The Handshakr Huddle - Season 3: Episode 2 with Neil Martin MD of MBR Partners

In episode 2 of the new series and ahead of the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we talk with the charismatic and incredibly knowledgeable Neil Martin, MD of Talent Acquisition at MBR Partners.  

We discuss his path into the world of tech and telco recruitment, old-school dodgy sales practices, candidate experience when recruiting, and the benefits of offices in an increasingly remote-first world.

I love chatting with Neil and always learn from our discussions.  Enjoy.

Transcript

Handshakr Podcast - Season 3 Ep 2

[00:00:00] Leon Hardwick: Welcome back to the Handshaker Huddle Podcast. This week we have somebody I've known for quite a while. . And I've actually wanted to get him on the part for, for a while as well for two reasons. One, He is squarely based in an environment that I wanted to hear a bit more about and, and learn a bit more about talent acquisition.

[00:00:42] Leon Hardwick: And also I think this chap is probably the most connected person I've ever met. So everybody welcome Neil Martin, the MD of Talent Acquisition at MBR Partners. Neil, 

[00:00:52] Leon Hardwick: thanks for joining us. Really cool to have you on. 

[00:00:55] Neil Martin: Thank you very much, Leon. It's a pleasure. Well I, I, I 

[00:00:58] Leon Hardwick: sort of alluded [00:01:00] to the fact that you're in recruitment and we've known each other for a long time, and, and I do a pre-recorded like intro to, to our guests generally before we release these things, but, In your own words, tell us a little bit about yourself and about your career to date, and then we'll go from there.

[00:01:16] Neil Martin: Okay. Well, I'm gonna go back in time actually. So cuz I, I don't think as, as you said, I, I'm firmly in the world of talent acquisition and recruitment. I, I, I don't think many people wake up, you know, in their early twenties and think, well, I really want to get into recruitment. You just sort of fall into it.

[00:01:36] Neil Martin: So I'll sort of explain. How I fell into it. So so I did an economics degree at the University of Birmingham, and of course all of my friends at the time were, were getting into, you know banking accounting, that sort of thing. And I, I did a few interviews with some, some of the top accountants, and I just could not persuade anyone that I had any passion.

[00:01:59] Neil Martin: Tax. [00:02:00] I just didn't have , you know, one of those things. I just couldn't do it. And so I decided to go along to a a sales sort of assessment day for a company called Preto Law. And this is not a pitch for them, by the way at all, but but they basically take in a group of grads, they get you to stand up and there's about 20 people there and they pick sort of two to three people out of that group to say, After a whole bunch of assessments that these people would be good for sales.

[00:02:30] Neil Martin: And so they picked me as one, as their two to three. And I was think, well, this sounds exciting. And then and by the way, this goes back to sort of 1999 when I didn't have a mobile phone. I didn't you know, I. No, it was completely fresh. And then they placed me in MCI WorldCom, which is this obviously huge telecoms business.

[00:02:49] Neil Martin: And they said, okay, here's your company car, which was a Mercedes. Here's your company mobile phone. I was like, oh my God, there's your laptop. And then we went off to Winslow and did [00:03:00] a whole bunch of sales training and it was like five weeks of intense sales training. And I would love to say that is where I got the, the sort of, Pieces of, of, you know, the, the sales strategy that I still use now, but it was awful.

[00:03:17] Neil Martin: It was absolutely horrific. I mean, it's things like never say the word No problem, because you've said. Problem. Your, your potential client is thinking that, you know, but this is just complete nonsense. I mean, they, they look, don't get me wrong with, there's some brilliant sales training out there. I mean, some of the best salespeople that I've ever met have their background in the old I B M sales training from years ago.

[00:03:43] Neil Martin: But I do think moving forward a lot of that, Gone away and it's a different way of doing things now. But anyway, I ended up working for MCI WorldCom. Anyone that's that's, that's familiar with the telecom space will know that MCI WorldCom is one of the famous fraud cases of [00:04:00] all time . So we went all off to Euro Disney for our sales kickoff.

[00:04:05] Neil Martin: Absolutely amazing. Some of the guys asked some really interesting questions, which are obviously, I think it's Bernie Madoff that had no answers for it at all because people are starting to get a bit suspicious. Anyway, after all this glitz, I got plunked in Milton Keens with this horrific.

[00:04:21] Neil Martin: Patch that had already been done a million times before by lots of other companies. And we were like the second most expensive behind bt. I mean, it wasn't a good pitch. And I just decided, okay, I, I, this is after six months of that, I was like, oh my God, this is, this is not for me. And just 

[00:04:37] Leon Hardwick: say I, I'm imagining like a Glen Gary Glen.

[00:04:41] Leon Hardwick: You know, it takes brass balls to be a salesman type environment. Always be closed like that kind of Oh, 

[00:04:48] Neil Martin: oh my God. Oh my God. It was exactly like that. I mean, there was, I won't say any of the names but I still remember the, the, the, the, the VPs and a lot of these guys have been bought Welcome, [00:05:00] have bought lots of other resell.

[00:05:01] Neil Martin: And it was exactly that type of environment, this sort of Okay. You know? Yeah. And very, very sort of well, it was, it was lacking in sophistication. I mean, we were meant to have a database and in the end they plunked us the yellow pages and said, Hey, get going. You know? And and then, yeah, it, it was really, really like that.

[00:05:19] Neil Martin: And I thought, there's no way I want to do this. So I, I thought, well, I need something where I. Almost go back and sort of build my career up rather than just being prompting at the, the deep end. I mean and so I ended up getting a, a role with, I actually got a few different offers at the time. One one, which, which, which was technical.

