My Ambition is to

MICHAEL HEWITT, DIRECTOR AT CORVUS

My first six months in recruitment were a disaster. I was recruiting in the Aviation industry focusing on licensed aircraft engineers, globally. After six months, I realised that what I was doing wasn’t working for me. I wanted to focus on the local market so that I could get out and meet people.

After I moved to recruit in the Construction sector, I really started to enjoy recruitment. I liked the fast-paced, mentally stimulating work and the ability to impact businesses and people’s careers for the better. I’ve taken this approach forward throughout my career and have always done my best to match the right people to the right jobs. One of my fears as a recruiter is taking somebody out of a job that they are happy in and putting them into one that they hate. Moving jobs is a big deal and there is always a risk involved. If I do my job properly, I can negate those risks, which leads to the growth of careers and businesses.

A key turning point in my perspective in recruitment was when I had completed a copywriting course in London. I’d always been quite a creative person until I worked in recruitment. Standard recruitment training has a tendency to squeeze the creativity out of you and focuses on moulding each consultant as a carbon copy of the others. The course proved that it was okay to bring more of myself into my writing.

After the training, my approach to recruitment changed. Instead of working on 15-20 vacancies per month which is quite typical for recruitment, I started working on just three or four. This meant that I could really get to understand my clients and also provide a higher level of service to candidates. I honed my craft to provide a more personalised experience which proved to be far more effective and efficient.

In January 2019 I moved to Corvus. The culture at Corvus is a perfect match for me – I have the freedom to work how I want to and also the ability to drive change and get involved with the strategic direction of the business. We’re a real value-driven company and everyone has the same end goal of doing things the right way, looking after people and nobody is afraid to try new things.

September 2020 was a big month for me. I became a dad and I was also appointed as a director of Corvus. This was challenging on a personal and professional level, but the support and confidence that I got from Ian Weatherup (MD) really helped me settle into my new role.

I’ve always been highly driven and I’m constantly looking for ways that we can improve our offering as a business. In late January, we launched Corvus Assured®, a recruitment methodology designed to save businesses time and money by ultimately increasing the accuracy of their hires through a combination of science and our extensive recruitment expertise as a business. Corvus is at the start of a big growth journey in the way that we support businesses to recruit in the future.

With Corvus Assured, we have a powerful solution to increase the accuracy of hires but there are always areas for improvement. We’re advocates of diversity and inclusion. A diverse workforce isn’t just right, research suggests that diverse teams perform better – a study by Boston Consulting group found that diverse companies produced 19% more revenue. The long-term plans for Corvus genuinely excite me: we have a fantastic team of highly experienced and principled consultants who really live by our values and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us.

“The culture at Corvus is a perfect match for me – I have the freedom to work how I want to and also the ability to drive change and get involved with the strategic direction of the business.”