Maintaining focus on specialist FM recruitment

James Fitzpatrick explains his personal and business development within the FM sector and his increasingly international focus

Similar to most professions over the last three or four years, the role of the recruiter has seen a higher number of unique challenges emerging in quick succession, creating a testing environment that has seen many fall by the wayside.

Regardless of the type of challenge facing individuals and companies, this will additionally bring opportunities for growth and expansion for those able to adapt sufficiently quickly to take advantage. With this is the central requirement of providing quality services, from which more positive options will emerge.

Outlined above are the reasons that Boden Group has not only successfully faced the challenges of recent years but has also managed to enjoy further expansion. It is now an international provider of specialist FM recruitment services and its chief executive officer and founder James Fitzpatrick is confident that this trend will continue in the years ahead.

Speaking exclusively to FM Director, he explains his first experience of the recruitment sector that began in 2000 within the construction industry. “This was in the Birmingham area and nothing related to FM initially, but then the financial crash of 2008 saw construction recruitment fall off a cliff,” he recalls.

His next career move was working for the Carillion in-house recruitment service Skyblue Solutions with the intention of establishing a permanent service to recruit personnel for roles including FM, energy and utilities and construction. “The aim was to take it to the general market, but it wasn’t particularly successful because a lot of companies saw Carillion as a competitor and didn’t want to do business with them,” he continues.

Mr Fitzpatrick saw the FM sector rapidly expanding in 2010/11 when outsourcing became a popular movement in both the public and private sectors. Having made contact with a number of senior FM personnel, he became keenly aware of the need to recruit people to join rapidly expanding businesses in all areas of the industry.

“In 2012 I took the step of launching Boden Resource, which initially consisted of me working from my home then in a small office in Birmingham and having to do everything, including making sure the office was clean and tidy. I was also recruiting candidates and making sure everyone was paid on time.

“It was a lot of fun and also aged me considerably,” he states with a smile, “but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. After two years I employed my first member of staff and also took on Mark Fearnley and Ryan McNeil the same year, who are still with us and are now directors of Boden Group.”

As Mr Fitzpatrick prepares to celebrate the company’s 12th anniversary, he explains how the business has retained its focus on providing valuable, high quality services to its customers as a central element.

Although this often proves difficult for many businesses as they expand, he states that the company has retained “a very clear view of where it wants to be and how it wants to operate”.

“We’ve always had a very clear idea of where we want to be and how we want Boden Group to be seen and the areas we focus on, which has always been FM. Our core business is still focused on FM and we are also growing our service to the property sector, as well,” he says.

The company continues to work with businesses of all sizes, both service providers and those seeking client-side FM personnel. Boden Group recruits personnel for all areas of the FM industry and its mix of clients see it in regular contact with some, while others may only need a limited number of staff over several years.

“We work with companies that are in their start-up phase and those who are private equity-backed, as well as the large corporate FM providers, and our work sees us supporting clients across the UK and also places such as Paris, Copenhagen and Athens. We’ve also set up a US business a couple of years ago, which was a natural extension of the UK operation, and we now employ around 60 people and there are no plans to stop growing and expanding,” he states.

His experience over the last 12 years has shown him that while FM recruitment levels may not achieve those peaks of other sectors, such as technology or finance, it also does not experience the “troughs” seen in these and other industries. Mr Fitzpatrick regards the FM industry as providing increasingly essential services and value to its clients that result in constant demand for personnel at all levels of seniority.

He provides the example of the Covid pandemic to provide further evidence of the sector’s importance, with Boden Group engaged with the recruitment of personnel to run and manage testing sites around the UK.

The company’s efforts saw it place more than 350 people within FM companies running Covid testing sites around the UK over the course of the pandemic.

“What I love about FM is that it gets you close to whatever’s going on around the UK, you’re really working at the coalface and it gets you into some really interesting places, as well having meaningful conversations with some great people who have a major impact on the country,” says Mr Fitzpatrick. “You don’t get that with other sectors and that also makes the job candidates in FM really interesting to speak to, as well.”

While all industries have recruitment requirements, he finds FM to be unique in the breadth and depth of requirements it includes. “Once you’ve been bitten by the FM bug, that helps you to really understand how important people are and that any organisation is only as good as its people,” he states.

He finds numerous similarities between the recruitment and FM sectors for the reasons outlined above, which require a high level of emotional intelligence from the people involved that leads to consistent demand and opportunities.

An example of this is the more recent trend for companies to reduce their head office footprint, which then frequently sees demand for those with the necessary skills to help them to do this, either with closing down facilities or downsizing others and redesigning them to work more effectively.

“There’s always something that FM can be doing to support Workplaces and Public sector estates and that includes the workplace management role that’s become popular, whether that’s someone to help manage the team to welcome people back into the office or the receptionist, which is now known as a workplace experience coordinator.

That’s created another opportunity for FM companies and we’re seeing a lot of demand for customer focussed workplace experience candidates of all levels” he says.

Boden Group is now positioned to recruit candidates for all types of FM roles from Managers to Engineers, Directors to Commercial people and corporate head office roles through to specialist niche positions, , including both permanent and contract roles. Their Contract business delivers Interim’s to FM providers such as Project Managers, Finance, Mobilisation, Blue collar and Commercial Management.

“We also set up the Canopy business two years ago and this is run by Mark Fearnley as an executive search brand that sits outside of our core business, although it’s still focused on the FM space. It offers a high level of discretion and confidentiality to our clients, as is appropriate with the senior management roles.

“We also have Boden Property, which is a smaller part of our business but has potential to expand much further, and then we also have Boden US, which is also focused on recruiting FM talent in North America. A lot of our UK clients are either US businesses or have strong links with the US, so the move to start providing services there made a lot of sense and is an exciting venture for us” says Mr Fitzpatrick.

“While we love our core business in the UK, we also enjoy the challenge of working in new geographies and we still have a lot more we’d like to achieve in the US. We’re very open-minded to see what comes next in our FM journey.”

The conversation moves to discuss the growing use of AI in both FM and the recruitment sector, which is regarded as helpful up to a certain level, after which the skills, adaptability and personality of people are essential to ensure the best outcomes.

“Having a well-trained and motivated workforce is still really key,” he continues. “My personal preference is not to post or write in Chat GPT because it’s still obvious if you do that, and we prefer that everyone expresses their personality, which is more appealing and authentic to our customers. However I am very open minded as to how AI will change the Recruitment industry”

“Essentially a lot of our work is all about sales, people and emotion and you can’t teach a robot to do that,” he states.

“We are certainly one of the biggest FM recruiters in the UK but most important is the value we offer to our customers, candidates and employees, and we will only deliver that value by achieving a motivated happy workforce here at Boden”

Mr Fitzpatrick states that staff retention rates support his claims of high levels of support for all colleagues. While the average recruitment business will see a staff turnover level of 35%, the Boden Group’s figure is 15%, which he attributes to the high levels of support and opportunities for further development provided to all members of staff.

“One of the mantras of the business is that we want to grow up without growing old, which means you need to update the infrastructure and processes within the business whilst avoiding getting tired and continuing to have fun. We recently held our annual conference, where we set out plans for the next three years and what type of organisation we would like to become,” Mr Fitzpatrick concludes. “I have never been more excited about what the future holds for Boden Group and the impact we know we can have on the wonderful people in the FM industry”