[00:05:39] Neil Martin: And, and, and I, I was like, do I really wanna do sort of something really technical? And I said to one of the guys that I was speaking to, I said, actually, I'm quite fancy doing something like what you are doing in terms of. Personal ELE elements and I had accepted a role in East London, which at the time looked nothing like East London does now.[00:06:00] 

[00:06:00] Neil Martin: And it was with Norton Healthcare and I thought, you know what I'm telling them I've got a month's notice and I'll, and I'll look for something else. In that time, I ended up working for a company called Escom in Ailsbury, which is very close to where. You know, well, my family lived, and the reason I picked it is I looked at the car park and there was just all these like super cars there, and I, and, and they said, okay, you're gonna start off on basically no money at all.

[00:06:27] Neil Martin: I mean, it was about 50% pay cuts. And I thought, you know, why not? And so I worked there and I was supporting the, this sort of Vodafone account with all of their rollouts. Of the world. So there's Safari calm, there was Vodafone Hungary, you know, plenty of them. And, and you know, I'd come into this fresh and I was already talking to sort of the CTOs of these businesses and I was like, wow, this is incredible.

[00:06:51] Neil Martin: Again, I was earning no money at all, but I realized how much RF engineers were being paid. And And also sort of Riggs. And I [00:07:00] said, well, what are these people? And they go, well, the, we'd need a line of site person and we need someone to just look from one side of a, a, you know, a, a tower to find, look and see if they can see another tower.

[00:07:10] Neil Martin: And I thought, well that's, how much did we paying these people 350 pounds? I was like, A day. And I was like, okay, well I want to become. I want to become a RF engineer obviously. So when, when the mobile network free first started one of my friends started working for them rather than actually offering my recruitment services, I sent a note to everyone saying, if you're looking for any junior RF engineers, I'm your man and I actually got a call from, from someone saying, Hey what do you know about network dimensioning?

[00:07:43] Neil Martin: And I said, well, it's dimensioning a network. . I obviously no idea at all. So, so, so strangely enough that didn't happen. But, but I put in a lot of calls over that sort of period. It was only a six month period again. Because a guy, as we both [00:08:00] know, Steve Preston, Aircom International, gave me a call and said, Hey, do you fancy coming and working for us?

[00:08:06] Neil Martin: We've got this network planning tool. We'll train you in RF engineering. And so I thought, well, if I could recover, I'd become trained in RF engineer then, then I'll. I'll recruit lots of people globally. That's my way of, of becoming an engineer. So I actually joined Aircom thinking I was gonna become an engineer, and I had, anyway, I, I, I basically played around with this software.

[00:08:28] Neil Martin: There's this, there's this map of Jersey. You plunk your bass stations down and I decided demo. I'm well familiar with that one. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, after. After 15 minutes of plunking my bass stations, I decided actually recruitment is a good option after all, . 

[00:08:48] Leon Hardwick: But I love, I love that story because, you know, you, you, you kind of, you studied something.

[00:08:54] Leon Hardwick: Didn't quite want to get a job in that space cuz it didn't sort of float your boat and you shifted it and you kind of [00:09:00] fell into sales, fell into technical type sales, and then you just carved out this opportunity. You know, through, through networking and talking to people, which, you know, if you think about it, is the fundamentals of selling, right?

[00:09:14] Leon Hardwick: It's kind of finding that problem and finding that space that you know you can fill. So you, you. You become almost the only person in Aircom. That starts selling recruiting and then selling these engineers into, into into opportunities. Right. That, that's kind of You made that your own 

[00:09:33] Neil Martin: Yeah, that's, that's right.

[00:09:34] Neil Martin: We had a sort of a, it was aircom contractor services before that it was actually called New Wave Search, and, and again, we, we kept it separate company. I was doing the v a T return. And the v a t guy came round and said like, okay, he actually thought I'd done it all correctly and it was completely wrong.

[00:09:52] Neil Martin: I mean, obviously it was completely wrong. Again, I was no accountant. It was quite clear that was not my vocation . [00:10:00] So but it was a lot of fun. I mean, we went, when I joined, we had four contractors in the business by the time I left. Any moment in time, we got sort of between five and 600 people. And it was interesting because it, it, we were only able to do that with a tiny team because of the the, the, the, the technology we adopted and.

[00:10:21] Neil Martin: You know, at the time it was sort of basic email lists. I mean we were recruiting the same things over and over again, ultimately in reusing the same teams, moving them elsewhere. But but I very quickly became sort of the, the number one recruiter globally for RF engineers and sort of transmission engineers as well.

[00:10:41] Neil Martin: and so that, that sort of lasted, I think it was five and a half years. I mean, advent International Boughts Aircom International. I don't think they really knew what they'd bought because they certainly didn't know a lot of the revenue was coming from as I suppose sort of bums on seats recruitment as opposed to sort of, you know, real [00:11:00] professional services in terms of delivery perspective.

[00:11:03] Neil Martin: And so I, I, again, I just had this. Random outreach from Mike Barrow, who I've been working with ever since 2006. And again, he sort of came up with the the concept of, of joining, doing some head hunting, something that I hadn't really done before because it was, it was quite high volume, really recruitment that I'd been involved with.

[00:11:25] Neil Martin: So this was much more sort of low volume. And he'd also, he was also involved helping companies list on the aim market mm-hmm. , and he said, look, actually we could probably shift towards this. So I, like the first time in my, I was sort of working with him. I flew over to south of France, met people from the London Stock Exchange, and my vision was actually to move away from recruitment altogether and and, and get involved with.

[00:11:52] Neil Martin: At the aid market and which is an alternative investment market on the the London Stock Exchange and, [00:12:00] Anyway, that didn't happen. And I ended up doing the most hardcore recruitment I've ever, ever done in my life. And I, as I said, I've been doing it ever since. So a lot of the companies or a lot of the sort of telco vendors in particular we've, we, we work with a lot of the, the sort of oss bss, sorry if this, these terminologies don't mean anything to you, but a lot of the software companies that sell software to service providers, And and then as time has gone by, a lot of those companies have branched out into other verticals and NBR Partners as a business is sort of followed in their footsteps.

