James and James Human Resource Consultants

Welcome to James and James, specialist human resources consultants.

Our speciality is finding today's hidden talent that becomes tomorrow's super stars in the corporate and sporting worlds.

Traditional recruitment is a relatively linear process that beats the drum of the best person that can be found for the job as judged by their current skill set and past achievement level. The major short coming of the traditional approach is that it is essentially ‘artificial’; no one works or behaves as they do in an interview. Its aim is to recruit someone who best matches and fulfils the recruitment process criterion. Candidates are required to work and perform in the real world but are judged by their performance in an interview to select them! The process typically pays little attention on how far the candidate's talent has yet to develop and grow. We maintain that it is far more important to recruit a rising star who will quickly overtake someone who has already peaked. Traditionally, the best person for the job interviews the best, has the best skill set and has the best success record. But have they peaked with their star is in decline and is another candidate with a less than glowing profile and a less than stunning interview the one who will actually be the better real world performer?

At James and James, we reject the traditional recruitment process as a methodology completely. Whilst candidate history is somewhat important, the future contribution of the candidate is far more important in terms of selecting the best candidate. Hence, our methods are more adept at spotting tomorrow's talent who would likely fail today's traditional interview process. And at what cost to your organisation?!

As a consultancy we work very closely with a select number of clients each year. As we deal with privileged and market sensitive information, we do not boast about our client list and it must remain confidential; all our clients expect and demand that. The positions where our expertise has most value are high level, high impact roles, where getting it wrong can not only cost millions internally but also result in significant competitive disadvantage. We work with clients confidentially and in the background; we do not publicise or glorify our role.

The impact of the teams our clients build can be measured in millions of pounds and where one star can completely transform a business or team. The problem is to try and recruit tomorrow's stars particularly in a highly competitive world where star players themselves are either unaffordable or would not consider joining your team or only at exorbitant pay and conditions that destabilises the existing status quo of your team.

The recruitment question really is: what candidate will contribute the most in the future and be tomorrow's super star that transforms the business? And that is where we come in as this is not such an easy problem to solve. Over many years we have developed proprietary methods for assessing candidates to the degree that we are confident of over a 90% success rate in our predictions of a candidate's real world performance. Our methodology looks very much at the future success trajectory of the candidate and matches that to the organisation's ambitions and business plan. Recruitment is about the future and whilst past successes and current skills are indicators we concentrate far more on the likely future impact of each candidate. This often means that the 'obvious' candidate from the linear interview process is not in fact the best person to select and that real talent is overlooked.

When millions of pounds is at stake organisations cannot afford to get it wrong; the competition is relentless and getting the team wrong means not only significant cost but costly slippage against the competition as they win the recruitment process. The question for you is: do you want James and James on your team or your competitors?