We strongly believe that people are the cornerstone of any service business and the decision was taken to grow purely organically, meaning that staff joining the business had the opportunity to progress at the speed they could. This selection process was to be based meritocratically on performance, attitude and work ethic.

To this day, we are proud that all our staff have come through the ranks and that every director, manager, team leader and consultant started at the company as a trainee. Through the business culture, training and leadership programmes, SmithCorp takes on a responsibility to offer all our staff clear progression paths.

'People, Passion and Progress’ was the goal in 2004 and remains unchanged today.

From the outset the strategy was to build a strong margin, non PSL reliant, multi-brand recruitment team servicing the UK via a strong network of business developers from single site locations, not a branch network. Coupled with that, we aimed to be the fastest growing privately owned company in the UK by our 4th birthday. In 2008 we were ranked number four in The Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100. We followed this up with two consecutive entries (2009, 2010) – an achievement that at the time had only been met by one other recruitment company and nine businesses nationally in the 12 years the awards had run.

2008 to 2012 saw the global financial crisis hit and the plan for this period was to remain profitable and ensure that we had the platform for growth when the inevitable confidence in the market returned. Energy was focused on the education sector, business improvement projects, re-shuffling assets and exiting low margin/non-aligned businesses, developing new businesses, charitable work, establishing a training academy and creating an extensive client and candidate database. In the subsequent five years (to the end of 2017), SmithCorp has grown from 50 staff to 140, and £14 million to £30 million turnover.

January 2014 saw the start of a planned succession programme to run the business under a new executive board. This has now been in place more than three years.

The aims and goals of the Executive Board are outlined in the ‘Our Business’ section, under ‘Our Vision’, as well as ‘Meet the Exec’.

In 2015 SmithCorp became the largest privately owned Education Recruitment Specialist in the UK providing temp and perm provision for Further Education, Secondary Schools and Primary Schools UK wide.