[00:12:37] Neil Martin: So the talent has moved elsewhere. I mean, primarily financial services because that, along with Telco is the other, they're the two really big industries. Enter. Software. Again, I mean we, we, we do a lot of sales people in particular globally. So so yes, we sort of followed the market and evolved again.

[00:12:57] Neil Martin: I've sort of taken some of the learnings that I had [00:13:00] from Aircom in terms of. In terms of how, how you actually apply technology all the time and keep refreshing that to, to keep to, to keep as efficient as possible, really. But the other thing that, that whole Aircom experience, Taught me because I moved to Red Hill and ended up living with all these engineers.

[00:13:20] Neil Martin: Mm-hmm. It really helped me understand, because you end up talking in the same language as them. Yep. And it helps you understand the sort of building blocks of the network, or at least as much as you. As much information as you need to be able to sort of form a map in your head as to where all this stuff fits together and, and, and, and, and, and sort of this, the tele-management forum have, have got this big sort of map of, of where the telecoms ecosystem fits.

[00:13:47] Neil Martin: And if you just look at it without any context, it just looks like a complete sort of weekly mess. 

[00:13:53] Leon Hardwick: my lady's hair. It's a, a phrase that Peter Young, my old ceo and somebody we've worked with together at. Coined a mad lady's [00:14:00] hair. It, it is hard to, to decipher that, that map without context. Yeah.

[00:14:05] Leon Hardwick: And yeah, if you, if you live with a bunch of engineers and you speak their language Yeah. You, you, you're able to sort of at least form your own sort of picture in your own brain, like you said. And I, I had to do the same when I joined, joined Aircon I literally started, I had a bit of an IT background and I started.

[00:14:21] Leon Hardwick: Peter actually, and Graham, Graham said to me, Leon, you've got two weeks to learn how telecoms works. So go and study, figure it out, and then figure out where all our products and services fit within that sort of map. And I was like, oh my God, this is nuts. How do I do that? So yeah, it's funny, like Aircom, they would chuck you in the deep end and see if it, if you, if you swam and if you.

[00:14:42] Leon Hardwick: Okay, fine. That, that's a bet they were willing to, to take and lose. But if you, if you swam, it was always a gonna be a good outcome, I think. So you, so you've been in essentially telco tech recruitment, head hunting now called talent acquisition for over 20 years. [00:15:00] Right. You've li you kind of know the whole thing in inside.

[00:15:03] Leon Hardwick: It's over 20 years, Neil. Yeah. Yeah, I know. 

[00:15:05] Neil Martin: Sadly, , it's over 

[00:15:07] Leon Hardwick: 20 years, right. The thing, the thing I always find, I, I think it's one of the toughest jobs around, right? So you've got, you've got two customers. You've got the folks looking to acquire talent and you've got the folks that want the job, they want to get into those companies.

[00:15:23] Leon Hardwick: It's a really difficult balance with those humans involved, right? It's like, you know, getting those people together to the point where they agree and move forward and, and one of the things. , I'm kind of keen to understand and given your experience, right, and, and the time you've been in the game, like for me, where do you start?

[00:15:45] Leon Hardwick: Right? So, so you've obviously got a set of needs from a, from a, a company in a particular vertical with a particular product, and you've gotta really understand there. But where do you go from there? Like how do you. As not, I wouldn't say like, what's your [00:16:00] process, but like how do you figure that stuff out and like how do you go about finding the right folks for, for matchmaking and all that kind of stuff?

[00:16:06] Leon Hardwick: Well, look, 

[00:16:07] Neil Martin: I mean, first of all, I, I'm really glad that you actually started with the client because. A lot of people have this sort of misconception that, you know, we, we take it on a candidate and then we work with that candidate to place them. That's actually not how things work in the world of recruitment.

[00:16:24] Neil Martin: Okay. Okay, cool. That's good to know. It's always about a set of client requirements, so it's about, ultimately it's about learning as much as you possibly can about that business. So, and there's a bus, there's a reason we get so much repeat business is because we really try and understand exactly what's going on in, in that in our client, but also sort of the ecosystem that they're in.

[00:16:48] Neil Martin: And, you know, nine out of 10 times we, we, we sort of know, you know, roughly what's going on anyway. But, but we, we, we, that's our objective. That's what we want to do. So, and, [00:17:00] and, and just going back to what you said again, You said, here's some people that want to work for this company and we've got the client here and these guys that want to work for them, that's not necessarily the case.

[00:17:12] Neil Martin: Yeah. So I think if, if, if, if, if, if the candidates are really keen to work for that company, then they'll naturally find each other anyway. We should do anyway. Where we come in is where you know, Mo most of our clients have got, you know, relatively large. Teams themselves, and they've got very good processes and they're usually very good at finding people that you know that they're cherry picking from the ex.

[00:17:38] Neil Martin: You know, very close competitors, people that are blindingly obvious. Where we come in is like, okay, well that's been, those, those blindingly obvious roots have been sort of explored and we haven't found the answer. So we are coming in and going, okay, well where's, where's your second, second be? What is your second [00:18:00] best sort of profile look like?

[00:18:01] Neil Martin: What's this third best profile look like? And sometimes it's actually about redefining what the requirement really is, because when you sit, when someone creates a job, speck. , they're basically putting their dream there, you know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've seen the most ridiculous job specifications where we've got, you know, particularly in telecoms, you can go through and, and you can go, okay, well I want someone with five years experience, I maximum of five years experience.

[00:18:30] Neil Martin: And then, then you put. Everything related to cloud-based technologies, all the latest stuff. Mm-hmm. , and then they go mandatory something like SS seven or you know, GSM or something that, that literally no one who's under the age of 45 will have. Yeah. Because people just don't learn it anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:51] Neil Martin: And you have to sort of explain this to the hiring managers time after time to say, well, There has to be a compromise [00:19:00] here also. I mean, the same's true with with, with salary levels as well. If you've got a certain budget, then it's all about compromise and, you know, we, we'll get a bit of pushback from, from clients saying, well, hang on a minute.

