10 year anniversary for brightonandhovejobs.com

In honour of the 10 year anniversary of BrightonandHoveJobs.com and for this month’s cover feature, Sussex Business Times delves deeper into the inspiration behind the award-winning company committed to providing solutions to finding the best jobs locally. We hear from Love Local Jobs company Founder, Gary Peters.

Can you tell us your initial inspiration behind BrightonandHove-Jobs.com

I really can’t believe it’s been ten years already. Where does the time go? The inspiration behind it was simple, we had an opportunity to fill a big gap in the market and more importantly, we wanted to make a positive difference to our local communities, particularly focussing on inspiring local future generations.

This goes back to 2009/2010 during the last recession; a pretty bad one at the time. Will it compete with today? Who knows, but there was an exciting opportunity to start something new and I was set on giving something back to the local community I had grown up in.

I was very lucky after I left school. I didn’t leave with much and I was unexpectedly given a job in recruitment many years ago now, an opportunity for which I am very thankful for now as I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for the opportunity that somebody gave me all those moons ago.

We developed a local job advertising platform that advertised local job opportunities but also worked in partnership with the region’s best employers, coming together to raise the career and life aspirations of our local communities with a particular focus on our next generations.

Guys like American Express, Bupa, Domestic & General, Legal & General, City College and EDF loved the idea and committed to supporting us. Although they weren’t hiring much at the time because of the recession, they were very keen to remain visible in the market – particularly the local market – and help do whatever they could with us at the time to help inspire next generations to be strong, dig deep and realise their full potential, despite all of the doom and gloom surrounding them.

So 10 years on, we have more than achieved our goal. We have grown our reach and become LoveLocalJobs.com, we have advertised thousands of jobs in those years and we have placed thousands people into employment; but what I’m most proud of is the work that we have done with schools – all of this work has and will continue to positively change the lives of future generations for years to come.

Our inspiration was to make a difference to the local communities we live in and we’ve definitely done that!

What are the core values of the business and has that changed over the past 10 years?

Our core values have always been very important to us, particularly with the work we do with schools. Hope, resilience, determination, grit, trying your absolute best, excellence, integrity, and as important as all of those; having fun. This is always very important to us and has in fact helped us through many a tough time with the business and the setting up of our Foundation; they work on both a personal and a professional level. They are values that we take very seriously and they are a part of our pitch, our solutions, our every day work and particularly through the tough time that we’re all going through currently, we need them now more than ever. They are integral to every one of the programmes that we deliver and we take very seriously. I would encourage any business to revisit their values occasionally, but always have some that you stick to through the tough times and the good because they will help see you through.

How do you differentiate from other job boards or recruiters?

Simply speaking what separates us from our competitors is the fact that 1) we’re local 2) we work in partnership with our partners to help strengthen their recruitment pipelines 3) we help them to considerably strengthen their local CSR commitments, helping them to raise their company profile and involve staff in everything we do and 4) something that you don’t often see often with many online platforms is that we have a mostly face-to-face presence with almost all of the work that we do.

All of the employers we work with are local businesses that are committed to raising the profile of their business, recruiting the best talent they can locally and all are committed to making a positive difference to their local communities and future generations.

Can you tell us about the Love Local Jobs Foundation?

We officially launched the Love Local Jobs Foundation about two years ago now. Harry Redknapp launched it for us which was fantastic but really it’s been a build up of the last ten years’ worth of work that has been spun out into a pure social enterprise or, hopefully in the very near future, a full blown charity. That is certainly what we’re aiming for over the next year or so to ensure we can change the lives of as many people as possible.

The Foundation is essentially the “arm” of the business that now purely concentrates on working with schools and employers to raise the aspirations of our local next generation. We work with many schools across Sussex, bringing employers of all shapes and sizes to them and facilitating informative and inspirational conferences, events and trips away that really do challenge young people to become the best version of themselves.

