In this issue, We look at two quite unique recruitment establishments who endeavour to provide a truly comprehensive range of services, enabling them to fulfil the diverse recruitment needs of UK and global businesses.

A RARE WAY TO RECRUIT DIVERSE TALENT

Rare Recruitment is a niche recruitment company which specialises in providing very high quality candidates, especially those from ethnic minority backgrounds, for internships, new graduate positions and second and third jobs.

Established in August 2005 and based in Clerkenwell, London, Rare has quickly built an impressive client list which includes the Guardian, KPMG, London 2012, L’ Oreal, Merrill Lynch, Pearson, Slaughter and May, UBS Investment Bank, and WPP. Rare has now placed almost 50 people in jobs and internships with these organisations.“ The key to our approach” says Managing Director Raphael Mokades“ is a

personalised service. None of us has any background in recruitment sales, and strangely enough I think that’ s a good thing. We take a lot of time over people, treat them as individuals, and really get to know them. Having done all that, we have a pretty good sense of what they want to do – and that means we have a pretty high hit rate in terms of helping people get jobs”.

The figures support this claim: for every four candidates Rare sends for a job, on average, two get interviewed and one gets hired. It’ s an unconventional approach for a recruitment company to spend a lot of time with each candidate, but it works – especially given the particular barriers around ethnic minority people in the labour market. Says Mokades“ We had one young woman come to us about a year ago. She’ s black, clever, and had been working

in the music industry for five or six years since graduating. She really felt stymied and stifled, and that she couldn’ t be herself at work, and believed that she had no chance to progress within her company”.

“ WE SAT DOWN and did an interview and a profiling exercise with her, and it soon became clear that she yearned for something more creative and more intellectually stretching. So we suggested a top graduate scheme with one of our clients, WPP [ the largest marketing and communications firm in the world ]. It’ s a long way from the music business, but we believed it was right for her – and that she was right for it. The programme is also enormously competitive – something like a thousand applications for eight hires. That was intimidating, and without our encouragement