Rosaleen Blair has reinvented the way the recruitment industry works, despite entering the sector without many academic or business credentials, writes MARTIN DOYLE.
DUBLINER ROSALEEN Blair was 29 and fresh off the plane with no experience of recruitment other than having run a small nanny agency when she went for a business development job with a top London agency. The interview panel was split between those who were bowled over by her enthusiasm and the majority who could not see beyond her lack of academic or business credentials.
Fast-forward 13 years and Blair is not only their boss, but she has just led a £100 million (€128 million) management buyout, having reinvented the way the industry works. It's a good job she doesn't hold grudges.
"I'm still very friendly with all the people that interviewed me," she says. "I think the view was I was either going to be an unmitigated disaster or an incredible success."
Blair was a woman in a hurry. Having struggled at school (Loreto College in Dublin) with mild dyslexia, university wasn't an option, so she taught at a Montessori school. She then ran a fashion outlet on Grafton Street before she had first one brainwave, then another. "So many people were going to London and getting jobs I decided surely there was an opportunity to find jobs for them before they went," she says.
While she waited for her new business partner to relocate to Dublin, Blair had another idea. Exploiting Dublin's traditional class divide, she advertised in a northside freesheet for nannies and home helps, while simultaneously offering their services on the south side.
"By the time my business partner arrived to place professional people, I had a booming nanny business, so we didn't pursue the original plan."
But if the business was a success, the partnership, which was also a romantic one, was not. At 29, she had reached a watershed, thinking: "God, if I don't stop now and actually learn [ how to run a business], I'm never going to get a chance to."
She chose the Alexander Mann Group as her teacher, but within six months had gone from being the kid at the front of the class going "Miss, Miss" to tearing up the entire curriculum.
"I genuinely went there with a view to learning everything I possibly could in a year about how to run a business, and then do something for myself again. I drove everybody mad asking questions. I didn't care about looking stupid.
"After six months, I was staggered by how unprofessional the recruitment industry was. Blue-chip companies were paying a fortune but with no personal in-depth relationship. They might be hiring thousands of people a year, using dozens of different agencies. Directors would say people are our greatest asset but when you asked who is responsible for hiring your people, you found it was often people who had failed in other parts of the organisation."
Her big idea (recruitment process outsourcing) was to transform large-scale recruitment from a transactional affair to a management consultancy model, where the recruitment agency staff would be embedded in the company's own human-resources department, and take charge of not only recruitment but also career progression.
Blair was about to go out on her own, when her boss invited her to set up a joint venture. The result was so successful that the group ended up selling off its other divisions to focus solely on the business Blair had created, Alexander Mann Solutions (AMS).
Today, AMS has 1,100 employees and a £300 million turnover in 50 countries, where it will recruit 50,000 people this year. In February, it acquired European rival Capital Consulting, whose turnover last year was £20 million, for an undisclosed sum.
Her success has not gone unnoticed. She won an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Award in 2006. Last May, she became Veuve Clicquot businesswoman of the year, joining an elite club of winners including Anita Roddick, Marjorie Scardino and Dianne Thompson.
Having broken through the glass ceiling by herself, suddenly she had a pair of glass slippers and was going to the ball at the London Stock Exchange.
"The nicest thing about winning it was after the ceremony I was bundled into a minibus by all the previous winners, a whole host of business heroes, and taken out for dinner. I've suddenly got a network of very interesting people."
Blair is intent on moving into different sectors and new territories. She has also not finished transforming the whole concept of recruitment.
"I want to take clients on another journey. Instead of paying us for finding a person, in the next few years I want organisations to pay us for the impact that person has on the organisation. That will really, really revolutionise the industry."
Blair has a holiday home in Cong, Co Galway. She likes to ski and sail but is keen to puncture any jet-set preconceptions. "The sailing's not flash, it's a little dinghy, and I ski but I'm useless," she says. "The reason I like it is I'm so bad at it I can't think about work because it takes all my attention to stay on my feet."
