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Below is our recent interview with Paul Rayner, from Oakstone:
Q: Paul, can you give us brief description of Oakstone International?
A: Oakstone is a specialist recruitment firm focused on working with small to medium sized high growth, primarily US software companies to help them build outstanding teams of people as they expand Internationally. We have a substantial team of highly experienced, specialist recruiters who have invested many years sourcing the very best talent for these organisations.
Q: Why Oakstone International? What makes you the best choice?
A: Oakstone are an excellent choice – hard to say the best choice as I know there are other excellent recruiters out there however, I think that working with anyone is about finding the best choice for you and your company. Our team who are experts in their field and the importance of this is that with everyone chasing the best talent in the world – in order to engage with that talent and have them listen to you about opportunities takes knowledge, gravitas and experience – and we have that in abundance within Oakstone.
Oakstone are great at working with companies who are not well known or not known at all; companies who don’t automatically sell themselves. If you’re a company that isn’t well known you need someone to take your message to the right people and have them stop and listen.
One of our key differentiators is not only the level of experience, knowledge and ethos but most importantly it’s that we care about delivering a professional service. Everyone that works at Oakstone is profiled against certain criteria, and whilst we’re a sales driven organisation, when profiled nobody at Oakstone is lead by money alone – everybody puts doing a good job and delivering a great service above money.
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Q: Can you share a few examples on how you assisted talent searches for some tech companies?
A: Yes! One particular company we work with was struggling to source new sales executives of sufficient calibre for its European operations. The company had been working with nine different recruitment providers simultaneously in an attempt to attract the right people, but this multiplicity of recruiters resulted in these providers concentrating on the ‘low hanging fruit’ then giving up – instead of persevering to source the best executives.
Oakstone’s sourcing of high quality executives swiftly convinced the company that the fastest and best route to quality hires was to use only one executive search company (instead of nine).
Oakstone assisted the company to hire many executives including their most successful salesperson globally in 2014 and 2015, we’ve also hired entire teams from scratch for them in Germany, Benelux and the Nordics making EMEA their best performing region globally. We’re now working with the company to expand into South Africa. The company was last valued in 2016 at $1.7B.
We’ve worked with many companies to get the ‘first people on the ground’ Internationally and build entire teams from scratch – it really is what we do best.
Q: What type of client would benefit the most from your service?
A: The type of organisation/ partner that would benefit most from our services, from our experience, are those in need of targeting the top 20% of talent in their sector and do not have other resources, or limited resources, or even those who are too busy to source talent.
We’re passionate about building long term relationships with our clients – we work with the same companies for years, not just to hire one person here or there, but to build teams of people in different regions including all their critical hires globally.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Continued organic growth – we’re a 23 year old company and we’re extremely well established and well respected. We have a foundation of excellence on which we can build and so we are continuing to recruit as and when we can find the right calibre of people to join the company who have the right ethics, passion, drive and intellect. We will grow by 25% next year.
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