Building A Team For America

Originally Posted on LinkedIn - May 2015

The prospect of opening a new office GCS, in a new continent, is both intimidating and exciting. 

One thing in which I am very fortunate is that I will not be going alone. Part of our strategy has always been to have 3-5 people to start with, and ensuring that these people share my drive, energy and passion for recruitment and success was essential. I wanted people working with me in New York to be capable of really contributing to the business, not just in terms of placements, but also with ideas and enthusiasm.

I've known Alistair Pickering for almost 8 years now. We went to Bournemouth University together and have kept in touch continually since graduation. Knowing Ally as well as I do, I realised he would work hard to guarantee himself success in the same way that I had set out to do for myself at GCS. He's been in recruitment now for several years and reached a level where he is capable of building up great relationships with all levels of seniority and transferring those relationships into placements.

This move represents a huge opportunity for both of us and we are at the right point in our lives to take full advantage of it. It would be easy to hire a large team of recruitment rookies with the lure of New York's glamour but there is no value in acquiring quantity in place of quality. Given the time and cost involved in acquiring the relevant work visas to become a legal ‘Englishman in New York’, we want to make sure we're only doing this for the very best prospects.

At GCS we have a track record of training great inexperienced graduates or school leavers into top billing consultants and managers, therefore we wanted to bring in some graduates with the short and long term view of them joining our New York office, whether they are there from the first day or join us in 6 months. By following the same training process for all employees, we are able to ensure consistency across the business and make sure the same high-standard is maintained across all of our offices.

When starting a new business, finding the individual company culture can take time but the benefit of opening a new office for an existing business is that the culture is already in place. Certainly the particular flavour, so to speak, of the New York office will be something organic that will evolve over time as we grow but having our core values and work ethic in line with the other highly successful GCS offices allows us to have a clear identity from day one. Our NYC office will, no doubt, be similar to our Dublin office in that it will transition the way of working that has proved successful in the UK into a new country whilst taking into account the subtle cultural differences that bring out the best in our employees.