NEWS

We’re ch-ch-ch-changing. A Horizon update…

Published: 4th June 2019 | Author: Kate Howes

So, lovely reader, as I write this, Gemma and me (Kate) are heading into our 9th (aarrgh!) year in business as Horizon Search & Selection Ltd. My goodness, it’s been tough, but it’s also been fun and rewarding and brilliant too. The main thing it has been, more than anything else is…. a BIG learning curve and a reminder that change is inevitable.

When we started out we planned and hoped that one day we’d have 10, maybe even 20 staff eventually. We never set out to conquer the world, we just wanted to do it our way, do it well and have a neat, happy, healthy little business. The size of our team has fluctuated over the years but Gemma and I have always been here through the wonderful highs and the scarier lows. So when we found ourselves waving farewell to our Recruitment Assistant Ruth earlier this year, this left us at a bit of a crossroads. It was the first time since we opened that it had been just me and Gemma which was pretty odd but also liberating too. We’d never even considered having a two-person team; it just hadn’t been on our radar but all of a sudden, it just seemed to make perfect sense. It was a bit of a ‘eureka’ moment!

Onwards,   upwards   and   down   the   garden…

So for the foreseeable future, Horizon will be just Gemma and Kate. We love working together and have such great chemistry, but also we both feel strongly about offering a really great service. Our new ‘keeping it simple’ approach will allow us to do what we do best without our time being spent on managing our workforce and all of the things time-consuming that go with that. Now, we can be totally focused on offering our awesome recruitment expertise, skills and experience to our clients and candidates.

This means we’re on the move again! There was no reason to stay in our huge office – we are rattling around like peas, and although the dogs love it, it just doesn’t make sense of us to be here anymore. So, we’re going to do what many forward-thinking, quite sensible smaller firms do and…work from home. Woohoo! We’re building ourselves a new garden office to operate from but will be based centrally in Bury St Edmunds so will still be around to meet our clients and candidates.

Mixing   it   up   a   bit…

Now we’re super-svelte-streamlined and much more resilient to changes in our market and the economy in general. We have a renewed focus for what we hope to achieve out of our business, we are SO EXCITED for our future as a dynamic duo. Our service will change, but for the better. We’ll have more time to spend on working with our clients, lower operating costs which means more flexibility with our rates and special deals, and best of all…we’re scrapping the traditional recruitment agency model and are going to work collaboratively; pairing up and both working on recruiting for the same roles.

As Horizon is our business, we’ve been able to be bold with our decisions and have totally scrapped commission and KPIs because we just don’t need them anymore. We work hard for our clients because we really, honestly just LOVE what we do and that feeling of making people happy by finding them great staff, or by helping them into a new job…that means everything to us. Having happy clients and a small, healthy business with a good reputation is worth more to us than a big office with 20 staff and fat commission payments. It’s not the norm for our industry, but we’re OK with that because we’re not exactly the norm either!

 

So, here’s to the future and us just being us.

Gemma & Kate x