Product details

This software is to accompany the case. This case examines the management of people who work in the recruitment industry from the perspective of entrepreneur Chris Bartlett, founder of GCS Recruitment Specialists. He describes recruitment consultancy as ‘people selling people to people’. The job has many parallels with sales roles, although with the specific challenges associated with selling the services of another human being, and identifying a match between what that person can offer and the needs of the client organisation. GCS had been built up as a contingency recruitment business, underpinned by a focused approach to identifying, attracting and motivating highly capable recruitment consultants with the skills to succeed in this particular business model. The case explores the decision by GCS to branch into lower-margin preferred supplier relationships with clients, asking students to evaluate whether current approaches to selecting and rewarding consultants are likely to be as effective for the agency in the lower-margin business. The case is intended to develop insight into how HR and people management decisions are developed from, and provide the foundation for, a staffing agency’s business proposition. This insight builds up over five sessions, which could be run as weekly tutorials, or as a series of hour long classes delivered over one day. Accompanying the case are seven video clips, featuring Chris Bartlett talking about the agency and its people, with footage from one of the GCS offices. Undergraduate, Masters and MBA students are the target audience.