Reflecting, recruiting in the nineties was brilliant.
A time when mobile phones were shaped like bananas, CVs were faxed, and overflowing ash trays smouldered on every paper-strewn desk.
Data was stored in flip-lidded boxes, lunch was almost always liquid, and go-getters donned sharp pinstriped suits, unfeasibly large-knotted ties, and shoes so shiny you could see your carefully quaffed hair in them.
This was a time leveraging the abundancy of estate agents, double glazing salesmen, market traders, and pension pushers who’d emanated from the eighties – an uprising of the swashbuckling streetwise moving on from the apathetic austerity of the long, bleak, high unemployment rates of the preceding decade.
Where everything seemed grey under early Thatcherism, the liberalised eighties represented optimism and opportunity. Life got colourful, disco ruled, and almost anything seemed to go. But this was nothing compared to what was about to happen for the aspirational, opportunistic, businessperson.Because for those sales rebels without so much of a cause, the nineties offered the chance to create something from nothing. Swag met swagger.
And as the notion of recruitment as a proper profession really kicked off, handwork, endeavour, and charm were handsomely rewarded. Finding untapped talent – as it wasn’t known then – was alchemy. For even the half-savvy twenty-something, this era was sopping with sovereign.
Fast cash, fast cars, fast lifestyle. Commission incentives, whilst not new, fuelled rivalries that not only pushed competition, but boundaries too. Stop for a moment and an opportunity was gone. There was no such thing ‘another bus’. Champagne and razorblades some called it, others, more reasonably, a rollercoaster.
Whilst many consider nineties recruiters as brash, bullish, bombastic, overall, this period remains vaunted for producing many of the bright minds and practices mimicked today. Indeed, frontrunners then remain protagonists today.
The recruitment revolution had begun. But where would it go?
Part 2 (‘Reputations’) to follow…
