Meet this year’s NZ RCSA Industry Award winner for Outstanding Medium Agency

Archway Recruitment, is this year’s New Zealand winner of RCSA’s 2021 Outstanding Medium Agency award. Director, Michael McCauley, discuses the win and some of the key strategies that have helped the company grow and achieve more in the last four years than they ever imagined.

We were absolutely thrilled that Archway Recruitment was recognised as the winner of the Outstanding Medium Agency category in only our fourth year of operation.

When we started the business back in 2017, we were clear we wanted to break out of the corporate mould (and suits) we had all grown up to accept, in order to achieve greater work-life balance with our young families and have more fun.

We aspired to develop an agency model that centred around building lasting relationships with our clients and candidates through our deep industry knowledge, delivering a pragmatic and tailored approach for our clients’ differing needs.

We believe that the best strategy for building lasting relationships with clients is to build strong lasting relationships with our consultants!

We’ve managed to build a friendly and open culture where employees bring their whole selves to work and enjoy collaborating as a team to grow the business, as well as their own careers.

The pandemic has been tough for so many businesses and, back in March 2020 we, like most of New Zealand were grappling with how it would play out for us, especially as a relatively young agency.

For a period, recruitment came to a standstill, but we recognised that this provided us with the opportunity to concentrate on checking in with our clients, listening to how they were responding to the situation.

Equally important was to continue a transparent dialogue with our team about our plans for the business during this time. We supported all our staff and maintained retention at 100%. The feedback we received about our approach was positive and paid off once the market has started to move again.

Over the last 24 months we’ve grown our proposition from our origins of recruitment for the Built Environment to now include Accounting, Payroll and Office Administration and Business Support. Our current focus is on growing our temp and contract portfolio and adapting our model to offer more bespoke recruitment solutions for selected clients.

Our team has grown to 14 and we’re always on the lookout for experienced recruiters to join us on our journey in one of our three offices. Our team chat weekly, and we ensure every quarter we meet up in person to celebrate which ensures we maintain the comradery across the team regardless of location. We’ve had some great days out in Martinborough, Queenstown and Waiheke!

We’re focussed on keeping our work patterns flexible and family friendly, juggling 18 kids amongst us and various gym and sporting commitments – theirs and ours. For us it’s about output over hours in the office. For those who do choose to come into the office however, they get to hang out with our office dogs – Abby in Auckland and Maisy in Wellington. We’re working on our Christchurch office recruit.

We’ve certainly achieved more in the last four years that we ever imagined, which includes winning this award. The future’s bright at Archway Recruitment. With a growing client base and team we look forward to continuing to provide creative and informed recruitment solutions to our clients and candidates well into the future.