ELEVATOR PITCH
SR2 stands for Socially Responsible Recruitment. We are a community-driven tech recruitment start-up.
The recruitment industry doesn’t have a great reputation – and we’re here to change that. The cornerstone of our business is built on putting people ahead of profits. It’s only by prioritising our people, our clients, our candidates and our local community that we can be truly successful. And the more successful we are, the more everyone benefits. It’s a perfect winning circle.
OUR STORY
The Idea: To create a community-focused recruitment company that has a genuine impact, cuts through the stereotype and has a modern people-first business culture to match.
The business was inspired by a book by Dale Partridge called People Over Profit. Having drawn inspiration from the book, founder Chris Sheard started to plan how he could translate what Dale had done with Sevenly into a new IT recruitment company that puts people and the community first. Here began the idea of Socially Responsible Recruitment, SR2 for short.
We have multiple USP’s as a business that differentiates us both from our competitors in recruitment but also from other local businesses. We have achieved a lot in such a short space of time as a business ensuring that we deliver on our promises.
Local Community
We donate 5% of our profits to local charities, we have so far gifted just shy of £9,000 to our 2018 charity, Caring in Bristol. We will shortly be donating to our 2019 charity partner Changes Bristol who does amazing work in supporting people in our community with their mental health recovery.
The whole SR2 team has provided over 100 collective hours of volunteering to date across various projects with Feed Bristol’s Homeless.
We have created a group called ‘Bristol Technology Volunteers’ having identified an appetite within the tech community to give back and put their skills to use within a charity or NFP on a volunteer basis. Lots of charities have technical gripes although don’t have the funds to fix them. With our platform, they can connect with techies who want to help. Whether it’s a new website or database, app development, new equipment, they can turn to Bristol Tech Volunteers for support, something that historically they weren’t able to do!
We have also created ‘Women Rock’, a platform to champion diversity within the South-West Tech ecosystem. We consult, gather information, share stories and give advice to businesses to help them alleviate diversity imbalances. This means helping them establish how to attract, retain and promote diverse talent in their technical teams. We have a blog which contains a myriad of inspirational career stories that we hope will be seen by under-represented budding techies, thus accelerating a more diverse tech community locally.
Tech Community
We invest heavily into the tech community by supporting, organizing and creating various Tech meetups that are free to attend and facilitate networking and the chance to inspire and collaborate with others in a specific field. To date, we have organized and supported over 40 meetups with a combined 4,000 local technical individuals in attendance! Also, we’re proud to say that our consultants don’t just organize these meets and disappear, they take an active interest in the talks ask questions and try and make others feel welcome. They also do everything from arranging venues, speakers, catering, event tickets and the general running of the night.
Culture
A key part of our people over profit ethos has been about setting the right culture for our people. We want all our consultants to maintain a healthy work/life and, in the recruitment industry, this is something that is nearly always overlooked.
To achieve this, we offer a flexible modern culture with benefits that range from an unlimited holiday allowance, flexi start & end times to extended lunch breaks for people to take care of life admin or take advantage of their free gym membership! All our team are encouraged to get out of the office and volunteer with our chosen charities, which is great as they can see the impact that they are having within the local community firsthand. We also run a team bootcamp on a Monday at Starks Fitness where we are put through our paces – it ensures everyone is on tip-top form for the week ahead and further contributes towards the goal of all of our team having a healthy body & healthy mind.
What is the company’s vision for the future?
The aim is to build SR2 to be the most ethical and community-focused tech recruitment company in the UK – pouring our energy into supporting multiple charities as well as the UK tech ecosystem.
