Our Values
At Nine Twenty Recruitment, our values are more than just words. They shape our way to work with clients, candidates and each other every day. Our values; Innovation
Innovation: Staying Ahead
Innovation is often associated with technology, but for us it means something broader. We’re not just recruiters, we’re committed to staying at the forefront of new trends, tools, and strategies shaping the recruitment industry.
According to recent research, 96% of companies believe employer brand and reputation impact revenue, yet only 44% actually monitor that impact. Innovation means being in that 44% using data, insight, and market intelligence to make smarter hiring decision. Knowing this it influences how we work across all of our recruitment solutions;
Traditional Recruitment
Full-service Recruitment start to finish. Our wrap-around recruitment service is exactly what it sounds like. We take care of everything, from briefing, to sourcing, shortlisting, interviewing and supporting, we manage the entire process so our clients can focus on their business. Its recruitment minus the headache.
Exclusive Search
Dedicated, Focused and Guaranteed. When a business needs certainty that a critical role will be filled and filled with the best our Exclusive Search gives them our full attention. We search the entire market, provide detailed data and insights, and leaves no stone unturned to identify the right person.
RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing)
Whether you’re scaling fast, launching into a new market, or simply need extra resource our RPO solution integrates seamlessly into your business. Our RPO solution becomes an extension of the businesses HR. We manage the recruitment end to end on brand within the culture, delivering a flexible and scalable solution tailored to their needs.
For Nine Twenty recruitment innovation is about combining people, data, technology and market experience to create the best possible outcome for everyone.
Agile, built for a fast-moving hiring market
The hiring market doesn’t stand still, so neither does Nine Twenty Recruitment
Businesses can move from growth mode to urgent hire needs in such a short time frame. Candidates are making career decisions faster than ever before and the best talent is usually off the market in a
number of days.
Being agile means we can adapt quickly to the change in priorities, build up support and provide the level of recruitment partnerships each client needs at that moment. Whether it’s a single specialist hire, a confidential executive search or a full recruitment function through RPO, our approach is designed around speed, flexibility and responsiveness. Being agile is about moving with purpose and helping our clients secure the talent they need without any unnecessary delays.
Integrity, Honest Advice even if its uncomfortable
Integrity is one of the values we protect the most. Recruitment works best when there is trust and that trust is built through honest conversations, sometimes that does include sharing advice which may be difficult to hear.
Not every honest conversation in recruitment is a comfortable one. Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do for a client isn’t find them a candidate, it’s tell them the truth about whether they’re ready to hire at all.
That was the situation we found ourselves in with an SME client who wanted to bring in a Marketing Executive to build their marketing strategy from scratch.
On paper, it looked like a straightforward brief. In practice, it was a role with no precedent, no internal marketing knowledge, and no one on the team who could show this person what they should actually be doing.
That gap matters more than it might seem. Research into first marketing hires at growing businesses consistently finds that the biggest risk isn’t a skills gap, it’s the lack of structure and support around the role, which leaves even strong, capable people reacting to everything instead of building anything.
The Question We Had to Ask
We could have run the search as briefed. It would have been a straightforward placement. Instead, we went back to the client with a harder question: Without previous experience in this exact role, and without anyone in the business who could mentor or guide them, did they have the fundamentals in place to help someone succeed in this role?
The answer, once they thought it through properly, was no.
This isn’t a rare problem. UK onboarding research shows that new hires who lack clear guidance and manager support are consistently the ones most likely to disengage or leave early, and estimates of the cost of a failed hire commonly run to tens of thousands of pounds once recruitment, ramp-up time, and lost productivity are factored in. Hiring into a gap that big, without support in place, isn’t a shortcut to a marketing function. It’s a setup for failure, for the candidate and the business.
Backing the Advice with Evidence, Not Opinion
This wasn’t us simply telling the client what we thought. It was a conversation grounded in research and market data, showing them, clearly, what tends to happen when a first-in-function hire is left to figure things out alone, and what it would take to genuinely set the role up to succeed.
Not every business is an employer of choice, and not every role is ready to be filled the moment a client thinks it is. Small, growing businesses don’t always have the track record they’d like. Established businesses carry legacy issues. Every client has something that could make a role harder to fill, or harder to succeed in, than they first realise. Our job is to say so, even when it’s not what people want to hear.
It’s a difficult conversation to have, but it’s the honest ones that help clients position themselves properly, to candidates, and to their own growth plans.
The Bottom Line
We didn’t place a Marketing Executive for this client that quarter and that was the right outcome. An easy placement now would have been a difficult conversation later, for the client and for the person we’d have placed. Integrity, for us, means being willing to tell a client “not yet” when it’s the right call, even when it costs us a fee in the short term.
Because the value of a recruitment partner isn’t measured by how many roles they fill. It’s measured by whether they’ll tell you the truth about the one you’re about to.
At Nine Twenty Recruitment integrity means telling the truth, using data to support our recommendations and always having our clients and candidates best interests at heart.
Entrepreneurial, empowering people to grow
Nine Twenty was built with entrepreneurial spirit that still continues through to today and has helped shape the business. Take Karen as a great example, Karen worked at Nine Twenty, part owning nine Twenty Manufacturing before going through an MBO (management buy-out), this demonstrates our belief in empowering our leadership team to take ownership and drive their growth. At Nine Twenty we have created opportunities for people within the team to become part owners of their business. This includes Kerry McFarlane and Chris Lowden from Nine Twenty, Kerry part owns the Nine Twenty Marketing Recruitment while Chris part owns the Technology Recruitment. As well as running their own Networking communities including The Scottish Marketing Network and Tech Talk X.
This has helped shape and create a work culture where our team think like business owners, take on responsibility for results and encourage new ideas. It also means work with consultants who genuinely understand the challenges of building a business as many of our clients have done exactly that.
At Nine Twenty Recruitment entrepreneurial means thinking ambitious, curious and always looking at the long term value.