Recruiting Alchemy with Andy Simpson

Jim Ryan left Ireland at 17, knocked on doors selling cable TV, and walked into MSB in Bromley in 1997 with no recruitment experience. Eighteen years on from starting ERSG on the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, he runs a staffing group with £185 million in turnover, around £28 million in gross profit and offices from Seattle to Taiwan, and it has stayed independent without private equity. Andy Simpson sits down with Jim, CEO of ERSG, to talk about how a business plan he now calls naive became ...

David Bloxham has spent 30 years in recruitment, almost all of it at GCS, the business he joined in 1996 and now leads as CEO. Andy Simpson asks how he got there, and what it cost along the way. David talks through coming back to GCS just as the 2008 credit crunch wiped out half his contractors, and why he says you can always cut your cloth when the market turns. He explains how an MBO nearly fell through before Engage came in as backer, why GCS has never dual desked and now runs at around 95...

Andy Simpson is joined by Rory Gaston, Group CEO and co-founder of Saragossa, the buy-side staffing and technology solutions business he built with Jimmy Lloyd after spinning out of Red Rock in 2015. Rory explains why success-fee contingent staffing creates what he calls perverse economics, why Saragossa almost never competes against other firms for the same role, and how the business grew from a niche hedge fund staffing boutique into a three-part technology solutions group spanning staffing...

Andy Simpson is joined by Bradley Lewington, CEO and founder of Generative and former CEO of Spencer Ogden, the energy and infrastructure recruiter he scaled to over 500 people before a private equity backed MBO closed on 20 February 2020, three weeks before COVID hit. Brad explains why the business had to become one a private equity firm actually wanted to buy, what it was like to sign the deal and watch the plan disappear within four weeks, and why he chose to build an AI focused staffing b...

Is AI really going to replace recruiters, or will it simply expose the ones who were never adding value in the first place? In this episode of Recruiting Alchemy, Andy Simpson sits down with Craig Whiting, Founder of RecOS , to unpack one of the biggest shifts the recruitment industry has ever faced. Craig shares how his business has evolved over the last 18 months, why he's fully embraced AI, and what it means for recruiters, software engineers and businesses trying to stay ahead. The conv...