I love LinkedIn, not in the love I will have for my first child, but close to it. LinkedIn has revolutionised the recruitment industry. It plays on a very simple emotion, vanity. You may disagree with the vanity suggestion, but if you are on LinkedIn, then you are comfortable with promoting yourself to the world, which is being vain.

Your profile is effectively your CV, it’s a highlight reel of your corporate life, an opportunity for everyone to see what you do and how good you may be.  For companies this is an interesting problem because you know you star performers are constantly visible for all to see and for all to contact.

Recruiters obviously use LinkedIn as a first port of call to head hunt candidates. It allows upfront honesty and assuming that the recruiter is ethical in their approach and respects the persons contact settings (ie, the “open to career opportunities” is highlighted in their contact settings) it is an unobtrusive manner to get in touch. So knowing this is the case, why do companies like their employees being on LinkedIn?

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I have been here since March 3rd 2007 when Dylan first opended its doors as Mash Recruit. We opened them as a new and fairly green agency, we made some good headway through determination and a genuine ambition to create a unique recruitment consultancy. It was untimley that the recession took hold soon after but we were tenacious, dug deep and kept our heads above water, still trying to continue to stick to our ethos of trying to be a bit different but a lot better than the norm.

On Wednesday night last week, donned in a tuxedo with the team, I felt very proud to see us pick up two awards at the MARAs (best recruitment website and highly commended in the medium recruiter category) as well as picking up best small recruitment agency in the NORA awards recently too. It was a sign of how far we have come, it was a just a shame yours truly who was shortlisted for the best recrutiment awards wasn’t victorious, we must have missed the application deadline!

These awards are testament to the sheer hard work of the whole team and wonderful to see it acknowledged. Dylan is a wonderful place to work; there is a great culture, a fantastic team and a genuine pride of who we all work for and the brand that has been created. Next year I hope to go one better and scoop best medium agency of the year… see you on the podium.

We’re super chuffed to announce that we were named Best Small Recruitment Agency at last night’s National Online Recruitment Awards.

Now in its eleventh year the NORA awards celebrate the world of online recruitment and took place last night at Sway in Covent Garden. We were delighted that the hard work and planning that has gone in to making this site seems to be paying off. Rather than trying to communicate micro-messages to individual audiences, we try to communicate to everyone in the same tone, it doesn’t matter if you’re a potential candidate or client because the personality, values and passion of the company is what matters and we hope that shines through. We’d love your thought so please make any comments about what you think

Full disclosure.

We’ve never built a recruitment company before.
We’ve never worked in a recruitment company before.
We’ve never been recruitment consultants.

Phew.  That’s off my chest.  Why is this important?  Well, Phil and I were having a chat over some pizza (Rustica of course, Trentino & Primavera), really good pizza I might add, and it dawned on us that we’ve been slowly walking ourselves in to the role of managing and building a recruitment company, the way we’ve been told.  What’s wrong with that you might ask?  Well, for us, there’s a great deal wrong with that.  You see our goal is not to just build a very profitable recruitment company.  Our goal is to build a brilliant recruitment consultancy that by virtue of the quality of consultants, the originality of engagement, the focus on ‘customer’, the rejection of ‘the way it’s done’ and the unflinching focus on excellence, we become so good, you simply can’t ignore us.

It’s a tall ask and it’s not the easy route to fame and riches, but in our mind, it’s without doubt the most interesting route, the route we think will bring the most challenges and the greatest highs.

So we’ve decided we’re going to do a little less listening and a lot more inventing.  To use tech parlance, we’re going to stop focussing on the ‘Features’ (disciplines/rates/terms) and focus more on ‘Usability’ (ease/experience/speed) and Customer Service (accuracy/access/personality).

There is the normal way to do recruitment and then there’s the way we want to do it.  We’re going to work on the stuff that matters with an ambition to create more value than we capture.

I can’t remember where I heard this so forgive the lack of referencing, ‘make meaning and then you’ll make money’.

Here’s to making meaning and eating more pizza.

If you want to be part of this, let’s have a chat

We’ve recently come across a new social venture that we think could help a lot of marketing professionals develop their careers and make a real difference to a large number of charities in the process. The venture is Pimp My Cause and it offers a new online matching service that enables marketers to connect with the causes they would most like to donate their talent and expertise to.

We loved the look of this project so met up with Pimp My Cause founder, Paul Skinner, and asked him how it can help marketers with a heart:

“Marketers can search and browse the profiles of the causes, as well as read their help wanted ads, selecting an organisation whose mission they feel passionate about and whose needs correspond to their own areas of interest and expertise. They can even team up with other marketers on the platform to form an “open source” marketing department, combining to deliver breakthrough benefits.”

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This is too long for a tweet, so this one’s for you bloggers #trynottosoundlikeaweddingdj

Thanks Suzanne!

“I will most certainly vote for you guys as the best recruitment agency in the world!…You guys do stand apart from the mass of recruitment bollocks out there! (excuse the French).”

Those with similar passionate thoughts about us I urge you to vote for Dylan at the upcoming MARA awards 2011. Go on it will only take a second! http://www.ukmara.co.uk/dylan

Thanks!