Dominic Sockett, Senior Finance Manager
Homes For Students’ finance team was expanding rapidly to support growth and client acquisition, creating the need to recruit 14 Assistant Management Accountants over 12 months. Given the client-facing nature of the business, the brief required more than technical finance knowledge, with communication skills, personality and cultural fit equally important. Candidates needed a strong foundation in finance, through degree-level study or transactional experience, alongside genuine ambition to learn, develop and build a long- term career. With demand increasing quickly, the challenge was to deliver both speed and quality throughout the recruitment process.
We treated the brief as a strategic partnership, building a proactive talent pipeline through our established Harrogate network, candidate referrals and face-to-face assessment of technical ability, communication, attitude and cultural fit. Our understanding of the business and responsiveness to changing priorities enabled us to move quickly without compromising quality as workloads increased. Over 12 months, we successfully recruited all 14 Assistant Management Accountants, creating a cohesive, ambitious finance team whose members have continued to develop and progress within Homes For Students. The result is a stable, motivated finance function aligned with the company’s culture and supporting its continued growth.
I love working with Gemma. Recruitment is sometimes not always a positive, but sometimes it’s brilliant, Gemma has provided me with 16 people in total, out of the 16, the vast majority are still in the business and doing great, a couple have been promoted into new teams, one has been promoted 3 times! Half of the requirement was due to people Gemma previously provided getting internally promoted.