[00:19:12] Neil Martin: We, we, we asked for these sort things and I said, well, actually, We're not gonna be able to find you that gene candidate because you are paying sort of, you know, 60% of the market rate. So what we are looking at is what can you afford? Yeah. And you can decide where you want to compromise potentially, but, but there has to be compromise.

[00:19:31] Neil Martin: Seems 

[00:19:32] Leon Hardwick: like you're a mediator, a mediator plus facilitator of like, expectations on both, both sides. Right. And, and that is quite a challenging gig, isn't it? Yeah. When you get to the crux of it all, it's like you have the nuance of telco and the tech and understanding that GSM thing wouldn't be relevant to somebody with five year experience, but maybe the hiring management managers just don't [00:20:00] know the industry that well.

[00:20:01] Leon Hardwick: So you come with that real sort of expertise and that, that, that knowledge, but also the ability to sort of give people the reality of the situation. 

[00:20:09] Neil Martin: Right. And the, the, I was just gonna say, the other piece is, Companies often think everyone should want to work for us. You know, we should have the, yeah. Now that's, again, not the case.

[00:20:23] Neil Martin: Normally you're in a very competitive landscape and we actually have to come in and almost reeducate the the target audience about that business. So there might be some, you know, if, if they're a. , let's say they're a large software company. Everyone knows these businesses, who they are, and they've got reputations.

[00:20:43] Neil Martin: And you know, I've had a call with the head of Global Talent acquisition recently and that, and one of our clients, he said, tell me what the reality is about our reputation. And I did, I, I, you know, she goes, be honest with me. And I, I said, okay, well, it's like this, [00:21:00] but these are the ways that I pitch your business.

[00:21:05] Neil Martin: and I actually believe this to be true as well for X, Y, and Z reasons, because I've already had an experience that dates back to 2008 or so with them, and I've seen them change. You know, I can actually say, you have changed, even if you don't think you have, you have . So so to be able to do that from a third party perspective is something that, and, and I can compare and contrast against other clients as well.

[00:21:34] Neil Martin: And again, if you are just an internal recruiter and don't have, again, that crucial word context across the, the wider landscape, it's very difficult to have any credibility when you are talking to candidates because you are clearly representing one company only and only really have that sort of narrow field of view.

[00:21:52] Neil Martin: So, so that's another thing that, that we bring as a, as an agency and, and sometimes the people that they've already [00:22:00] identified and have said no to. by approaching it in a slightly different way, we may be able to get 'em on the hook to a conversation. Sometimes you have to break the internal model as well in terms of.

[00:22:13] Neil Martin: Or their internal processes at least, because some of these, some of these high performing people, they've honestly, they've got no interest in having a warmup call with a junior talent person, et cetera. Or they're certainly not gonna have a test as their first, you know, the first thing that you do when you engage with X, Y, and Z companies, you have a psychometric test and then they'll talk to you.

[00:22:34] Neil Martin: Yeah. I'm afraid that doesn't work at all. You know, you have to, basically, we are working. When we work best, we are working in tandem with the, the sort of hiring managers and VPs to make sure that we are pitching a really strong story to the candidate and also in the first call. The, the, the, the hiring managers are pitching to the candidates?

[00:22:58] Neil Martin: Yep. Yep. Because again, we [00:23:00] are trying to make the candidate want to work for the business. I think a lot of the times where companies fall down is that they have a very sort of unfriendly, unopened process and candidates just. Turn off. And at the moment at least you know, it's been a candidate driven market for the last 18 months.

[00:23:20] Neil Martin: And, you know, companies lose candidates. They go cold. They, they go, I can, you know, that's not a good experience for me, so I'm, I'm not interested. But it's important to realize that what, what the companies, what our clients think is a good process. On the other, it is often not a good process. When, when, because we also need speed.

[00:23:41] Neil Martin: We need, we need communication and you know, we, I'm constantly getting, I mean, the best way to reach me always is WhatsApp. And people get, you know, sometimes get frustrated by the lack of news. But of course as soon as I've got news, we are, we are distributing it. But, but sometimes there's genuine holdups, [00:24:00] budgets get pulled.

[00:24:01] Neil Martin: There's, there's, there's things that change internally and, and unfortunately in bigger companies, that's just, that's just the way, it's the 

[00:24:08] Leon Hardwick: way it is. Yeah. And you mentioned, you know, it, you mentioned your, how you go about things and how you work with the clients to make their process. A little bit more I guess tailored and suitable for the environment they're operating in.

[00:24:25] Leon Hardwick: And it's also like bringing that pragmatism to the table so that people, you know, they do come to some form of kind of consensus with candidates and things, but it also feels like you, you've seen a real shift in how things work in this whole game. And you mentioned sort of a more can. I guess there's, there's more choice and candidates that are being a bit more picky about who they work with, whereas maybe in, in the past you would wanna work for a big brand name, you'd want, wanna work for the Ciscos and the IBMs and you wouldn't really care about all of the other fluffy stuff.

[00:24:57] Leon Hardwick: Whereas I think maybe that's changed a bit. How, how do you [00:25:00] see the market in terms of the candidate led or, I mean, being more biased to can. Clients, like, how has that evolved since you've been in this space? 

[00:25:09] Neil Martin: Oh, for sure. I mean, I, I look, as I said, the last 18 months has been the most candidate driven market I've ever seen in my career.

[00:25:17] Neil Martin: There's no doubt about it. I think. I'm gonna say something here that's probably unpopular with many people, but I think the workforce in general, since the pandemic has been a bit spoiled. Yeah. And there is going to be a, a rebalance towards companies looking for specific things. And we are all start, we're all, I'm already starting to see it with clients that are saying, well, hang on a minute.

