Academy set up at recruitment company to welcome employees with no experience

Toro Recruitment in Fareham is expanding its team and CEO Daniel Pope is looking to hire five new people in April.

However, he wants to avoid the traditional route of employing people on the condition that they have a certain amount of experience working in the industry.

Instead, he has set up an academy, so he can hire a batch of recruits and train them to the standard of his company.

He said: ‘We aren’t looking for people that have spent decades working in recruitment, the experience doesn’t matter to us. Out of our current 14 team members only two come from a recruitment background.

‘We want to find people who have values and ethics that align with ours and want to put them through our academy so they can do the job confidently and well while being a good fit for the team. We want people from all walks of life, regardless of background, if their values are correct then they’ll be the right fit for the team.’

Daniel set up the academy in September last year to bring on more staff after the company saw significant growth over the lockdowns.

The training takes place over four weeks and begins with focus on wellbeing, before moving onto an intense fast-track course of theory, practical, problem solving and more to empower the recruits to feel confident in their job.

It is run by five of the current team members with different specialisms, including Daniel.

Daniel said: ‘We’ve seen such great results from running the academy previously, with our new team members making placements within their first month, which is rare in recruitment even with experienced people. It’s brilliant because everyone’s got the same purpose and are marching to the same beat of the drum.

‘The benefit of hiring in groups is that the team feels like they’ve got a support network around them as everyone else is in the same boat. It’s less intimidating and they don’t feel like the “newbie” in the office, which can be daunting. People could come to us from earning the minimum wage and could treble it with a career in recruitment.

‘Recruitment isn’t just sales; it’s not ticking boxes. It’s building relationships with the candidates, finding their motivations and placing them in a role which will help them build a career. It’s extremely rewarding.’

Potential candidates can get in touch with Daniel by emailing [email protected]

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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