Adding more people is how you grow a recruitment firm. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway.
Michelle Lownie spent years believing it. Then she watched it go wrong.
Michelle is the CEO and co-founder of Eden Scott, one of Scotland’s leading recruitment firms. She started in recruitment in 1989, filing documents and making tea at Melville Craig on a six-week summer contract. She stayed 15 years. In 2003, she co-founded Eden Scott alongside Guy Martin and Chris Logue.
Today, Eden Scott generates approximately £25 million in annual revenue with 38 consultants across Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow.
At its peak, the business had nearly 70 people.
“Turnover is great, but profit is everything.”
23 years in business. Two major market crashes. A global pandemic. And a deliberate decision to get smaller.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [4:14] How Michelle fell into recruitment at 17 and stayed for 15 years
- [6:12] Eden Scott today – sectors, offices, headcount, and revenue
- [13:39] How COVID forced a complete rethink of the business
- [17:51] Why Michelle has no interest in scaling back to 70 people
- [23:30] How business plans work at every level of the firm
- [26:29] Why Eden Scott has stayed on the 360 model while others split desks
- [30:24] How the 2008 crash became an opportunity
- [35:30] The hiring process – and why interviewers don’t discuss candidates between stages
- [40:44] What Michelle is actually looking for when she makes the final call
- [45:11] The retention strategies that keep consultants at Eden Scott for years
- [52:18] Why good recruiters don’t need to be pushed
- [53:51] What Michelle is seeing in the market right now
Why Eden Scott Got Smaller on Purpose
Before COVID, Eden Scott had close to 70 people. From the outside, that looked like success.
Inside, it was a different story.
Management time was being consumed by underperformance. Consultants were squabbling over clients and vacancies. Some were focused on filling jobs quickly rather than building relationships.
“We seemed to spend an awful lot of our time pre-COVID managing underperformance and a lot of in-fighting about, well, that’s my vacancy or that’s my client.”
When COVID hit, most of the team went on furlough. A core of around nine or ten people kept the business running. Michelle used that period to ask a harder question: what did they actually want Eden Scott to be?
The answer led to a redundancy program. It was painful. But it created the conditions to rebuild around the right people rather than the most people.
Today, the sweet spot is 35 to 40 consultants. Michelle has no intention of going back to 65 or 70. More headcount brought more management overhead, more internal politics, and often less profit.
“You might get higher turnover, but with scale comes problems and challenges – different types of challenges.”
Individual consultants carry targets from £140K at the consultant level up to £250K for business managers. Those numbers aggregate into a firm-wide plan, with a stretch target above it. Profit drives every decision.
Why the 360 Model Still Works
Split desks are increasingly common. One side does business development, the other handles delivery.
Eden Scott has never done it that way.
Their clients are mostly SMEs. Not portal-driven. Not volume-based. Relationships built over years. And Michelle’s view is that the person who wins the client is the person best placed to run the search – because they’re the one who actually knows what the client needs.
“If you’ve got somebody that takes that vacancy on and sits in that client meeting and asks all of those pertinent questions, that person is the one with the knowledge, with the best understanding of what that client is looking for. And it’s somewhat diluted if you’re taking that back to a team of people.”
The model also demands something that many recruiters struggle with. Consistency across both sides of the desk, all the time.
“It’s where the inconsistencies come in, where you do that bit of business development, get that job on, spend a lot of time filling that job, and then go back to the business development again six or eight weeks later. That just doesn’t work.”
Twenty-three years in business. £25 million in revenue. Still 360.
How to Hire and Keep Recruiters Who Don’t Need Managing
Recruitment firms are notoriously bad at recruiting their own people. Eden Scott headhunts. Candidates meet several people across multiple stages. They’re asked to walk through how they’d build a desk from scratch.
Interviewers don’t compare notes between stages. Everyone forms their own view first. They come together only at the end.
“We don’t always agree, which is interesting.”
She’s not looking for unanimity. What Michelle is looking for is harder to fake than a good interview – genuine interest in Eden Scott specifically, strong values, and someone who holds themselves accountable without needing to be chased.
“If we’re having to put pressure on you to do your job, then I think we’ve probably passed the point of no return. A good recruiter will put that pressure upon themselves.”
On retention: commission from the first temp placement, a quarterly structure that pays monthly, bonuses for retained assignments and above-standard fees, sabbaticals at five, ten, and fifteen years. That’s the structure.
But Michelle is clear that none of that is what actually keeps people.
“It’s the softer stuff, the less tangible things that keep people wedded to Eden Scott. It’s about mutual trust, it’s about ethics, it’s about morals, it’s about the way that we do business being mirrored very much in the way that our consultants do business.”
