Legal recruitment built around people.

I have spent my whole career in recruitment, and I have watched it done well and done badly at every level of the industry.

I started out inside one of the top three recruitment groups in the country, though not on the sales floor. I ran compliance, and I ended up leading labour exploitation and modern slavery investigations alongside the police and the GLAA, and advising a major retailer at senior level on how it protected the people inside its supply chain, seeing it change its processes on the back of what I recommended. That is an unusual place to start a recruitment career, and it shaped everything that came after. Once you have seen first hand what the wrong practices do to real people, you carry a different standard for the rest of your working life.

From there I went and built, twice, though neither business was mine to own. The first I was brought in to launch inside a much larger group, running it from a standing start as it grew to sixteen million in turnover in two years and came to supply the majority of the agency drivers to a multi-billion-pound logistics group. The second I set up with the managing director, just the two of us at the start, and I ran the desk as we grew it from nothing to four and a half million and opened a second branch. I did not own either of them and I was never working alone, but I was the one brought in to build and to lead, and both went where they went on my watch. That is where I learned to build something that lasts rather than just fill a seat, and I learned it to someone else's standard before I ever set my own.

That is what eventually pushed me. If I could do all of that for other people, I could do it properly on my own terms and answer for every part of it myself. So I did. Connect is the result. It is recruitment with the corner-cutting and the churn stripped out, the two things that have given this industry its reputation, and rebuilt around the only part that actually matters, which is putting the right person in the right place.

I hold one rule above every target, and I keep to it even when it costs me. I would rather lose the placement fee than put someone in the wrong firm. A bad placement helps no one. It costs a candidate months of momentum and it costs a client their time, their money and their trust, and it is the quickest way I know to burn a reputation that took years to earn. I am not here for the invoice that clears this month. I am here for the relationships that are still standing in ten years.

That is really the whole of it. Do the work properly, be honest about the fit, and the rest takes care of itself.