pools meant that we were balancing ups and downs all the time, making sure we touch as many career seekers as possible to either help them transition to a new career or utilize their existing skills and experience in new domains by upskilling. Much of our time was spent on career consulting as opposed to ‘hiring’ as we wanted to secure our future talent pool. This also included presenting at local High Schools to school leavers and introducing them to the ‘real life’ jobs out there. We also continued working with local Universities and their career coaches to ensure skills taught were actually in line with what the industry needed, particularly in technical areas such as programming languages, databases and tools.
It was in the earlier years of our operation that we created interest groups such as the “Christchurch Women in Tech”, “Christchurch FinTech”, “Women in Manufacturing” and a little later the “Christchurch Exec Women in Tech” meetup groups. The purpose of all these groups was to provide local tech professionals with the opportunity to network and mingle with like-minded but also provide organisations with the opportunity to present and host events where they can show case their knowledge and employer brand. The ‘Christchurch Women in Tech’ Group is now a focal networking opportunity for a membership pool of 1600 women of whom many come along every month to local events, celebrating soon 10 years since inauguration.
Although, being Christchurch based, Crescent Consulting worked across other regions within NZ without setting up remote offices, always wanting to be seen as ‘Canterbury born and breed’ without diluting our focus. We are working with clients and candidates across NZ comfortably via VC technology and although there is nothing like a personal encounter, physical distance to our markets did not seem to make a difference to our success. Quite the opposite. Unlike many of our competitors who had to learn the hard way at great expense, we stuck to our knitting and our local office, mainly serving the Canterbury community.
Then 2020 came and Covid19 hit New Zealand, we had experienced recruitment during the Canterbury Earthquake but this was another level. Clients, candidates, staff and their families, everyone was isolating, at home, unable to focus on work, was there actually any work?
It is still a blur to this day how we survived those years but we did, again staying small and lean had given us the backbone to conquer these hard days.
New ways of working were born, ‘work from home’, ‘hybrid’ and ‘remote’ working was a ‘thing’ which was to everyone’s surprise working really well until…
Companies found that, after an initial spike in productivity of individuals working from home, there was a disconnect within the teams, people were making decisions that were not conducive to best practice and team work went down the drain. With family members working and studying from home, the distractions in the home were soon slowing people down and some individuals whose only social contacts are at work, felt lonely and withdrew even further. A new HR issue had arisen: How can we get people back into the office now that they have tasted the good thing. Many employers are still scratching their heads.
Forwarding 4 years it seems the market has slowly moved to a new normal, inflation is easing, people are happy to work in the office, realizing they need to feed all those lonely cafes to keep them surviving in these crazy times. Then we see a new phenomenon of recruitment companies merging just to be attractive for large overseas buyers to come in and put their spin on what used to be a local flavor. Others are closing offices and leaving staff, contractors and clients high and dry just before Christmas!
There are now only a couple of truly Canterbury owned and operated recruiters left and we are proud to be one of them. Here to stay, partnering with our clients, knowing the market and all the individuals who we assisted in their careers, over 10 years in Crescent but also prior to that, in our individual recruiter careers spanning over 30 years.
Well done Crescent and Happy Birthday!!!
Our success would have not been possible without the support of all our clients, candidates and suppliers.
We would like to thank you from the bottom of our heart!