Movemeon employer spotlights are a series of articles highlighting our clients. They detail the internal company culture, employee experience and outline their ideal candidate.

Here, we speak to Mark, the Commercial Talent Specialist for Comply Advantage.

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Please tell us a bit about yourself and your role within Comply Advantage

My title is Commercial Talent Specialist – I lead recruitment for everything outside of tech and product,  e.g. sales, marketing, customer success, project management, ops, finance, legal… on a global basis. I’m the only person in the business who does commercial recruitment right now, so I’m really busy!

What is Comply Advantage’s plan for the next 5 years, and what makes it a unique company to join?

5 years is actually a long time-frame for us — the business is only 6 years old, and we couldn’t have imagined 6 years ago that we’d be where we are now. The sky’s the limit in 5 years’ time! 

For now, we are heavily investing in bringing in senior talent to upweight our leadership team. This brings a lot of potential growth, and we are doing this because we are starting to target bigger clients. We want to become the go-to name in our niche, but to do that we really need to get our name out there and increase our revenue. We’ve set ourselves some really ambitious targets – we are hoping to double our revenue from this year to next. In the long-term, we don’t know yet.

In summary, this is a really exciting time to join – we raised $50m of funding back in July, and we are investing that really heavily in the people and the product.

Do you have any typical career paths within the company that consultants might take?

There are lots of opportunities because we are growing, but historically we haven’t had very set career paths. What I can say, we’ve had a couple of people who joined from a consultancy background who then moved into strategy and more senior strategy roles, and into the product team. What we always say is that we’ll always do our best to retain talent – if people have an interest in branching out into different areas, we’ll do our best to facilitate that.

How do you approach diversity at Comply Advantage?

It’s something that’s really important to us – I actually sit on the diversity committee. But the structure and action plan has only really started to come together recently as we’ve been in a planning phase for the last 12 months or so.

As a start, we’ve done several initiatives in recruitment specifically – we’ve tried to remove bias from job adverts, hiring managers completed bias training and we have a D&I team which in itself is a diverse group. We also did some fundraising for Black Lives Matter, and the amount raised was matched by our COO. We are not somewhere where we have a framework in place, but our senior leadership are really bought into the importance of D&I and it’s clear to see it’s something really important to the wider business.

Do you have any tips for other people recruiting around being objective or any other helpful tips?

I did a lot of research into hiring bias and I really pushed that out towards hiring managers. I highly recommend looking into that – there’s so much out there on the internet; you just have to look for it. Additionally, the main thing is to understand that diversity is crucial, but you won’t be able to change the world overnight – just do the best you can do.

Which teams at Comply Advantage like to hire consultants?

When we started out we were quite consultant-heavy, with a lot of people from consulting or strategy backgrounds. It’s something we’ve moved away from a little bit, but there’s still a place for consultants, particularly within ops and programme or project management. That’s probably where consultants are most relevant right now. Additionally, revenue ops, where there’s a clear strategy focus, would also work. 

What was your impression of the candidate pool on Movemeon?

For a long time, we weren’t sure what we were looking for, so we interviewed a lot of strong candidates who nevertheless ended up not being right for what we wanted in the end. But otherwise, I’d say really strong.

And what was your impression of Movemeon and the support you received?

At first, I felt like I was getting too many CVs, but we had a few configuration calls and after that it was amazing. I really valued getting a small shortlist and being in touch constantly, but without pushiness, which is a real pet peeve of mine. There was enough soft chasing to remind me if I’d missed something, which was really good.

What makes Movemeon stand out from other agencies?

Movemeon genuinely seems like a specialist in bringing consultants and ex-consultants to companies. You don’t pretend to be anything you are not, which is great. I also like that you have your own platform where consultants can go, so they also know that you are a specialist and you are in touch with employers.

What is the best piece of hiring advice you’ve ever received?

This is important for people moving from agency to in-house – you are looking for the best person for the business now, whereas before you were looking for someone that could do the job just to get the job done. That was the biggest adjustment for me when I started in-house.

And what is the best piece of career advice?

Don’t always chase the money! It changed my work-life happiness when I took that advice a few years ago.

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