[00:25:38] Neil Martin: We actually want to have people in our offices five days a. and that, you know, ultimately that's going to really limit their talent pool. But at the same time, I, you know, I do genuinely believe that, that people work best when they're together. And I, you know, and I, and I may go back to Aircom, [00:26:00] there is simply no way I would've got the experience that I had from working remotely, just none.

[00:26:06] Neil Martin: I'm totally 

[00:26:06] Leon Hardwick: with you on that. I am absolutely with you on that. And it's so funny because. My experience so far just leading Handshaker and, you know, we're a startup and so our approach to bringing people into the company to help us is very different to larger organizations. But, you know, you, you get given a list of things that people want before you even decided on them.

[00:26:28] Leon Hardwick: And one of the primary things is, I don't wanna be in an office. I wanna work from home. Yeah. You know, full-time. And you're like, okay, that's just not possible. In terms of you. Collaboration for a startup, collaboration and learning for folks that are maybe starting their career. So I'm, I'm totally with you on that.

[00:26:47] Leon Hardwick: But it seems to be the primary thing on people's lists, unfortunately, especially folks starting out with their careers. 

[00:26:53] Neil Martin: Yeah, I mean, I think I, and, and I genuinely don't know why. Someone in their early twenties would want to be [00:27:00] working remotely. It just, you should be out enjoying yourself, , socializing with your teammates.

[00:27:06] Neil Martin: I mean, a lot of my, you know, a lot of my best friends over the years have come from, you know, working together and you know, it's a lot of fun. I mean, that's the whole thing. Work. Can be a lot of fun. Yeah. And you know, and certainly Aircom was great fun and you know, obviously I've been in the same business since 2006.

[00:27:23] Neil Martin: I wouldn't be here if I didn't think it was fun, , and you know, and, and, and, and just to have this sort of mentality while I'm doing x, y, and z hours and, and that's it. But, but it's interesting. I mean, I, I listen to, you know, one of the, one of my teammates who's been with the, the company for just over a year and to see how she pitch.

[00:27:41] Neil Martin: Our clients now, it's very similar to how I do, and that's only through her sitting there listening to me. I'm not talking to her directly. I'm not on a video call of her saying, do this, do that. She's just picking it up from, from proximity. Yeah. And yeah, and, and, and also learning about [00:28:00] what the different things in companies actually.

[00:28:02] Neil Martin: you know, when you're, when you're around together, you can, you can go to the finance department, you can go to procurement, you can get you, you actually learn what product marketing does what, and because you're, you are with people and it just naturally comes out about from socializing. And I think that that socializing piece is really, really important.

[00:28:21] Neil Martin: And, and as you said, being. Is about socializing ultimately. And you know, that's why I want, you know, the pandemic frankly, was quite hard because, you know, you weren't able to go out and do those water cooler moments and everyone, everyone's, you know, oh yeah. Water cooler moments, water load of nonsense.

[00:28:40] Neil Martin: But actually they're so important. Yeah, you really are. 

[00:28:43] Leon Hardwick: And think that's the primary change though, in terms of the workforce being spoiled. Is that sort of expectation to be home all the time, or is there more to it than that? Do. 

[00:28:52] Neil Martin: No. I mean, look, there's, there's been some of the really big tech companies have actually come in and actually spoiled the market in, in some [00:29:00] ways.

[00:29:00] Neil Martin: So you know, I can only talk about, you know, a, a fewer of them, right? But, but if you get a business, I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll mention sort of aws, why not? You know, they've come in and basically just offered people. 50% payroll. I don't even know if they realized that they were offering so much over the odds, all the stock options and everything else.

[00:29:24] Neil Martin: The problem is it's very diff, oh, working from home, blah, blah, blah. And then, and then, and then actually just recently they started laying off a few people. Right. And hopefully, hopefully that continues a bit because we could do with some rebalancing and people realizing actually that's, Normal, right?

[00:29:42] Neil Martin: What's happened is not normal. I think the US has been for me, the US is over, I say 18 months, but you can go back a lot further in the us. I mean, we've, we've placed project managers in Seattle that have been earning. More than CEOs of businesses I've placed in the [00:30:00] uk. Yeah, yeah. And that's just a bog standard, you know, software project manager.

[00:30:05] Neil Martin: And you just go there and go, okay, well, AWS has sucked up. However, everyone anyone that's got any sort of telecoms experience at all, just who it up into this thing and, and, and, and it has, you know, it meant that there's been a lot of salary inflation now, I think. Actually, we haven't had enough salary inflation over the previous sort of 10 years.

[00:30:28] Neil Martin: Mm-hmm. . But what's happened more recently has been crazy. Obviously we, we've then got actual inflation in the economy, but I'm talking about even before that, we were seeing huge, huge inflation in, in salaries. But, but yeah, I mean, it's good to see that it's a, it's a dynamic environment, but there's always a limit to how much companies can genuinely afford.

[00:30:47] Neil Martin: And yeah, the macro picture looks a bit interesting now, right? So it, it's gonna be an, a really interesting sort of two year period, I would say. But. But within telecoms we've [00:31:00] got a another specific problem in that there's this sort of retirement cliff coming up. I mean, you, you and I saw each other at in Copenhagen and, and I think it's Kerry, Gil Gilda, or from the c e O of Colt in the uk.

[00:31:14] Neil Martin: When I arrived there, she, she said she was speak. And she said about this retirement cliff, and we've, you know, we've got a real sort of problem with telecoms in terms of getting young people into the, into the organizations. Mm-hmm. The, the, the reality is people haven't been making an effort to do that.

[00:31:29] Neil Martin: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, but, but I think one of the, the tier one service providers in the US was talking about automation. This was a few years ago, they said, look, it's not about replacing people, but we can't get people into the industry. Like in the early two thousands and late nineties, people like you and myself, we wanted to work in telecoms because it was cool.

