Nicholas Georgiou shares his rules for success and spills on his most memorable placement

When did you join us and what were you doing before Marks Sattin?

I joined Marks Sattin in November 2016 at the ripe age of 19. Before this, I was an electrical apprentice.

What’s the best thing about working at Marks Sattin?

For me it’s the flexibility and autonomy. Of course, when you first start you need to find your feet, but once you hit your KPIs and are established in your market, you are trusted to do your job. 

Do you feel like you’ve got a clear career path with us and why?

Definitely. When I joined Marks Sattin, I am pretty sure I was the first non-graduate junior hire. At the time, I had no experience or understanding of the financial world or recruitment. The management team accommodated this and I spent my first two months as an intern, learning from the best on all things from what our clients do to the full recruitment process. After a few months I was promoted to Associate Consultant where I was solely working with candidates. After yet another promotion to consultant, I was challenged with starting a new desk from scratch. This proved really successful and the compliance desk has flourished ever since. This challenge led me to my new title of senior consultant. The next step for me would be either working towards becoming a manager or a principal consultant. The value at Marks Sattin lies in the way you aren’t syphoned into one path, they give you different options.

How do you keep yourself motivated on the roller coaster of recruitment?

This is a great question as it is one of the hardest things. Recruitment is known to have a high turnover, I think this is due to people enjoying the highs but not being able to deal with the lows.

For me, the best way to keep motivated is to realise that you cannot control everything and luck will play a big part in most of the processes you go through. The second is to have a balance in your life. In my first nine months in a 360 consultant role I did nothing else apart from live sleep and breathe recruitment, which resulted in great revenue but led to me being burning out. It’s safe to say I have learnt my lesson!

It’s really beneficial to have an end goal in recruitment and be disciplined in order to achieve it, such as buying a house, making £10,000 or buying a new car. Mine has always been the ability to own my own time and manage that myself. I discipline myself and live by the code “fear kills more dreams than failure ever will” and apply this to all aspects of my life. By having these goals you know you are constantly working towards something.

What is your most memorable placement?

Definitely my second retainer! I was emailed by a client saying that another client had passed them my details. Great start in my mind! The initial conversations were very consultative and they told me they were speaking to other agencies in order to determine who would get the role. They decided to work with me and I quickly found them a number of suitable candidates and placed one resulting in a total fee of around £40k!

Where will we find you at the weekend? 

At the gym. I do a sport called Crossfit which is essentially a horrible mix of Olympic weightlifting, gymnastics and cardio.

If you would like to read more stories from our employee spotlight series or have an anonymous chat to our internal recruitment team about anything recruitment career related, visit our Careers site where you can use our online chat function!