An interview with Jacqui Barratt, Founder & CEO at Salt
We sit down with Jacqui Barratt, Founder & CEO at Salt. Salt is a leading global recruitment agency, specializing in digital talent and their mission is to create futures to make client's life easier.
How did you end up at Welovesalt and what problem does Salt solve for its clients?
I founded Salt with my wonderful brother and we have another business partner Paul who ironically also had a recruitment business called Salt and we bought them together to #createfutures. We bring candidates and clients together to help them achieve their objectives across the digital eco system. It is a privilege to do what we do and positively impact and influence both individuals and businesses.
As the Founder & CEO, what are your main responsibilities at Salt?
The role of the CEO is a varied role and I read recently that the CEO should focus only on doing the things no one else can do in the business - to ensure personal efficiency. I would like to think my role is to ensure we never lose sight of our purpose, that we stay true to who we are and remain obsessive about our customers, both our candidates and clients. At the same time it is my role to help grow and develop the wonderful team we have so whether they stay or leave Salt, they leave with more than they arrived with.
How do you lead your team to organize and improve the marketing-sales process to increase sales and enhance the customer experience?
We are staunch supporters of the Net Promoter Score and have partnered with the team at Perceptive for a number of years to ensure we are delivering a great experience for our candidates and clients. We survey every client we work on a role with and every candidate we interview so we can continue to learn, improve and hold ourselves accountable and innovate where we need to. Listening to both customer groups is critical to our ability to develop and tailor solutions - recruitment is not one size fits all. We are dealing with people and we must never forget they have a beating heart.
At ColdFire, when we look at our clients' Marketing and Advertising strategies, they vary greatly. Some have found a single, scalable client acquisition process while others thrive on a mix of top-of-funnel strategies. How would you summarize the overarching revenue-focused strategy of Salt, and what key elements does it encompass?
At Salt we have two customer groups our clients and candidates, their needs and journeys will be different. Then when you take into account our specialisations we work across, the journey and need of a UX Designer may be quite different to that of a Full Stack Developer. Then a client who is seeking a permanent team member may have different needs of a client who wants to bring on board a skillset for an interim need. Therefore our strategies will vary however customer acquisition and retention is part of everyones role at Salt. Our client philosophy has always been about building from the inside out so we grow with our clients and build retention and loyalty.
What is an efficient marketing technique that you've implemented at Salt or previous companies, which you believe is underutilized by most management teams - and why do you think that is?
I am not a marketing expert but I very rarely see a truly integrated marketing approach in many organisations where offline and online are in harmony. As a result I think we are trying to balance the human touch with digital and not lose sight of the fact we are dealing with people about their aspirations and business objectives.
Has your C-level team experimented with some kind of cold outbound strategy (like cold email)? If yes what was the general outcome and if no, why not?
We utilise targeted email campaigns to share insights and information with clients both current and prospect. We have found this to be successful in building engagement and providing value whether our clients are actively recruiting or not.
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