Finding opportunity in adversity
The rigours of the recession have caused many businesses to take a long, hard look at themselves. Warren Partners is no exception, and managing director Joëlle Warren believes the company has emerged in strong shape to deliver an even better service to clients and candidates.
"It has certainly been a tough couple of years for businesses in every sector. At Warren Partners, the first signs of the recession started with the collapse of Northern Rock in August 2007," says Joëlle. "We anticipated that the banking collapses would have a serious impact not only on the FTSE 100 and 250 companies we work with, but also on mutual businesses and privately-owned clients, so we focused on how best we could respond.
"The initial signals of a slowdown were that clients started to make interim rather than permanent appointments, while candidates widened their scope to consider interim or consultancy roles. We have seen significant demand for finance and HR roles during the recession, an indication that these are regarded as key functions which support corporate restructuring and cost-cutting."
When the downturn kicked in, the management team at Warren Partners took the apparently counter-intuitive decision to go ahead and invest in the business and its people. The return on this investment has included increased client satisfaction scores, a faster time to shortlist and high levels of assignment completions.
"As part of our investment in people, training and systems, we broke our processes down and costed each step to ensure it was competitively priced. We also offered clients the maximum flexibility across a broad menu of services."
One of the key issues for Joëlle was to live up to the company's core value of treating others as we want to be treated. "For any business living through a recession, it's vital to keep everyone on board, maintain good morale and to be as open as possible," she says. "Inevitably, there are difficult decisions to be made but the important thing is to keep the lines of communication with colleagues across the company open. It has certainly worked for us; employee satisfaction levels are up over the last two years and in a recent staff survey 100% of our people said Warren Partners is a great place to work."
Another key investment has been in spending time with clients and candidates as a trusted adviser and source of support. "In tough times, clients often want to discuss their strategic options with a sounding board outside the company. We've shared our clients' thinking and used our own experience to add value through advising on organisational structure and how to attract and retain good people. Clients have capitalised on our understanding of leadership, performance assessment and ability to share best practice across our client base.
"Since we don't have the overheads of the multi-national consultancies, we can also give time to candidates whom we may not initially be looking to place. Career counselling, moral support and independent advice have helped many individuals coping with the very difficult market for senior level jobs. Even if we didn't find their next role, many of them keep in touch and often return as clients!"
Joëlle is seeing signs of the much-heralded 'green shoots', with companies positioning themselves for recovery and high quality candidates for operational and marketing roles much in demand. Clients are also increasingly using the Warren Partners talent mapping service to assist with succession planning and developing their talent pipeline.
"We're following our own advice and actively looking to expand our team by taking on people who share our values and can grow with the business," she added. "For us, staying true to our core values has been fundamental to riding out the recession. By treating our staff, clients and candidates as we ourselves would like to be treated, in bad times as well as good, we have emerged better and stronger as a business."
On 4 October 2007, the MEN quoted Warren Partners Director, Andrew Tallents, in an article about workplace politics.
While assertiveness and strength of character are often perceived as essential attributes to climbing the career ladder and becoming a leader, Andrew said that some of the best leaders in industry are those with a low-key approach.
He explained: "They set out a clear vision and set boundaries for roles and responsibilities within the team. They do not seek the limelight but use their interpersonal skills to get the best out of their people, coaching them and encouraging them to stretch themselves to higher levels of competence.
"They are sometimes the unsung heroes of business today."
Autumn 2009
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