COVID was a hard reset on life and business. First it stopped everything, and then it changed everything.
Nearly five years later, the scale of change brought by the pandemic has started to recede as many businesses attempt to corral staff back to the office.
But for SF Recruitment and its CEO Saira Demmer, the changes wrought by COVID have become a core part of the firm’s employee experience. The freshly minted CEO arrived in January 2020 only to have her initial ideas for the business derailed when COVID arrived and “blew the whole thing up”, Demmer told CX Lore, the podcast of CXM.
Like many other organisations at the time, SF Recruitment slipped into survival mode, chasing money and ensuring it would emerge on the other side of the pandemic.
“The second we ticked those boxes, everything went back to ‘how to make this brilliant for our people,’” commented Demmer.
COVID helped Demmer and her team strip back ideas around employee experience and focus on what “genuinely mattered”. Their thoughts were distilled into three core areas — employees want to be successful, they want to be fairly rewarded (and maximise their earning potential) and they want to spend time with the people they care about.
“These pillars formed the foundation of our employee experience, which we unimaginatively called the SF Experience,” said Demmer.
At the tail end of 2024, the SF Experience, which bundles together flexible working, generous parental leave, company-wide performance bonuses, and an employee ownership scheme, has become a game changer for the rapidly expanding recruitment firm.
Not only is it credited with reducing headcount churn from 46% to below 20%, the firm’s eNIPS has risen to +71, while the headcount has doubled.
The firm’s people-centric culture is also credited with driving its post-pandemic recovery. Over the last four and half years, the NPS value has risen from 16 to +46 — a stat also reflected in SF Recruitment’s 70% client retention rate.
Not only has the firm retained more clients, it has also seen a 30% growth in its customer base, launched two specialist recruitment divisions, and opened more offices.Employees are also benefiting — individual earnings have increased by 47% on average.
The employee experience has won plaudits outside the firm. This year, SF Recruitment ranked on The Sunday Times Best Places to Work list. It also won three golds at the UK Employee Experience Awards in 2023, and a further silver at the UK Customer Experience Awards in October this year.
The SF Experience has become increasingly important to attract talent to the firm. As the company has changed, so has its hiring policy. Previously, it hired graduates and ran training programmes. But now, it prides itself on attracting experienced talent from across the recruitment sector.
“This isn’t for everybody. We know who we are going after. It’s high performing, ambitious people who share that common goal of providing outstanding client and candidate service,” said Demmer.
“The huge amount of time autonomy we’ve given people has meant that people are working smarter, more effectively [and] they’re being more productive,” she added.
High staff retention and an average of 9 years industry experience, means that SF Recruitment is also hoarding industry knowledge.“The vast majority of [corporate knowledge] is staying, and the people that are joining us bring huge amounts of experience to add to the pot as well,” commented Demmer.
“When you have got this great environment and peer group, you can’t help but make money. Our productivity’s doubled, our profitability has tripled. When you get the employee experience and the culture right, everything else flows positively from it,” she added.
But delivering the SF Experience hasn’t been without its challenges. The hybrid working model has unfortunately been abused by some. Currently, employees are asked to do two days a week in the office, and “the rest is up to” them. It’s clear that “flexible working doesn’t mean optional working”, said Demmer.In recent months, SF Recruitment has doubled down on its commitment to maintain a flexible working environment.
“We believe that the community of people we have are high performing, mature [and], experienced. People do not need to be in the office five days a week,” she explained.
Arguably, there are bigger challenges ahead as SF Recruitment pursues continued growth. With more staff and offices, scaling the SF Experience will become harder. For now, the firm operates as a series of smaller firms, rather than one large homogeneous corporate entity.
“That means we devolve autonomy and decision making down to local leadership, but at the same time, they’re all operating within the wrapper that gives them the financial security and firepower that comes from a fast growing, private equity business,” said Demmer.
The other challenge is paying for the SF Experience. Despite mounting costs, Demmer is clear, the employee experience is a core part of the firm’s success, so removing it isn’t an option.
“The more people you have, the more expensive it becomes to have a great benefits offering… We never did the maths to say, ‘what if it’s three times as much?’ And then it got to three times as much, and we wondered why the bills are so big! But it is a core part of what got us here,” added Demmer.