It was twenty years ago today ...

...well, give or take a few weeks

Don, Caroline, Sheila, Guy, Liz and Paul put down their lyric sheets to explain the evolution of ‘Sergeant’ BLT’s recruitment philosophy.

According to Mr Lennon and Mr McCartney, it was in 1947 that Sergeant Pepper founded his ‘Lonely Hearts Club Band’ as celebrated by eponymous record released in 1967 – a milestone in the nation’s musical heritage.

Recruitment consultants BLT were founded in 1987, so in the tradition of maintaining the same 20-year distance, we are now celebrating that milestone in the nation’s Management Consultancy, Tax, HR and Company Secretarial recruitment heritage.

When we began, our aim was to provide a unique recruitment service to clients. First, we were one of the few agencies to provide a specialised recruitment service in each of our markets. And secondly we wanted to set up a firm that offered an ethical and high quality approach to recruitment. We wanted to be experts in our fields and, 20 years on, we are proud to have achieved this goal.

The brand evolved around the personalities of the main directors and much of the work came in via recommendation. Little has changed; our forte then was in developing long-term relationships and this still exists today, with the people we placed 20 years ago now being our clients. We have often followed them throughout their careers – a quick glance at the existing partner populations and the key players in the HR, Management Consultancy, CoSec and Tax markets illustrates that many started life as one of our placements!

Still thinking creatively

BLT has always sought to find creative, effective ways of uniting great people with great jobs. From Mike Beament’s interview on Radio Four for the ‘World at One’ about the exodus of staff from the Inland Revenue, through our monthly BLTmail round ups, to the launch of our new BLT Blog we are constantly exploring new channels of engagement.

What's changed?

Has the humble tax specialist changed over the years? Not really, although within the profession, the emphasis on marketing and relationship building has resulted in the existence of (and need for) more well-rounded ‘all singing, all dancing’ business types. Simultaneously, your archetypal in-house tax professional needs to be highly commercial and visible within the business – tax is no longer confined to the backroom! That said, there will always be a place for technicians who are ideas driven and tax
has become no less complicated over the years

The CoSec market has developed significantly over 20 years. Once a largely unrecognised and mis-understood profession of academically-minded individuals offering ‘backroom’ corporate administration services, subsumed within legal or accounting departments, it is now a high profile discipline led by commercially-focussed experts working pro-actively and creatively to add real value to Board-level decision-making. Much the same could be said for HR, which has steadily climbed the value chain, whilst the Management Consultancy market has grown exponentially.

Gone are the days when our database consisted of index cards in a shoebox. Advances in technology and e-mail have changed the way we communicate and the pace at which we work. CV’s can be submitted at the touch of a button, and the internet has helped to streamline recruitment processes. But at BLT we still adhere to our key values of building relationships and providing an ethical service. In our view, there is still no substitute for picking up the phone.

The International Angle

One of the greatest advances has been the international explosion. We regularly work on assignments in Asia/Pacific, the US, western, central and eastern Europe and the Far East. It’s getting to the stage where if you name a country – we will have had involvement there – although the Eskimos have yet to benefit from our services!

Throughout all these changes and advancements, BLT are proud to have remained the consultancy of choice for our clients and candidates in the worlds of direct and indirect tax, CoSec, management consultancy and HR, and will continue abiding by our ethos of providing ethical, efficient and effective recruitment solutions for all.

Above all, we enjoy what we do and will continue to do so. Again, like Sergeant Pepper, ‘Sergeant BLT’ would like to say ‘you’re such a lovely audience, we’d like to take you home with us’, but we don’t think there’s room. So, let’s just say - here’s to the next 20 years!