Tech Recruiting, Finding Niches & Starting Your Own Business

In this interview, Joe Woodham discusses recruiting for a tech start-up, finding your niche, and starting your own business.

Joe is known as the “intro guy” at Torii Recruitment, the specialist IT recruitment firm he founded in 2012. Finding a good fit in IT recruitment, he says, is a more nuanced challenge than just finding someone with the right skills.

The Interview

In one sentence how would you describe yourself?

I’m highly driven and passionate about business. However, I focus on maintaining balance in all aspects of my life. I love to enjoy myself, challenge myself and grow as a person.

In one sentence, how would describe your career?

My career has been a constant progression in terms of self-development and learning new skills. I’ve been lucky to fall into what I do and I’ve enjoyed the challenges along the way.

In one sentence, how would you describe your business Torii Recruitment?

Torii is agile and able to move quickly, enabling us to understand the market and our clients’ pain points and deliver a high-touch service in a skill-short market.

Finding your niche

During your talk in the WeTeachMe Master’s Series, you mentioned finding a niche and then building a business around filling it. How did you determine IT recruitment was the correct niche for your business?

I started my career in IT Recruitment and it wasn’t IT being the niche. The niche was actually working with specific skill sets within IT that the market was experiencing a shortage of.

Working with companies, understanding their pain points and looking at where the market was heading, I was able to leverage the skills I’d built to deliver a service the market and my clients needed.

You also spoke of your big learning curve when starting a business. Can you share some of them here?

When I started a business, I was good at IT Recruitment. However, when I started working for myself I quickly realized there was a lot more that was happening in the background. I had to start working on building a brand/image in the market which people knew me/Torii for. There were so many new things I had to master and make decisions on that I had taken for granted — small things like the software I used, the accounting system we used, and how I sent an invoice. I basically had to learn very quickly, and fill all the gaps to be able to run a business.

Joe Woodham (second left) at WeTeachMe’s Masters Series

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by Angela Phung via SitePoint