[00:31:49] Neil Martin: It was new. It was sexy. And, and now who comes up with university thinking, oh yeah, telecom sounds like a good idea. Well, 

[00:31:57] Leon Hardwick: do you know what? Right. The, the, and the people that [00:32:00] do don't last very long, so, My experience over the last five years in particular, so I had a, I was lucky enough to have a global sales role at spatial bars, and so I went to lots of different parts of the world.

[00:32:14] Leon Hardwick: You know, talking to folks at working level and then, and, and a leadership level and, you know, I think North American in particular, US and Canada had a real sort of drive to bring young people into their organizations. And, and, and you could, it was tangible. I'd rock up to meetings and see folks at university working in digital, working in customer sort of operations or working in in tech.

[00:32:37] Leon Hardwick: and they'd be there for six months, eight months or whatever. And I, and I honestly, I have multiple occasions where this has happened. They get involved, they start like really keen and you're engaging with them as part of your sales process or your account management process. And within six to eight months they've gone on, they've gone to a tech company or Google or whatever.

[00:32:56] Leon Hardwick: And, and, and that happened in US, Canada [00:33:00] Asia. And in, in Europe, you know, I met a guy at in, in Copenhagen, the event you just mentioned working in Europe, first job outta university, and he was eight months, he is gone. You know, in the time that we, you know, we've, we've come back from Copenhagen, so it's got a real problem.

[00:33:17] Leon Hardwick: I think Telco I dunno how that changes though. When you've got these big tech companies and, and telcos want to become tech companies, they're having to shift in that direction, right. How do they change that, do you think? And, and given everything you see from a recruitment perspective, what are people looking.

[00:33:33] Leon Hardwick: In those organizations that might change that, just in your opinion. I know it's like not a 

[00:33:37] Neil Martin: science list, but, well, I actually, I, I actually think the service providers have done a better job than, than the vendors in, in, in this sort of thing. 

[00:33:44] Leon Hardwick: What do you mean? You say vendors just so everybody's cleared.

[00:33:46] Leon Hardwick: We, when we talk about vendors and telco, we talk about the big guys that sell the kit and the software and that kind of thing, like the Nokia and the Ericksons and so on. 

[00:33:53] Neil Martin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there's a huge number within that ecosystem. There's really a lot of companies [00:34:00] that supply the bits and Bob that make a telecoms network work.

[00:34:04] Neil Martin: I think, I think part of it is, is, is just going back to all the sort of acronyms involved in terms of the engineering side. It's just. It, it's just, it's just very dense. I mean, I have people who, so the word bss , so, so it, it stands for, so, you know, it's business support systems and for, for, it's, it's billing platforms effectively.

[00:34:29] Neil Martin: And, you know, I was talking to one of my, my, my resources and said, okay, we we're looking for X one said they come, came backwards to me and said, we got this brilliant profile BSS all over the profile. And this is a problem with keyword search. Okay, well it actually stood for base station subsystem or something years ago, and that was the whole thing.

[00:34:47] Neil Martin: It was all a completely different place. I mean, even within, if you look at oss, there's two elements of oss. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there's the network side piece. Then there's is other piece and, and again, it, again, it's all [00:35:00] about context and. And you come into this, I mean, the guys in telecoms free gpp, they just love coming up with these acronyms that, I mean, when 3G came around, we, you, you replaced a base station with a node B.

[00:35:13] Neil Martin: Why ? Why it's a base station. Just keep it a base station and, and you know, so, so there, there's lots of things where telecoms just hasn't helped itself. But I do think. As well. You know, it's, it's gone from, from being this sort of nascent technology through to basically you know, more, more of a utility.

[00:35:36] Neil Martin: I mean, that's, that's the reality now. It's a utility that evolves much faster than a water supply or electricity supply. They're still interesting things happen happening, but you know, 5g for example, how has that really impacted anyone's lives at all at the. . Well, it hasn't, I mean, it really hasn't. I mean, even people were, I spoke to someone last week and they were saying, well, as soon as I've got 5g, I'm [00:36:00] turning my fiber off.

[00:36:01] Neil Martin: Trust me, you're not , you know, there's no way you're doing that. So but it's, but, but, but fast Internet for sure is all about you know, new things will come up that require it more and more. I mean, gaming is right there at the edge that now. So streaming services for things like that with low latencies if you happen to be a gamer, you are gonna want the, the, the, the best broadband you possibly can.

[00:36:26] Neil Martin: But what else out there is, is, is really making a difference. Now, I say that who would've thought that the use case for a 4G network was like a. Taxi hailing service, , you know, so things come up that use the technology that you never really think about. So, so hopefully that happens with 5G and, and the service providers actually start making some substantial money from it.

[00:36:50] Neil Martin: But I do worry about it because if you look at I think, I can't remember what service, I think it might have been Vodafone that doing something with Porsche at the moment. [00:37:00] But, and, and sort of having a sort of private 5G network with robots working and so forth on the 5G network, but how many Porsche you know, factories really are there?

[00:37:13] Neil Martin: I mean, this doesn't seem like a huge sort of market to really go after, but maybe, yeah, it's 

[00:37:20] Leon Hardwick: interesting because actually at handshake of what we do this question comes up all the time, so, Large telco, we talk to their primary sort of problem statement is, how do we monetize 5g? I mean, it's the same thing over and over again.

[00:37:34] Leon Hardwick: It doesn't matter who we talk to, where they are in the world. That's the thing that's on their mind. But it could, I wanted to come back to the question like, how do they improve the, the sort of funnel. Younger folks coming into Telco because those are the folks that are gonna solve the problem, right?

[00:37:51] Leon Hardwick: They're the ones that are gonna come in and like, you know, come up with ideas to bring this stuff to life and utilize it and, and, or is it. [00:38:00] or is it more about collaboration with other sectors, do you think? Like the tech sectors? 

[00:38:06] Neil Martin: Yeah. It's interesting because I think almost you've gotta go back to what people choose for university courses.

