Meet matt
Meet Matt, our Joint Managing Director, who joined Verbatim in 2019. With a strong focus on growth, people, and delivering for clients, Matt plays a key role in shaping the direction of the business.
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Read the interview below to find out more about his journey, approach, and what drives him day to day.
INTERVIEW WITH MATT
1. What did the company look like when you joined?
​I joined Jasmine in April 2019, it was just the 2 of us. My focus was recruiting into the operations and supply chain space within pharma services. We made our first hire in November 2019 when Hinna joined us. Soon after this we moved into our first office which was co-working space.
2. What was it like working in a smaller team during the early days?
Exciting, busy and stressful! Lots of late nights and weekends to get the business up and running. When you are in a start up business, you are wearing multiple hats – we were recruiters, finance, credit control, back office. Whilst we were experienced recruiters, every client that worked with us was taking a bit of a risk so we had to make sure we gave them an amazing experience and delivered great candidates.
3. How has Verbatim changed since you joined—and what do you think has stayed the same?
We have grown to 15 people, moved offices 4 times! And organically grown the team based on the needs of the market and our clients. We have learned a lot along the way, from running and growing a business to the complexities of hiring into different countries and learning the local labour laws. Our internal culture has stayed the same, being service led and not sales driven. we have always been focussed on giving our customers a good experience and ensuring long lasting relationships, rather than going out and trying to onboard lots of new customers.
4. Are there any team traditions or ways of working that have carried through the years?
​As Jasmine was born in the US we have an annual thanksgiving lunch in the office, where everyone brings in a dish! Otherwise, we like celebrating our successes and having fun along the way, this was important to us as we started to grow the business.
5. What’s the biggest challenges you’ve faced in recruitment — and how did you overcome it?
You need resilience and determination to work in recruitment, I always say it is a rollercoaster with many ups and downs, and you have to ready for the ride!
We’ve has some recruitment searches which have taken us 6-9 months to find the successful candidate, in times like this its easy to give up, but that isn’t us.
One of my first managers in recruitment taught me “control the controllables” and this is something we apply everyday.
6. How do you think the recruitment industry has changed since you started?
I started in recruitment in June 2007, fresh out of uni, first job! Back at that time, linkedin was only just starting and wasn’t really used. We would recruit for only companies in post code or county!
Our main source of candidates was using job boards. There weren’t really any small / start up recruitment companies, it was just big corporates.
There was no tech stack – we had a CRM, a login for 2 job boards and would stay late to post out our paper based mailouts.
The industry has completely changed and evolved (for the better!)