Ribble Valley entrepreneur Tom Keighley has launched an innovative, data-driven sales recruitment business that uses social media to find the best candidates, writes Jan Woolley
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oung entrepreneur Tom Keighley has spent all of his working life in dynamic sales environments. He began his career in Manchester working for large companies selling everything from training packages in leadership to managing a team of 50 sales people in a UK-wide business – all before he had reached the age of 30. When he took over sales for a national IT service provider in 2019, his career was flying, but the pandemic struck: “It was a sink or swim moment,” he recalls. “A lot of organisations had on-premise infrastructures, which didn’t allow them to work from home. The company I was with developed a private cloud infrastructure to facilitate working from home and, as you can imagine, it helped lots of companies deal with the pandemic and business boomed!
PURSUIT EFFECTIVELY SHIES AWAY FROM THE TRADITIONAL RECRUITMENT MARKET, USING SOCIAL MEDIA AND DATA-LED METHODOLOGY “We helped lots of private and public organisations and I was in charge of a team of account directors supporting companies with the major transition of working from home.” Tom, who is from Whalley, was subsequently head hunted by another company where he was appointed sales and commercial director, but adds: “We were on the right trajectory so I should have felt great, but I didn’t really feel anything. So, I got thinking. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, thinking of setting up my own company and making notes of my ideas on my phone. I knew sales inside out – but I had always struggled to find good sales people.” Tom named his new business Pursuit: “You pursue a job and clients are always in pursuit of good sales candidates and I came up with an Instagram tag line, ‘start the pursuit’. So, Pursuit was born with the aim of becoming the leading specialist sales recruiter in the market.