[00:38:15] Neil Martin: Yeah. There's, there's a few countries out there. I mean, France has always had a. Brilliant university system with regards you know, engineering in general, but telecoms, engineering always first class. I would say that, I mean, we've seen, you know, port Portugal's been very good at producing excellent people and Poland as well, and he's, you know, now you see this sort of, you know, fruits, fruits of that.

[00:38:40] Neil Martin: And so it's more about trying to get people into that at, at much earlier stage. I mean, it. You know, talking about people coming out with sort of lots of options, but yeah, you've, you've got to try and make people excited about sort of change and, and, and, and it's difficult, isn't it? Because, you know, now we're probably talking about 6G and [00:39:00] the impact that will have and so forth.

[00:39:01] Neil Martin: And, you know, I know that all of the, you know, big vendors and service fries talk about the metaverse and things, but. It's, it's, it's difficult when you are competing for talent with companies that, let's face it, Google, you use, you might use a Google phone, you might use Google Chrome. I mean, I use a, we're talking now on a Chromebook where you've got these, these, you know, I've got an Apple phone or whatever.

[00:39:26] Neil Martin: But when you're competing for talent with companies that, that basically Amazon's another one. You stream, you buy stuff from them. They're so in your life that it feels like a natural thing to, to sort of. Move to, to working with them that, you know, in terms of brand, it's, you can't really beat that. And so, so yeah, I, I mean, I think people wake up a little bit soon anyway, because I think some of those businesses have over expanded.

[00:39:53] Neil Martin: They look, the bigger they get, the, the, the more sort of culturally they'll, they'll become, [00:40:00] They'll become dinosaurs eventually it becomes Yeah, it becomes that cycle, isn't it? Yeah, of course. And I, and I think, I think if you look at it, I mean, I, I, I've always enjoyed working with small to mid-size companies that have got a great idea.

[00:40:14] Neil Martin: They might have got some financial backing and then they're going out and doing it and, and each per, I mean, that's one of the things that I've learned over the years. You can get a really brilliant person. Put them in the wrong environments, particularly salespeople. You put 'em in the wrong environment and they won't perform at all.

[00:40:29] Neil Martin: But you can take the same person who's basically failed in that business, put them into the right culture, and they'll absolutely fly. And I totally 

[00:40:38] Leon Hardwick: agree with you on that front. And it's, it is interesting because it's, it's one of those things that, do you find folks are open-minded about that when you put the, put those candidates in front of clients?

[00:40:52] Leon Hardwick: does a failure generally, is it perceived openly or do you see people sort of [00:41:00] closing off on the client's side? 

[00:41:01] Neil Martin: Well, I think it depends on how many times you've failed. Yeah. I think, I think Ev every person can go through some, you know, make wrong decisions, but the key is not to keep on making wrong decisions and, and sometimes, Look, particularly as a salesperson, you've got to look at, you know, the, the opportunity there and say, okay, is this something that's sellable?

[00:41:23] Neil Martin: And. And again, I mean, if you, if you get the timing wrong then it can be, it can be really bad. I mean, there are companies that literally sell nothing for four years and it's the fifth year. Suddenly it all starts to happen and they go somewhere. But trust me though, four years before have been a lot of hard toil, getting nowhere.

[00:41:41] Neil Martin: Yeah. But but yeah, I mean, I, I, I personally, and I, and I love to. You know, small to mid-size companies doing well in, in, in, in, not just telecoms, but enterprise software companies as well. I mean, we are working with business at the moment, which is a UK company called Cannan. And it's, it's, it's, it's great to be, you [00:42:00] know, working with a fort leader within the sort of Linux and, and open source software space.

[00:42:06] Neil Martin: And you know, they're They're, they're growing fast and but they're still a relatively small company compared to the Goliaths that we're talking about. I mean, they really are. And but, but working with 'em, it's just dynamic. You're working with the, the people that are really making, you know, decisions.

[00:42:23] Neil Martin: You are helping them with making decisions and there's nothing better actually than. Looking at a business that's done really well and knowing that you've helped put the key people into those positions. Yeah. It's really satisfying. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm still doing this. I mean, 

[00:42:39] Leon Hardwick: yeah.

[00:42:39] Leon Hardwick: Yeah, I can, and, and that comes through when you talk, when, when you talk about what you do and when other people talk to you. My, my, my question then is, Is that your wheelhouse then the SMB tech company to get commercial and tech folks into those businesses that can make a big difference and an impact?

[00:42:58] Leon Hardwick: Is that 

[00:42:59] Neil Martin: [00:43:00] for, for me personally? Yes, for sure. The look, I mean what tends to happen with these sort of small to mid-size businesses is they, cuz, cuz they tend to then use us globally. We'll start working on one position that's a problem position, and then the relationship will naturally sort of flourish.

[00:43:17] Neil Martin: And then it will be, well, can you help with this location? And it's yes, yes, yes. And then it's, so you start with sort of sales, then pre-sales, then it's, you're gonna grow with them. Delivery. And then it's and then before you know it, they're, they're sort of asking for developers and so forth. And so we are, we.

[00:43:32] Neil Martin: Really actively sort of building out our competency with regards technical recruitment as well. So yeah, that, that'll become a bigger thing for us over the next few years for sure. But we're also working with a lot of, you know, FinTech businesses as well. Which is inter, you know, it's really interesting to see the, the, the big differences between the financial services market and the telecoms market in particular.

[00:43:55] Neil Martin: What are they? ? Well, that's it. . I, [00:44:00] I, I, well, I, I remember, I sort of remember going to, to meet my first sort of, I suppose, banking sort of salesperson. And he was a really strong performing FX sales guy. The delivery for FX is literally a company wanting to do a financial exchange transaction, just moving money from pounds to dollars maybe.

[00:44:28] Neil Martin: But we're talking about such large numbers. It makes a huge difference. , you know, the bank takes a small percentage, but the number is so high and you know, his delivery at the end of it was literally pressing a button. That's it. So it's a hundred. Relationship driven. That's why there's, there's, that's why there's so many pubs in the square mile, right?

