The Channel Recruiter (TCR) has set its sights on becoming the UK IT channel’s “number one” recruitment firm after enlisting its first Sales Director.
Ben Vernon will act as the “right hand and number two” of founder Zoe Chatley once he joins on 6 January, Chatley told IT Channel Oxygen.
Having founded TCR in 2021, Chatley said the all-remote agency is upping its ambitions for 2025 with a £1m turnover target.
“Our goal is to be the IT channel’s number-one recruiter,” she said.
“We want to be the go-to for all sales and marketing, technical, finance – whatever it is – within the industry, and be that real niche specialist.”
“The business needed another me”
As part of the new strategy, TCR has hired its first Sales Director in the shape of Vernon, a recruitment stalwart who spent time at HP and Dell earlier in his career.
Another new hire set to join early next year will bring TCR’s headcount to seven.
“[Ben] has got a lot of experience growing and managing teams and recruitment businesses,” Chatley said.
“It’s always been me who’s done all the new business development, the marketing and the brand building. I’ve also been managing the team, and am a very hands-on recruiter as well.
“What the business needed, and what I needed, in order for us to grow, was another me, essentially – somebody else with a lot of experience, who’s equally passionate, and could help drive business growth.”
Around 80% of TCR’s business is generated with vendors, with the remainder coming from a mix of distributors and resellers.
“The cloud and SaaS market is something we don’t do enough of. We really want to acquire net new logo business within those areas, as well as gaming and consumer electronics,” Chatley said.
£250,000 pipeline
As Chatley herself has acknowledged, the flat market has prompted many vendors, distributors and partners to move from a hiring to firing mindset in the last 18 months.
Chatley said she is preparing her team for a “busy second half” (TCR’s financial year ends on 30 June 2025) amid expectations of an uptick in activity, however.
“Our pipeline right now is at £250,000,” she said.
“That’s the biggest pipeline we’ve had in a really long time, and that’s positions we’re actively working on. Even if we land and place half of that, that’s £100,000s worth of business. If you compare that to last year, we weren’t even seeing half that pipeline.”
Half the battle is convincing clients to pursue an external rather than in-house recruitment model.
Although the latter approach saves on additional fees, outsourcing the process to a third party “takes the pain out of hiring”, Chatley said.
“The main benefit of using an external agency is it takes the hassle out of recruitment,” she said.
“We manage the process for them. We’ll go out to market and identify the key individuals that are a match for the role, so they’re not having to go through 200 applications. But we also head hunt, and once we’ve identified them, we then screen the candidates.”
“He understands the industry”
When it came to hiring a Sales Director, the specialised nature of recruitment meant Chatley (who earlier this year documented her own journey in recruitment) was unwilling to consider candidates lacking a firm footing in the industry (see below).
“I think a few people thought I was being small minded by not looking at people with leadership backgrounds from within the IT channel,” she said.
“The difficulty is that I don’t have time to train them up on how to run a recruitment team. I needed the person to be able to understand the fundamental stages of the recruitment process.
“Ben hasn’t recruited in the [IT channel], but he understands the industry. And more than anything else, he understands running and growing a recruitment business – and that was key.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