We are all surrounded with very negative media these days – especially with access to so much social media – so the confidence of young people is not surprisingly very low. When you are surrounded by people, images and news of activities that look so perfect and wonderful but are, in reality, so fake and awfully shallow, young people are very easily guided into thinking that is how they have to be. Sadly that leads to all sorts of issues; depression, low self-esteem etc and actually this has really started to impact on adults as well. We appear to be surrounded by a world that looks so perfect and it makes us feel like ours really isn’t. Far too many people are living a life of trying to be something they’re not, seeking ‘perfection’ and it’s sad, really sad.

Our programmes are particularly focused on finding your inner self and learning to love who you are, no matter your size, hair colour or skin colour for example. Particularly now, it’s hugely important to realise that you really are incredible and if you learn to adopt a growth mindset, you can achieve amazing things by being true to yourself and just trying your absolute best.

The employers we work with are varied in size and are all absolutely committed to changing the lives and the outlook for our local young people, and it’s an area that I absolutely love. It’s key to me and as we mentioned our core values before – this work supports the core values we have always had as an organisation and we are determined to use them to keep helping people achieve the most amazing things locally.

We were all given a break at some time in our career, and the feeling that you get when you are given an opportunity is special. You never forget it. It’s great to be able to give that opportunity back to other people in your local area – people like you, people like you once were who just need that first break or a flash of inspiration.

How has Covid-19 and the past few months affected the business and how have you adapted?

It’s fair to say that Covid has hit us very hard. A lot of the team have had to be placed on furlough but they have remained so incredibly positive and I am so thankful for that.

Schools have been shut and employers have had the heart ripped out of them, so their absolute focus right now has to be survival. This again links to our core values, for those guys and for us. We are having to dig very deep in order to survive. Fortunately before furlough started the team were able to create some online content in the way of video and resources that schools have been using really positively. The feedback from those has been incredible.

The reality is that we are working incredibly hard to find businesses that are able to thrive through this very tough time and can find a way to support us. I’m delighted to say we do have businesses that are doing well and are committed to our long-term success within both Love Local Jobs and The Foundation. For me personally it reignites why we do this in the first place; we do this to help our local communities and while it’s tough for us, there are people fighting much harder battles than we are right now.

Even with everything that is going on right now, there are still opportunities to change, evolve and adapt to what will be a very different world in months to come. Remote working is becoming pretty much the norm now and there will be a lot more changes, but we are under no illusion that the next few months in particular are going to be very tough.

Companies are planning for redundancies, furlough will stop and there is a huge amount of uncertainty out there. Despite all of that we are going to carry on doing everything we can to ensure that our clients and our younger generations have the tools and inspiration they need to come out of this stronger.

What does the future hold for LLJ?

Well firstly we are still 100% committed to doing what we already do but even better. That will always be our main focus. We have so much more to offer through both the job board and foundation and I’m really looking forwards to taking that forwards with our amazing team.

There is also an opportunity for us to work more proactively with partners of ours who are still recruiting, or planning to recruit very soon. Over recent months several have asked us to provide more traditional recruitment services on their behalf and it’s an opportunity I’m really interested to explore.

The job board can of course be a cost effective form of recruitment. If there are job seekers looking for the opportunities that you post at the time then it is a very cheap and cost effective way of recruiting. It absolutely should be the first port of call for any employer out there. That said, there is also a race to recruit the absolute best talent now, maybe talent that isn’t proactively looking for work right now, especially within areas with skill shortages and at the mid-senior levels. Companies are using this time to considerably reduce costs and boost profit and they will need the very best talent to help them do this. It’s not just about survival right now, it’s about being strategic and recruiting the best staff to ensure you come out of this stronger. Consequently I am being asked more and more to support senior end recruitment solutions and this is something will start supporting over the next few months.

This approach gives us an exciting opportunity to become a more holistic recruitment partner across the region and with the expertise that we have built up over the last 20 years with various different organisations, I am certainly up for that challenge.

A Final word from Gary

I’d really like to thank every single person, business and organisation that has played their part in making LoveLocalJobs.com such a huge success. Your passion, energy and commitment to wanting to make our community a better place is both humbling and inspiring, I can’t thank you enough.

Equally, if you or anyone out there has any recruitment concerns, growth opportunities to plan for and/or you would like to explore supporting the work we do with schools, we would love to speak with you.

Good luck to everyone out there, stay safe and thank you again for all of your amazing support.