I started Ruby Magpie because I had spent enough time on both sides of the hiring table to know that recruitment was broken. Not slightly off. Broken. I wanted to build the agency I had always wished existed.
Before Ruby Magpie I was a marketer. I led several product launches at Microsoft, ran marketing at 118 118 and UKTV, and spent years building and managing my own teams across agencies and brands. I know what it feels like to need the right person urgently and be let down by a recruiter who did not understand the brief, the industry or frankly the basics of good communication.
So I built something different.
I am not interested in filling roles. I am interested in making the right match and doing it with complete honesty on both sides.
I grew up in the north east of England. My dad was an electrician. My mum was an Avon lady, not just any Avon lady, the number one in the country. She used to spend her sales incentives taking us on trips away, opening our eyes to a bigger world.
I chose a Chemistry degree at university, not because I loved it, but because I wanted to prove that a girl from our family could do a science degree. I worked weekends in a greasy spoon and Asda until I eventually landed my first role in London. I did not have a black book of contacts or access to internships. I worked my way up, proved myself, and built a career from scratch.
My first boss at a marketing agency asked me to drop my accent because he said clients would not understand me. I did not tell him where to go, but I thought about it every day after that.
Decades later I genuinely believed my kids would be entering a different world. One where opportunity was not shaped by background, generational wealth or who your parents knew. I was wrong.
Graduates from working class backgrounds are still significantly less likely to do an internship than their middle class peers. That gap has widened from 12 percentage points in 2018 to 20 today. Just one in ten internships is found through an open advertisement. Forty percent of unpaid interns rely on the bank of mum and dad to fund their role. The system has not changed. It has got worse.
That is why for every role we fill at Ruby Magpie, we donate 5% of our placement fee directly to Fledgling Work, our social enterprise giving early career talent access to paid, real world experience. Every placement is paid. Every candidate earns their place on merit, not background, not connections, not who they know.
It is what we can do. So we do it.