A Chat with Kaler Pilgrim, Founder at Digital Recruitment Agency: Futureheads

Kaler Pilgrim

Futureheads is a digital recruitment agency that works hard to help clients and candidates navigate the digital industry – putting the best people into the best roles.
Futureheads recruit for a handful of digital disciplines, rather than tackling a bit of everything. That means a deep and genuine engagement with a niche community and its issues, conversations and events. And lots of homework for the committed team of consultants.

When you talk to a Futurehead you talk to a specialist who ‘gets’ what you do and what you’re looking for. Insightful, helpful, and refreshing.
 
 
Futureheads Recruitment | LinkedIn
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I am one of four founders at Futureheads, three of us are women. We all met at a small boutique agency in London and worked there for years. When it was sold to a larger international player we stayed on for three years and had amazing training – but we saw that there was a gap in the market for a really personal service and that the small boutique agency feel was missing from the scene.

We also collectively wanted to show the recruitment industry that it was possible to be a profitable business with high morals, and we set out with the intention to provide excellent employment opportunities and experience for our staff, without the single pursuit for money alone.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
There were some obvious learnings and things we needed to adapt throughout the pandemic to ensure that we all continued to communicate and could work harmoniously remotely. But we also looked under the bonnet and developed our ‘people, purpose and planet’ approach to really drive forwards on some of our values too.

This has seen us take action on climate change by signing up with Ecologi, an organisation that helps others to reduce their carbon footprint.

We introduced internal business processes to improve EDI and updated our messaging so that clients and candidates know how important this is for us.

We had run a well-being programme for many years, but in 2020 we recognised a real need to step this up and take it even more seriously, so we implemented various programmes to support employee mental health.

In general, we learnt to communicate better with our clients and candidates about the things they care about, thanks to a series of social media polls and our insightful salary survey. These gave us a clear snapshot of the digital recruitment industry and what matters to those working in it so that we can share what we know for the good of the sector.
 

What can we hope to see from Futureheads in the future?

 
The digital industry is growing at a rapid rate and we are seeing the job market boom. To support businesses that are scaling up in the space we have developed Futureheads ON – working on the ground with clients who are on big digital transformation trajectories to help source them the digital talent they need. We act almost as an extension of their team and work across multiple hires.

We have also been investing in research and methodologies that will help our clients be truly diverse. As a recruitment business, we believe we can be a real conduit for change in this space so we’ve started hosting events that can help our clients improve inclusion in their workplaces.