Staffing your company well is just about the most important thing you need in order to be successful.
The classic question asked of us when we present ourselves as a recruitment agency is …. “Why?” Pretty much everyone at a senior level has done their share of recruitment, from placing some sort of advertising through interviewing, another round of interviewing, and finally offer, negotiation and hopefully acceptance. Easy!
Well, as you’ll all know, it’s never quite as simple as that. It’s vastly time consuming to simply set up all of the above and while delegation is all very well, sometimes it takes longer to talk through how to get the job done than it does to do it yourself, especially for smaller companies. It can save an awful lot of time and hassle to use a specialist recruitment company – and we believe that the best way to do that is to turn to a specialist recruitment company that is focused purely on one market sector.
Copy of the original published article header in Gambling Insider, written by: Steven Jackson
At GRS that’s exclusively what we do – help betting, gaming and casino companies source talent for management positions. The key is really all about experience in the field - you wouldn’t hire someone who’s never worked in casino gaming to be a surveillance manager for example, and similarly our experience in the betting and gaming sector, and recruitment within that sector, is unparalleled. I’ve been recruiting for this sector for the last 13 years, and my partner has worked in operations for 20 years in various areas of the field – so between us whatever job you’re trying to fill, we’ve either recruited for it or actually carried out the role before, sometimes both.
The process is designed to keep things as simple as possible from your end. Firstly we’ll review your job spec, to get an idea of what the role entails – there aren’t many that are new to us, but of course different employers want slightly different things from an employee, and the job spec is just the start of our trying to understand exactly what it is that the employer is really trying to achieve. It will sometimes take a series of meetings, calls and / or questions to get full understanding of the best approach to take to fill the gap.
Once we have a firm grip of what the client wants, we’ll go out to market to find candidates. This is where industry knowledge and experience comes in – there’s pretty much no one who works in the gaming industry that isn’t either known to us directly, or within one degree of separation (we know someone who knows them). Hunting through the market to find the perfect fit can be a lot of hard work, or it can be a question of knowing who’s looking to move on, and might be up for any given role.
From here we’ll generally present a shortlist, and have the client determine who they’d like to interview, whether it be in person or over Skype or similar to begin with. Once we have some workable dates for the client, we take care of everything, letting the candidates know the time and place and ensuring they’re ready for the big day.
That’s not the end of the story, mind, as after the first interview we’ll take care of organizing the next round and letting unsuccessful candidates know that they won’t be progressed, ideally with feedback from the client to help them in future. From there on we will also deal with the successful candidate in terms of package, with of course the client’s interests, first and foremost, at heart.
The key element in all of this for us as an agency is making sure the client is happy and well informed throughout the process – recruitment is a repeat business for us, and a one shot commission doesn’t go very far in an industry like gaming. We’re delighted with our feedback so far, with repeat business from most of our clients who need multiple positions filled – for example we’ve just placed our 7th person within one of the UK’s major casino operators, and that’s just in the last 18 months. We’re also taking on the recruitment of the senior team for the new GGV Large casino in Leeds too, a really exciting project, about which you can read more elsewhere in this issue.
Simply put, anyone can have a stab at recruitment for their own company, and pretty much anyone can take a shot at running a recruitment company in some form. We are proud of our track record and would point to an ever growing client list to back up our claim that going to an experienced, laser-focused industry specialist is the way to get the best possible result.
Steven can be reached at steven@grs-recruit.com