As we celebrate twenty years of Next Move Executive Search, I can’t help but think about how long that actually is. I keep putting it into perspective. It was six years before the iPhone launch, and Tony Blair was PM. Twenty years is long enough for a child to grow to adulthood and their parents to almost pay off the mortgage on a house. That’s incredible, but it’s the follow-on thought that really gets me. Next Move has been helping clients and candidates for so long that we could soon be helping the children of our first candidates on their own career path. Honestly, I think we have every right to be proud of that.
When we started back in 2001, the intention was to create an executive placement service that would focus on placing mid to senior level talent where they were needed in the IT industry. Looking back on what the IT industry meant at the time shows just how much has changed. Back then, it was very London centric and mostly hardware/software-based. It’s astonishing to think that many of the clients we work with now are major businesses working in areas that were in their infancy at the turn of the century. Even more amazing is that we now recruit for job roles that didn’t even exist when we first opened our doors.
Our clients, of course, are one of the reasons for our success. Over the years, we have seen the businesses we help grow and thrive, sometimes in the most challenging conditions.
As founder of Next Move, I have always been able to really see what clients want and understand their needs, so we have also been lucky enough to also become part of the story for many new businesses as our contacts moved to new challenges.
The biggest changes
One of our biggest changes has been the growth of internal talent acquisition teams. These have become a significant part of our business, particularly within our larger clients. In all honesty, developing a working model to service our clients effectively with this kind of acquisition team is a real challenge. However, we have never backed away from a challenge, and we re-forged our approach to overcome any issues presented by the change. We are now able to work in full committed partnerships with all of our clients, becoming their partner of choice for their mid-level to senior-level requirements. In fact, this process has helped our business evolve and develop so significantly over the past two years that we now work with global clients as well and recently delivered on assignments in New York and Munich.
The partnership model is exciting, innovative, and it is fuelling our expansion. It is producing amazing results, and we are now able to offer an agile but well-developed service that helps us place candidates for our client base on a global scale.
Speaking of candidates, naturally, they are also a very big part of our story, and twenty years on, we are still helping some amazing talent develop their perfect career path. One of the nicest things about being in recruitment is helping a candidate reach their goal in the workplace. There is no better feeling than ending a long working day knowing you have made a real difference to a candidate’s life by placing them in the perfect job.
Finally, a thank you
Finally, there is a thank you to be made. Since day one, when the business took that first tentative step towards becoming the success it is today, the team at Next Move have been amazing. We were granted Investor in people status in 2006, and that means a great deal to us. The people who give their best every day to make this business what it is are the ones who deserve the biggest recognition.
It may be a bit of a cliché, but that old saying is true, a journey of 1000 miles does begin with a single step. In this case, that first step opened a path to twenty years of growth and development.