The sales floor of multi-award-winning recruiter Morgan Hunt in Covent Garden, London, is packed, buzzing with calls and conversation as consultants and managers mix on the factory floor.

Staff have just returned from a heady night at the Recruiter Awards for Excellence, supported by Thomas International, where the company picked up trophies for Best Public Sector Recruitment Firm, Best Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy and the Gold Grand Prix Award, the event’s highest honour. “We have almost run out of office space,” says Helen Stokes, the company’s managing director, as we walk around the office meeting staff before stumbling across her paper-laden desk.

“It’s a very open environment; we ask consultants ‘what do they want?’ People have access to talk to me and the other directors. We are very aware that the people who are delivering are our consultants and we stand by that.”

And it’s the consultants-based focus that has powered its growth and led the company to its award-winning performance — in particular, the company’s turnover grew to £90m in just seven years, increasing headcount from two to 200.

That growth has helped boost retention, with 85% of the current management team being sourced from rank and file members. “That has offered a huge amount of upward movement. People haven’t reached a ‘glass ceiling’ yet,” says Stokes.

Chris Wimshurst, manager of Morgan Hunt’s further education division, told Recruiter the company’s success meant he was able to achieve a management level position just two years after graduating. “When I joined the team, it was only a two-person desk and now we have a whole division.”

The education team was established in early 2006 and now has over 25 employees dedicated to the sector. With around 500 temps working in the further education market.

Wimshurst attended the awards evening with other specially selected colleagues, such as winners of a month-long sales competition, leading support staff and a number of wildcards who had performed consistently throughout the year.

And today, on a sun-drenched Friday afternoon, there’s champagne being shared among workers, as Stokes drums home the message that these awards and this company are focused on its staff.

Retention has helped build the team’s specialist knowledge, a factor cited by the judges as crucial to winning Best Public Sector Recruitment Firm for the third time.

However, Stokes is far from complacent about the company’s performance after years of competing with the sector’s established players and witnessing a slew of new entrants over the past 18 months.

“If anything it’s helping the market move. We haven’t lost any marketshare, but the competition is tough and well respected by us. We have a strong company and brand, but competitors need to be watched,” she says.

As public sector procurement evolves the company is set to compete in an ever-advancing marketplace and Stokes acknowledges the difficulties in facing companies who have more experience in implementing new products.

In the past, Stokes has attributed the company’s success, in part, to the fact that it launched two years before vendor managed service (VMS) companies, allowing it to build direct relationships with clients.

Looking forward, it’s this emphasis on relationships which will build business. “The future is in sensible supplier relationships. We have put a lot of energy into partnering them [the VMS providers] and we are very close to the companies that run these services.

“Recruitment companies offer similar services, with similar practices. A client will choose to work with a company that evidences itself as a specialist and gives them the confidence that we will be able to engage with their business further.”

The combination of trying to build relationships with clients’ and consultants’ specialists knowledge of their business provided the genesis for a corporate social responsibility programme very early on in the business’s development.

Stokes says she very quickly realised that there was more the company could offer its public and third sector clients, and that staff members’ direct involvement would help them learn about the businesses they serve. “We were in a position of strength to offer more than financial help; we could lend them the people they need to help them improve,” she says.

Katie Wylie, a senior consultant in the supported housing and charity division of Morgan Hunt, described how consultants went into a housing association in West London to help paint the houses of its elderly and disabled clients.

“It was a good opportunity to get to know the housing association and what they do,” she says.

Wimshurst, who supplies staff to the education sector, worked with the pupils of a local school, feeling the benefit of utilising the skills he has learnt on the job.

“We went into a secondary school on the last day of term and did CV writing and interview classes. We had to try and motivate 20 students on the last day of school, which was difficult but it helped that we were young professionals going in who had relevant experience.”

The company also supports several small charities, with which it doesn’t have a direct supplier relationship. Stokes is spending her next CSR project working with educational charity the Outward Bound Trust, cooking for young people over a three-day trip which aims to give disadvantaged people the opportunities to learn about sailing, trekking and camping.

The strategy is firmly entrenched in the company’s staff, with over 67% of staff taking part and the company gleaning a tangible economic benefit.

“It deepens your relationships. We can contribute to their objectives, rather than just being a supplier of staff. If we weren’t able to offer the right recruitment services they aren’t enough to retain a client, but having staff members work inside clients’ organisations has helped build relationships.”

Morgan Hunt’s CSR strategy is one way to enforce this understanding, but only makes up an element of building consultants’ specialist knowledge.

In one example picked out by the judges, the team sourced an outreach/gang intervention worker for the London Borough of Hackney. A consultant managed to find a worker who could both empathise and communicate with hard-to-reach youth groups by approaching someone cited in a youth publication who had set up a charity dedicated to reducing knife crime.

Katrina Hagan, a consultant in Morgan Hunt’s executive and interim management division, told Recruiter her experience working as a nurse helped boost her specialist knowledge. She added that staff in the company could all display detailed knowledge about the markets in which they work.

The future for the company lies in expanding its reputation and specialist knowledge to the private sector, which currently makes up around 10% of its revenue. “Over the next five years, my role as managing director will be driving our main offering [in the public sector] and delivering into the private sector. Recently, we hired a director from a competitor to look at driving a new brand and developing our international offering,”
says Stokes.

The company’s Russian offering is due to be expanded, leveraging the executive search brand which it has had there since 1994 and has recently opened a second office in St Petersburg.

“There’s a learning process to doing business in other countries and it’s incredibly enriching experience. Eight months ago I had never been to Russia,” says Stokes.

The Gold Grand Prix award was chosen by the judges at the end of the adjudication day to recognise the company that had impressed them the most over the whole process. And it was this award that ties together the elements of Morgan Hunt’s offering which has allowed it to excel in the sectors it serves: sector specialism and a focus on staff.

That maxim was embodied by Stokes’ initial reaction to the award: “It is a huge confirmation of what we have been trying to achieve. The only way you can succeed in this business is by having a cracking team. Without that you have nothing, and I surround myself with a team who are as good as, if not better than, me.”