Complete Recruitment Department

Teresa Charles, VP of HR, APR

APR partnered with Quarsh in the spring of 2019 to elevate our recruiting presence in EMEA and APAC by providing sourcing, screening and processing candidates in the local time zone which resulted with an efficient candidate experience start to finish. The team at Quarsh was quickly able to learn the APR model and absorb our culture to represent APR properly with every candidate. Claire and team are simply a joy to work with!

James Mallender, CEO, The Legal Director

We realised we needed to look at recruitment differently. Our growth was heavy reliant on internal resources and “traditional” recruiters were at best mixed. Jason and Lucy’s comprehensive approach was very interesting. Quarsh’s detailed and enlightening audit process showed us how to re-engineer our recruitment process from top to bottom. With this information, we could have then improved things ourselves, but we decided to leave it to the experts, and we weren’t disappointed. Tony became our white-labelled, in house recruitment manager. With the Quarsh team, he set about establishing best practice processes and achievable targets, all against a recruitment strategy the management team bought into. At every stage, the team has delivered. Audit, process design, recruitment strategy and MI; we have everything we could have hoped for. We now have reliable access to the people we need to grow, and they are consistently candidates of the highest calibre. This pool of quality people enables us to look again at our future development strategy. We’re delighted with all that Quarsh has done for us and we’re looking forward to continuing our relationship.

Ben Sewell, Head of Technology Strategy, Launchpad

Recruiting to Launchpad is a challenge – the offer is sometimes described as ‘too good to believe’, but is in fact a complex proposition including funding, training, study, starting a business and building a product. Every person comes to the programme has a subtly different mix of skills and motivations. The active, highly tailored approach taken by Quarsh has significantly increased the number of quality applications to Launchpad. They have integrated into our recruitment process, and they feel like part of the team.

Jackie Scarfe, People Director, Hospitality Sector

When I first approached Quarsh to help me overcome the challenges we were experiencing at various stages of our recruitment process, I was unfamiliar with RPO as a concept and to be honest, a little sceptical as to the benefits it could bring to the business. However, within a matter of weeks, the Quarsh team had familiarised themselves with the business, our particular talent needs, had helped us to refresh our recruitment literature strengthening our employer brand and had put in place a seamless and efficient process to allow us to reduce our time to hire from weeks to days. Quarsh are clearly passionate about delivering a process to suit the client and will work tirelessly to ensure this.

Jaclyn Castledine, HR Director, Aerospace Technology Institute

We successfully recruited to our target, well within time, some of which were quite complex technical searches. We were extremely pleased with the calibre and personalities/fit of the people we selected.

Lucy runs a tight, professional and focused ship and Quarsh will go to the ‘nth degree’ to understand your business so they can source the right people for you. Her staff are effective, responsive, visible, accessible and dedicated throughout the process.

As always, there are lessons to be learned from partnerships to ensure that something already extremely good is great. This is more to do with ensuring that the partnership works as well for you as is does for some tricky line managers internally – who assume that recruitment happens overnight – and who can be difficult to pin down on their decision making and keeping to process. You will have seen all that before, no doubt! Quarsh were very professional in that situation – if you enable them to have the freedom and space to operate.

Albert Rogers, HCT Beauty, Managing Director

We worked closely with Lucy and her team during a three-year period of extraordinary growth…our biggest challenge at the time was to be able to get the right talent in place to support our growth.

Quarsh proved to be up to the job in every single occasion…FD, Ops Manager, Admin staff, Sales, Project Management, Marketing Director, Brand Managers and Receptionist were among the roles fulfilled by candidates provided by Quarsh. Without Quarsh’s contribution, it would have not been possible to sustain our growth and results.

Sue Kingston, Head of Recruitment, St James’s Place Wealth Management

Quarsh were recommended to me by a colleague who had worked with her in a previous company. It has turned out to be an excellent recommendation with Lucy very quickly ‘getting us’ and striving hard to understand and meet our needs. Nothing has been too much trouble for her, communication is rapid, she shares information generously and is a pleasure to do business with.

The outsourced support we receive from Jon is excellent…he knows his stuff, he’s pro-active and is very joined up with the Quarsh team behind the scenes, enabling us to jointly provide an excellent, scalable service to our hiring managers.

Chris Powell, Financial Director, Transport Systems Catapult

Transport Systems Catapult needed to scale quickly from a very new start up to having almost 100 full-time staff within a period of around six months. It was not a job that we had the time, resources or diverse enough skill set for in-house.

From the outset, Quarsh gave the assignment their fullest attention, plus also assigned a dedicated team to fully meet with our demanding and ever-changing needs. The RPO process is and should be a learning process for both parties, and this is where Quarsh excelled. They fundamentally got to the heart of what TSC required, which was to bring in exceptional people who were happy with ambiguity and used to fast-paced growth and change environments.

