Father's Day Special: Bringing Honour Back to the Recruiting Profession, with Richard Hoon

How does having a sense of honour help you build relationships at the highest level in your recruitment business? In this episode of the Resilient Recruiter, my guest Richard Hoon will share his perspective gained from a successful 25-year career in recruitment. 

Richard is the founder and CEO of I Search Worldwide and has been a C-Suite search practitioner for over two decades. He is also co-founder and Chairman of the Advisory Board of Validus, a fintech company that is now worth more than $100m.

Richard is also the Chairman of the Centre for Fathering & Dads-for-Life, a 20-year-old charity in Singapore. This is very timely for our parent listeners for the upcoming Father’s Day weekend. Although not related to recruiting, if you are a parent or planning to be a parent sometime in the future, I am sure you will find value in Richard’s wisdom on this topic. 

Episode Outline and Highlights

• [3:16] Centre for Fathering & Dads-for-Life: two approaches to eradicate fatherlessness.
• [9:50]  Richard’s key achievements
• [13:11] How to manage a large business when you can’t be everywhere at once.
• [14:10] Bringing honour back to the recruitment industry
• [18:24] Why we need to shift from contingency to pure retained model
• [23:00] How to handle challenges when dealing with internal recruiters and HR
• [36:30] Never too late to start from zero - how Richard co-founded a fintech company 
• [39:42] Philosophies and strategies when building a larger business.
• [49:52] How art collecting it influences your thought and creativity

Centre for Fathering & Dads-for-Life

Richard is the current Chairman of the Centre for Fathering & Dads-for-Life, a 20-year-old charity in Singapore.  What is the charity about? In Richard’s words: “The goal is to eradicate fatherlessness. Every child born has a father, but the father is not present, is not engaged, not actively contributing to the family. So the child grows up fatherless. Our job is to encourage fathers to be more active and engaged with their children.” 

In order for them to address fatherlessness and the negative impact on children, they take preventative and intervention approaches. “We do events, we do programs, we do training, we do father and child bonding camp, we encourage national events like eating with your family.”

Bringing Honour Back to the Recruitment Agency

Richard believes that having partners that you can trust with the same long-term philosophy is important when you are managing your business, and so is being honourable. For Richard, having those who value honour in the recruitment business is really a minority. “The recruitment business is high grounding... They say things they don’t mean, they say things they don’t know, and probably get a lot of untruths.” He added,  “I don’t want a recruiter’s name, one day, being associated with a second-hand car salesman.”

This is how Richard puts it on how it should be addressed: “This is a very honourable business because when you put people together, you have got to really be responsible for their career, for their future, but you are also responsible for the company... Unfortunately, the lack of training in the recruitment industry probably gets a lot of just short term results.” He added, “If you always say good things, you are already propagating a lie. If there’s anything I would like to do, it’s to bring honour back to the recruiting industry. By making sure recruiters go back to a centered sense of morality.”

Never too late to start 

At the age of 60, Richard Co-founded a fintech company, Validus. For him, it is never too late to start from scratch. Starting from zero, the company today is worth over $100million dollars. 

Richard Hoon Bio and Contact Info

Richard Hoon is the founder and CEO of I Search Worldwide and has been a C-Suite search practitioner for over two decades. He was the Managing Director of Asia for an international executive search franchise and was the General Manager of International SOS. He has held senior and regional roles with companies such as American Express, Tourism Victoria, and Pall Corporation.

Richard is the current Chairman of the Centre for Fathering & Dads-for-Life, a registered charity, and IPC in Singapore. He is a co-founder and Chairman of the Advisory Board of Validus, a fintech company that has received series A funding from a major financial institution. He is the President of the Circumnavigators’ Club and the President of the Palm Island Club. He is also a fellow of the Singapore Institute of Directors.

• Richard on LinkedIn
• I Search Worldwide website link

People and Resources Mentioned

• Centre for Fathering website link
• Doug Bugie on LinkedIn
• James Caan on LinkedIn

Connect with Mark Whitby

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