[00:44:50] Neil Martin: Because everyone's trying to dine out, get their best relationship so that they get the, the permission to hit that button. Now, that's nothing like [00:45:00] telecom, and the software. You know, when you, when you're selling sort of, you know, software that's, that's worth sort of millions of, of, of dollars. and you're going through a very, very substantial process.

[00:45:11] Neil Martin: You're going all over. You are mapping the whole sort of service provider you're trying to get, you know, there's multiple stakeholders involved. You know, there's a lot of blockers that can come up. I mean, this thing's completely different. I would say that the banking world has been miles behind telecoms in terms of.

[00:45:29] Neil Martin: You know, cloud virtualization, adoption of new technologies. I mean, you know, we all use banking apps now that that's brilliant. But, but yeah, in terms of the sort of innovation that's come through, I mean, there's still. A tremendous amount of sort of middlemen in the way now, now, every time you use your phone to buy something, you know, it can look like the slickest experience ever, but as soon as you hit that buy button, it goes off into these, this [00:46:00] wheels.

[00:46:00] Neil Martin: Absolutely. I mean, there's, there's probably, well, there's a lot of different intermediaries involved. It's all. Offline. And you know, there's, again, there's just lots of companies taking a small percentage of a, of a lot of money that really have no right or reason to be there. And that's one of the reasons why blockchain technology is so interesting, because it sort of gets rid of this need for all these intermediaries and you know, and that's where technology comes into play.

[00:46:27] Neil Martin: And it's, and, and I mean there's a, there's a very interesting company that we've worked with in the past. Share gain. And again, that's about bringing the, the sort of service that a pension fund has and, and, and to, to an individual person. So it, it's really interesting to see these, these, these things being broken down finally within these sort of traditional banking world.

[00:46:50] Neil Martin: But, but yeah, it's, 

[00:46:52] Leon Hardwick: it's, I recommend, like, you, you were talking about that finance game there, but do you reckon then there's a, there's an opportunity. Those financial folks [00:47:00] to upscale and, and learn that whole process of selling cross-functionally lobbying, long-winded process for a tech. Replacement or implementation in the financial world.

[00:47:11] Leon Hardwick: Is there a real opportunity? 

[00:47:13] Neil Martin: Yeah. Yeah. Look look for, for sure. I mean, there's also, there's been a lot of people that have come from, from telecoms and moved across into financial services. I mean, all of the, the big sort of sis have people that cross from one to the other because at the end of the day, You know, it infrastructure, is it infrastructure, whether it's telecoms or, or, or financial services.

[00:47:35] Neil Martin: And, and, and look, the guy that I've met, that was a long time ago now. Right? Things have changed and, and yeah. And look, the emergence of FinTech businesses that have basically been selling into banks, not just challenger banks coming up with new ideas, but, but. But technology companies that are selling new things to banks that they can offer additional services.

[00:47:54] Neil Martin: That's been, that's been, that's been big. And, and, and yeah, look, the banks are fighting for survival [00:48:00] now. I mean, they're, you know, they're doing all they can to ensure their future because their business model is absolutely threatened by new technology. And it's interesting. I mean, even if you look at telecoms, I mean, there's been a few bad results that have come out, but it does mean, I mean, the.

[00:48:16] Neil Martin: The, the CEO of Vodafone has left. But it means that whoever comes in has to make changes. And with changes, you know, there should be opportunities. It won't just be, oh, we're gonna let all these people go and that's gonna be it. We are just gonna sort of, you know, there has to be more than that. It, it's literally, okay, well how do we make more things more.

[00:48:36] Neil Martin: And you can always make things more efficient. You know, power consumption is something that, that we've been, well, some of the small companies I've been working with have been talking about for a long time in terms of, well, you know, we can down, down power, the networks and, and that energy issue has become absolutely paramount now.

[00:48:54] Neil Martin: So there are all these solutions out there that Haveve actually been around for a while. That just haven't been [00:49:00] utilized. And it's now it's like, okay, we've got this, this, we've realized what a problem this is cuz it's affecting our bottom line in a bigger, big way or certainly in a much larger way than it was.

[00:49:09] Neil Martin: Let's start ex exploring that. So, you know, yeah, it's brilliant. Like, 

[00:49:13] Leon Hardwick: you know, with, with change comes great opportunity and that's probably a great place to kind of tail our conversation a little bit here because we are kind of coming up to our, our time slot. I really, I've really enjoyed listening and talking to you, Neil.

[00:49:30] Leon Hardwick: It's been a real op eye-opener in terms of like how, you know, how the whole recruitment and talent acquisition world works. How can people find you? Where can they find you if they're looking for a gig, a new role, or a change for the new year? Or if the, the client in s and b and their enterprise want to talk to you about how they get new talent into their business, how do they get hold 

[00:49:48] Neil Martin: of you?

[00:49:48] Neil Martin: Man, yeah, I look LinkedIn is great. I, my email address is neil@nbrpartners.com on my LinkedIn. I'll see that in the notes. On my LinkedIn profile, you'll [00:50:00] actually find my telephone number, and as I said earlier today actually WhatsApping me is the best way to get ahold of me. I'm, I'm absolutely not afraid of people WhatsApping, me, , what everybody has, 

[00:50:10] Leon Hardwick: has permission.

[00:50:11] Leon Hardwick: To cold call Neil following this conversation. Yeah, and 

[00:50:15] Neil Martin: if they're a good cold caller, I'll try and recruit them. . 

[00:50:19] Leon Hardwick: If you do a good call, you might be, you might be up for another job. Brilliant mate. Thank you so much. At a time of recording, this is literally between Christmas and New Year. This won't come out until probably February, but have a happy New Year and good luck for 2023.

[00:50:32] Leon Hardwick: Great to have you on. Catch you soon. 

[00:50:34] Neil Martin: You too. Thanks a lot. Bye.[00:51:00]