The Quarsh team met all of the requirements and enabled Transport Systems Catapult to concentrate on its core business, an excellent outcome for all. Furthermore Quarsh met regularly with TSC stakeholders and gave feedback and reports on what was and what wasn’t working. Just as importantly, they were never frightened to say ‘no’ when they didn’t think they could meet a particular brief or find a particular skillset, which is very refreshing.

I would unhesitatingly use Quarsh again, and wish them well for the future.

Anita Cawley, Operations Director & Co-founder, Aptus Clinical

Aptus Clinical was founded as a niche contract clinical research organisation with a focus on developing valued medicines in Oncology, rare diseases, and advanced therapeutics. Attracting the right calibre of people, ensuring individuals know who we are and like what we stand for and having an integrated database that helps us match individuals to relevant projects is key to this.

Quarsh worked closely Aptus Clinical, delivering detailed insight into our employee value proposition, they helped us understand the value of talent pipelining and how software could support this. They also started us on our talent pipelining journey by identifying great individuals that are now part of the Aptus family. They have a flexible approach, are easy to work with and provided the right support at this important stage of our growth journey.

Tim Berkley, VP Global Human Resources Operations, Worldwide Clinical Trials

Working with Quarsh on a deep end to end review of our recruitment process uncovered great insight that’s allowed us to uncover and prioritise the issues that will drive greatest impact for improvement. We were able to draw on someone looking at our process fresh, without our own internal blindspots. This work meant we could leverage Quarsh’s broad market knowledge from across industries, which allowed us to find solutions that can mark us out as different from how other competitor companies in our industry speak to candidates.

Finding the best quality talent is critical to our business successfully growing. It isn’t hard to make an investment case for researching how to be better at that goal. Now, we have a whole set of strong data analytics that identifies the gaps and allows us to ground our future talent acquisition strategy, together with advice on best practice in the recruitment industry. We would have struggled to get that if we had done all that in-house.

HR Outsourcing

Rachel Parsonage, Managing Director, KMI Brands

In assessing a step change around structure for our business, the team were at the heart of this and each individual’s ambitions and future needs were of key importance to us. Lucy and Jason at Quarsh proposed several solutions in skills mapping and career audits to help enable more clarity for managers within KMI. It was invaluable and allowed us to move on at a better pace for the future.

Anna Wood, Head of People and Culture, Pretty Green

Quarsh have provided outstanding support to the business since we started working with them earlier this year as our HR Consultant. Reliable and efficient, everyone who I have been in contact with at Quarsh instils confidence and are clear and concise with their guidance and advice.

Executive Search

Linda Kolonits, EMEA Strategic HR Manager, Brunswick Marine

The three main characteristics that describe Adrian as a professional are flexible, curious and quick in delivering results. Every time when we agreed an assignment, Adrian would start working on it immediately and results would not hesitate to come in. 

What I also appreciated was the level of professionalism in dealing with sensitive situations and the open feedback we exchanged. On top of it, Adrian’s sense of humour is a rare quality that you may find in business these days!

Chris Johnson, Executive Chairman, Paragon Electronic Components Ltd/JJS Manufacturing 

I have been involved in recruiting people across a range of roles for over 35 years, in all that time I have met few if any businesses in the recruitment space that I would consider using, let alone recommending. Quarsh are the exception. If you are considering ‘head hunting’ or a senior level recruitment campaign these guys are the best. In the last 15 months they have successfully completed three assignments for us including a Chief Operating Officer and a Director of Purchasing. 

We are a medium sized manufacturing business with four sites, spread across two countries, and that is growing rapidly; as such having the sort of professional, no-nonsense support we have had from Quarsh has been invaluable.

They have helped us scope and plan campaigns, advised on tactics, supported the interview process and at all stages, communicated clearly and unambiguously with us on all matters. 

Clearly, you need to know what you’re looking for, but their assistance in supporting us in every aspect of the campaigns has made the recruitment and onboarding process almost a pleasure!

Jenny Hardy, HR Director, CircleHealth 

They really are the best Exec Search headhunters I’ve worked with, mainly because of their style and understanding of what you need from someone meaning they find potential candidates where you could almost recruit them all. 

They started an exec search for us for 1 x GM in Birmingham, and from her search we actually filled 2 x GM roles in Bath and Reading instead as the Birmingham build was delayed 18 months!

They also took on all our nursing recruitment (not easy with the national shortage) for all sites taking on the whole process and headhunting nurses, setting up interviews, making offers and keeping them ‘warm’ through to joining. They also have expertise in marketing, social media (with phrases and apps I’d never even heard of!) and fully exploiting ATS systems. Plus they have very competitive rates and great ethics around how they work.