We introduced you to NonStop Recruitment – the pan European consultancy training and developing people on a massive scale mostly in Prague – in last month’s issue and we here at Business Animals were so intrigued that we asked them to explain more.

• Ben Jones, 29 years old.
• Director at NonStop Recruitment. 

While the name NonStop may evoke images of a 3am run to the local potraviny, for this company, it highlights a particular thread that runs throughout the business – through its people, its philosophy, and its basis for success.

It’s about resilience, not giving up; about motivation and determination and the will to succeed against all odds. It’s about the business supporting its people through award-winning training and development to become elite recruiters, and about those people driving the business forward.

NonStop Recruitment is a company defiantly unlike any other you’ll come across. This is an organisation shaking up the recruitment industry with a determination to provide the best careers for its people, regardless of skills, education, nationality or any other background, while also providing the best service for its clients. And they’re doing it from right here in Prague.

What are they doing specifically? Well, it’s recruitment – it’s supporting clients in their search for the best talent to drive their businesses forward. But look one layer deeper and it’s clear NonStop is doing this in a way that no other recruitment consultancy is – by training and developing their recruiters from scratch. 99% of their people, including business leaders, joined NonStop with no prior experience. You can, too.

NonStop hires Europe’s brightest, most motivated raw talent

And provides intensive training to help those people become industry-leading, expert recruitment consultants who effectively run their own business unit. And the training doesn’t stop at recruitment skills either. Once their people have begun to find success, NonStop helps them develop into effective managers and business leaders while also letting them choose which NonStop office they want to work from. There’s some tempting options: sky high in London’s Canary Wharf, in historic Portsmouth on England’s South Coast, lakeside in picturesque Zug, Switzerland, and of course Prague’s ‘architectural jewel’ Danube House.

It’s NonStop professional and personal development and NonStop career progression with the life experience that comes with working with people from more than 25 different nationalities who have moved from around Europe to Prague.

And it all means that people progress as quickly as their ambition, motivation, determination and, well… their NonStop belief will allow them.

Ben joined NonStop four years ago and like most of the company, wasn’t really sure what he wanted from his career. He now owns a flat in Prague, manages an office of more than 150 people and drives a 2017 California T Ferrari.

“NonStop is literally changing people’s lives – not just our clients and candidates but changing the lives of our employees. We’ve got people in their mid 20s who are earning six figure salaries (in Euros, not Czech Koruna!), who have paid off student loans, who have bought property, who travel to exotic locations and stay in five-star accommodation… we’ve got people like myself who will be able to retire very early and very comfortably,” he says.

But it’s certainly not as easy as it sounds, he adds.

“Yes there are fantastically high rewards for people at NonStop – you get out of this what you put in – but you also need to be humble enough to take on feedback and apply the training while still maintaining a will to succeed, a perseverance to basically keep going when the going gets tough, even in the face of rejection because that happens a lot in recruitment. We are helping our clients find the best employees and sometimes the matches don’t work out.

“This is the NonStop belief we talk about – a persevering belief that you can do it and a will to make it work… and of course, there’s a load of support here from the Training & Development team and also more senior people in the business to help people in that journey.”

In discussing the NonStop belief, it’s interesting to look back at where the company has come from. It’s a phrase that epitomises the business’ founder, Kevin Smith.

Homeless and living on the streets of London, he maintained an unshakeable belief that he’d be able to turn it all around. His belief is what ensured his company has grown NonStop – even through the recession when many recruitment businesses filed for bankruptcy and NonStop’s own clients were struggling, NonStop as a business continued to grow through the hiring, training and developing of people with no prior experience and through the promotion from within to create management and senior management layers.

It’s a business model that has seen the company’s net fee income increase on average 40% year-on-year over the last nine years and given it the perfect platform from which to launch globally within the next couple of years.

There’s only one question that remains. Do you think you have what it takes to become a NonStopper and take your career global? Contact careers@nonstop-recruitment.com.

Photo: Marek Rebroš