ABOUT

Tell us who you are!

My name is Rick Kumar, I'm the Co-Founder and Director of an award winning recruitment and headhunting business called MODA consult. I'm a 46 years old proud British Geordie Indian, originally from Newcastle and I studied in Leicester, and moved to London 25 years ago.

I studied marketing and advertising at university and kickstarted my career in creative agencies. I spent 12 years working my way up in creative agencies, making advertising, integrated and digital work for brands like SEGA, Pro Evolution Soccer and other gaming clients and youth brands.

I always wanted to run my own business, and made the move into recruitment and set MODA consult up with my business partner (who is also my wife!).

So what do you actually do?

We work with outstanding companies and help them find their talent, and build their teams for success. 

Our clients range from top advertising and creative agencies, through to digital consultancies and innovation agencies, and also leading brands and businesses. We specialise in marketing, creative, advertising and digital roles - working with both service led businesses and direct with marketing departments for start ups and fortune 500 businesses. 

We help our clients find the best talent out there, and we're very fortunate that we also work with really smart, diverse and super creative candidates who can genuinely make a difference to an organisation.

What has your career path been?

I started off working in creative agencies, and this genuinely gave me a great foundation into my current role and business. I graduated in marketing and advertising and it made sense start working in agencies, moving up the ranks from Executive up to Director level. 

I worked with some great brands, would shoot some great work, make TV ads and other comms creative work. All very exciting!

However, the more senior you get in creative agencies you tend to move away from making the work and get involved with the finances and running the business with clients. I enjoyed it, but it was time for a new challenge. 

I actually liked making the work, but I was never one of the creative brains, or the strategic brains - I don't think I was quite good enough if I'm really honest. I was very entrepreneurial however, and had the ability to generate income and wanted to do my own thing. However, I didn't want to start a creative agency so I was a bit stuck.

It just so happened, one of my current clients gave me some advice 15 years ago. This person was a CEO of a top creative agency, and I was actually interviewing for a role at his agency. It was the 5th and final interview, a very long process, and we both concluded that this role wasn't right for me, and even the industry wasn't right. We had a really open and honest chat and I always remember his advice - "I think you'd be great at recruitment" and I listened. Funnily enough the same person is still a client, and their business is our biggest client now. 

And he was right, I started a role at recruitment business, became a Director pretty quickly and 12 years ago set my own business up, MODA consult. We won an award for Best Client Service in our first year, and we've grown from strength to strength.

What is the best part of your job?

Speaking to people and genuinely being able to help them out.

Finding someone a dream job is the best feeling ever, and I don't think you ever get bored of that feeling.

People tend to leave jobs because they're either unhappy, or they want to better themselves and progress. And if you can make that happen for someone it's very rewarding for all parties involved in the process, including your clients.

Why do you do your job?

I know this sounds really corny, but it's because I care.

And I'm slightly addicted to what I do! I really enjoy helping our clients and finding people their next dream job.

One piece of advice for someone starting in your role?

Care. That's all I can say.

Treat people with respect, respond to people, bend over backwards to help, be honest and transparent. Don't be driven by money. If you care and have respect the successes will come like you won't believe.

Any parting words?

Don't chase the money, it becomes too stressful when you do that. Just focus on being the best version of yourself, be a decent human being. If someone emails you, reply back to them, return their calls or reply to a text message.

It genuinely makes a big difference. It's the simple things that make a huge difference.

DAY IN THE LIFE

Every day is completely different, there's so much variety in this role as we work with so many different clients and talent.

But I tend to wake up at 6:30am, check emails then get ready for work. Help with the kids, drop one of them off and I'm at my desk by 8:30am.

I always plan my day, as much as I can though as new opportunities and challenges always come your way throughout the day! Most days are always spent interviewing and speaking to candidates, this is either face to face, video calls or telephone interviews.

We are either checking their suitability for our live or future briefs, getting to know the candidates and understand their skill set and experience, to see where we can help them and place them into roles.

I also spend the day getting feedback from candidates following on from their interviews, and we like to get as much detail as possible from them to help our clients and understand how the interview went, in some cases we are also talking to candidates about presentations they are preparing for interviews and we share thoughts and feedback on this prior to final interviews.

The day is also spent speaking directly to our clients, and there’s lots of them! We will speak directly to them to understand their briefs and talent requirements, we discuss job descriptions in detail so we fully understand their business needs.

Clients also use us to understand what’s happening in the market place, and we share market intelligence on things like salary levels, talent movement, the freelance / contract market vs. permanent market and understanding the full talent landscape and talent mapping. Understanding where the best talent is and where they are working is key, and this is a big part of mapping the market place.

We need to understand this and share details with our clients and ensure we are attracting the best talent for the businesses we work for. Another big part of this role is to share feedback with clients following on from interviews, and hopefully chat about job offers and make sure this process runs seamlessly.

Interviews do happen after hours, so it's likely you'll have to take calls after work, but it's no hardship. They're usually good calls to take.

And of course, now we can, sometimes we do get to have a good lunch with clients or candidates!