Eighteen years of
recruiting carefully.
Rachel Marlow and James Finch met at Hays in the late nineties, where they spent twelve years between them running large recruitment teams across the South East. By 2008 they had both come to the same view — that the volume model they had been working in could not produce the kind of recruitment they wanted to do.
They founded Marlow & Finch from a serviced office in Reading in the autumn of 2008 — an interesting time to start a recruitment business — with the conviction that a small, careful firm could compete with the volume model on quality. It took three years to feel certain that conviction was right. Eighteen years later it remains the way we work.
The deliberate decisions
We have made some deliberate choices along the way. We have never bought a candidate database. We have never sponsored a job board. We have never hired more consultants than the partner team can directly mentor. We have never opened an office that was not justified by client demand in that geography first.
The result is a firm that has grown more slowly than the volume model would have allowed and that is more profitable per consultant than is typical. Both of those things matter; the second is what funds the time the consultants spend with each candidate.
Where we are now
Six consultants across three offices. Five sectors. Roughly 400 placements a year. 87% repeat client rate. The longest-tenured client relationships are now seventeen years old; the youngest are six weeks. We expect to grow modestly from here — perhaps to eight or nine consultants and a fourth office — but we have no ambition to be a national firm and no plans to take outside investment.
If you would like to work with us — as a candidate, a client, or someone considering joining the team — we would be happy to hear from you.
