How three recruiters became Fred.

There comes a time when as scary as change is, you know you need to take the plunge into the unknown and do something big. For us, even with the combined decades of experience in the industry, this is as big as it gets. Anyone who has started a new business knows exactly how much is involved in the set up – we’ve been recruiters who have focused on everyone else’s businesses, now needing to understand how to lay the soundest foundations to our own.

We wanted to create a work place that offers recruiters the ultimate flexibility. A place where you make your day your own, and enjoy the trust and inclusion that comes from a management style based on a self driven model. We have a vision for ourselves that pushes the norms and challenges the traditional recruitment work-place model, that offers a flat tier structure, where we all work together on the same level with the same goal forefront – to ensure all our clients are receiving the best recruitment service across the country. So, the fun part we thought – the name.

In a flooded market, we agreed it needed to be memorable, easy to spell, and it had to be different. How hard could it be? As it turns out, very. It’s been the hardest part of it all by far. We could decide on legal documents, banking requirements, finance structure, CRM set up, integration systems and marketing, all on the spot, but for all the 594,747,588 names we went through, we just couldn’t get a unanimous vote. It became a bit of a joke and for a long time we were No Name Recruitment which we shortened to NNR – we called ourselves this for months and even considered keeping it at one point.

Initially the names came through thick and fast, with fairly instant votes for and against, so many already taken, or too close to something else, or just not a majority vote. (RIP Verve Recruitment!) Desperation slowly sinking in, we went to the AI platform chat GPT, star signs, our initials, every word that stood for teams/recruitment/energy converted to another language in the hopes for something that excited us. We asked friends and family, we even made a few words up – but it was very clear…we sucked at names.

With time closing in on us, we decided our best strategy would be to get drunk and put names in a hat. Whatever came out we would live with it. While that would have been a good story, in the end during a recent meeting we agreed we would get into the board room with no one leaving until it was decided. After months of it, within an hour and a half, Fred Recruitment was finally settled on. The relief! We could finally get behind our brand. It was surprising how good it felt to finally have an identity.