A GLOBAL recruitment business serving the software and financial technology industries has seen record year-on-year growth of 61 per cent.

Oakstone’s fintech software division has seen growth of 50 per cent in the past six months, with five people joining in January.

The growth has led the Poole-based consultancy to create a new position dedicated solely to recruiting for in-house roles in the Dorset area.

Chief executive Paul Rayner, who founded the executive search firm in 1995, said: “We have been on a very strong revenue growth trajectory for some years, growing at between 10 and 20 per cent a year, and we expect this pattern to now continue.

“We have reached a point where our profitability means we can invest in our growth – so this is being accelerated.

“We have got a great quality team. The calibre of our team members and their level of experience and their continually growing networks is the reason we are as good as we are at what we do. They do such a good job in reaching people.

“We are also extremely focused on caring about people in the company, our clients and our candidates, which may be considered unusual in recruitment, but stands us in good stead and is very much our ethos.”

The firm’s four divisional directors – Tristan Heywood, Steve Farr, Andy Strong and Dan Hammond-Smith – have a 80 years of service between them.

Oakstone, which has 26 staff and works with around 50 companies globally, is based at the Arena Business Centre in Poole, with another office in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, it was first established.

Seventy per cent of its work is recruiting sales people, pre-sales people, semi-technical people and “customer success people” who make sure customers get the best out of the software they purchase.

Four years ago the firm launched its financial technology (FinTech) software division – now eight-strong – which recruits hands-on technical people, programmers and developers up to chief technical officer level, from crypto scale-ups to investment banks.

It says clients are generally little-known small to medium software providers, mostly in the USA, seeking a sales organisation to rapidly roll out their produce across the UK and Europe.

Mr Rayner said: “They need us because no one knows who they are. They might be a really exciting young company, possibly the next big thing, and it is our role to educate candidates about this potential.

“We help facilitate expansion. We work with many of our clients for several years, often recruiting 50, 80, 100 or 150 people for them.”

Around 40 per cent of the people Oakstone recruits are placed in the UK, 20 per cent in Germany and 20 per cent in north America.