Declan Frith

From Law School to the Long Game

Frith went to law school and qualified as a lawyer back home in Ireland. He liked the firms, liked his colleagues, and genuinely enjoyed the business development and client networking side of the work. What he could not find was fulfilment. "I went into law to help people," he says, "and then realised it was actually helping some corporations rather than individuals." He had struggled through law school to get there, and found himself asking whether reading documents every day was really all there was.

The turning point came over drinks in Belfast with two friends who had gone into recruitment. They told him what he had not quite admitted to himself: that everything he loved about his job was the client relationship piece, and that his instincts were people-oriented rather than document-oriented. He applied to legal recruitment agencies, and the firm that had originally placed him in law became the firm that hired him.

The industry has since carried him a long way from where he started. Over eight years he has lived in Belfast, Dublin, London, Chicago and New York, including a stretch working in house at KPMG in the United States. He has moved from agency desk to team leadership, and he does not treat any of it as ordinary. Those were, in his words, truly life-changing opportunities.

The Manager Who Counted Coffees, Not Calls

Ask Frith who shaped him and the first name out of his mouth is Andrew Curry, his first manager at Hunter Savage, the small Belfast agency where his career began. Curry was a hard manager, and deliberately so. When things went badly, he did not let Frith sit in the disappointment; he made him dust his shoulders off and build the resilience the industry demands. What made him unusual was what he chose to measure.

"A lot of my core metrics were how many in-person meetings, how many coffees, how many lunches are you doing this week, rather than just how many dials are you making," Frith recalls. In a business that often reduces new hires to activity counts, being trained on relationship building at the very outset was, he says now, both rare and lucky. Curry has since gone out on his own as founder and director of Achuman, a firm turning over roughly a million dollars a year with a team of three in Belfast and international legal recruitment work spanning London, Dublin, the US and Dubai. The two still speak weekly, sharing woes and successes.

Lindsay McCracken, who worked alongside him at that same first agency and now owns her own business, Connect Legal, in Ireland, taught him a different discipline: how to take yourself out of the process entirely. She does not lead with fees, numbers or her own success. What she does instead, in Frith's description, is "enabling that discussion to offer genuine consultative advice." He has met almost no one who does it as naturally, and it is the standard he holds himself to when a conversation would be easier to close than to have honestly.

The third is Vincent Vall, a director at KPMG who has been with the firm for something like 15 to 20 years, and with whom Frith worked closely in house in the US. Vall was the reason Frith got the opportunity to move to America, and he modelled something Frith now passes on to his own team: never let the stress of recruitment take over, and never change your personality to suit somebody else's business agenda. "He always brought his authentic self," Frith says, describing an easy, go-with-the-flow temperament that translated directly into greater operational effectiveness in how the team recruited. Of everyone he has worked with, Frith calls him among the most inspiring.

Augmentation, Not Replacement

Frith's read on artificial intelligence is practical rather than evangelical. Automation, in his experience, has made candidate screening faster, more scalable and more data driven, and it has stripped out the parts of the job nobody misses: the admin, the screening, the scheduling. The practical effect on his team is measured in days. Where a search once meant three days working through resumes before finding the right person, it now means speaking to the right people the day after a client releases a role.

What that speed buys is time for the work that actually differentiates a recruiter: relationship building, employer branding, strategic hiring decisions, being a genuine partner to a business rather than filling a seat for the sake of it. The question he wants answered is not whether a candidate matches a spec but how that person will make an impact and align with the company's own objectives.

He is candid, though, that the industry sometimes leans on automation harder than it should. "The best results come when it's used to augment human decisions rather than replacing them," he says. He does not believe the technology will ever replace the recruitment industry, precisely because of the personal touch the work requires. He is equally clear that it has already made him and his team more effective and more efficient for clients.

Your Product Is People

Pressed for the advice he would give other talent leaders, Frith does not reach for tactics. He reaches for a reminder. "At the end of the day, your product is people," he says. The environment is fast paced, dynamic, competitive and often stressful, and it is easy to lose sight of the stakes inside a single placement. He recently placed a candidate who relocated her whole family from New York to Florida. That, he points out, is not a transaction. That is somebody's life.

The corollary is patience. Build relationship and trust with clients and candidates before expecting results, he argues, because the returns compound. The best clients on his desk today are people he first met three or four years ago and built credibility with over time. Treat people with the respect they deserve, do not underestimate the power recruitment has to change lives, and stay human in the approach.

There is one more reason he loves the work, and it is the one he lands on last: recruitment is one of the few corners of corporate life where being fully yourself is an advantage rather than a liability. "It's powerful to be yourself in the sort of corporate working world," he says. The job rewards personality, because personality is what fosters the genuine human connections that make the business run.

Proud of the Industry

Frith is aware that recruitment sometimes gets a bad name, and that the people doing it rarely get much appreciation for what they do. He pushes back on both counts, and does so publicly, with the conviction of someone who has watched the profession change his own circumstances. He came from a small town and was the first person in his family to go to college. At 30, he has built a life in New York that has let him fly his family out to visit, travel, save, and buy a house. He never expected an industry to give him that kind of comfort, still less to give it to him doing something he loves.

He speaks to former law school classmates who like their jobs but do not love them, and the contrast sharpens his gratitude. Not every day is sunshine, he is quick to concede; dealing with people brings its share of headaches. But roughly ninety percent of the time, he says, he is entirely happy with the decision he made to step into recruitment, and thankful for the chances it has given him in his personal life.

"I don't think I could see myself doing anything else," he says. "I have a passion for what I do because I think it can really impact and change businesses for the better and change people's lives as a result. It certainly changed my life."