From Redundancy to Revenue:
How Elizabeth Willetts Built a Profitable Job Board Championing Flexible Work

Introduction

When Elizabeth Willetts was made redundant during the pandemic, she didn’t just look for another job — she built Investing in Women, a job board dedicated to flexible, part-time opportunities for women. What started with a £5,000 redundancy payout and a WordPress site has grown into a profitable, high-impact platform with 70,000+ candidates and hundreds of employers onboard.

In this episode of the JBoard Interview Series, Elizabeth shares how she:

• Got her first clients before she had a working product
• Built her candidate pipeline with no paid ads
• Monetized in a way that aligned with her mission
• Expanded into coaching, events, and a book deal — all from the core of her job board

Whether you're just starting out or trying to scale a niche board, this is a must-watch for anyone serious about building a sustainable, values-driven business.

Watch the Full Interview

5 Key Takeaways for Job Board Builders

1. Launch before you’re ready — and offer value upfront

Elizabeth didn’t wait for perfection. She launched with free job slots, leaned into her existing recruitment network, and proved value first before charging. This helped her build momentum and trust early on.

2. Monetize with multiple models, not just job posts

Beyond job slots, Investing in Women offers end-to-end recruitment, sourcing packages, and even career coaching. Multiple revenue streams have made the business more resilient and scalable.

3. SEO and organic LinkedIn built her candidate base — not ads

With zero marketing budget, Elizabeth grew her audience through LinkedIn authenticity and strong SEO. Her blog, lead magnets, and live events continue to drive high-quality inbound candidate traffic.

4. Personal brand matters

By being visible and consistent on LinkedIn, hosting webinars, and collaborating with other communities, Elizabeth became the trusted face of her brand — and it continues to pay dividends in candidate and client acquisition.

5. Don't wait for someone to create the solution — be the solution

Having experienced the lack of flexibility as a working mum firsthand, Elizabeth decided to build the job board she wished existed. It’s a great reminder that real pain points make the strongest niches.

Full Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:01.877)

Elizabeth Willits, welcome to the show. An absolute pleasure, absolute pleasure. Really, really excited to have this conversation with you today. So let's jump straight in. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and what led you to creating, founding, launching Investing in Women?

Elizabeth Willetts (00:04.322)

Thank you so much for having me.

Elizabeth Willetts (00:24.334)

Yeah, so my background is recruitment. I think we've been in recruitment a similar amount of time. I started in recruitment in 2007, so the year before the credit crunch and worked for one of the largest recruitment companies in the world. I recruited their account, recruited accountants to work in banks and I had a brilliant, brilliant start in recruitment. I absolutely loved it. I felt like a duck to water. was, you know, you just feel like you've come home.

and I felt like I hadn't really enjoyed school or university. And then I was so lucky to get a job that I just, as soon as I started, I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is for me. And I felt like a butterfly suddenly bloomed and had a brilliant year. I won, I was that good, won a platinum, they called them platinum places. The top formers, we all went to Monaco. then while we were at Monaco in September 2008,

The day we were due to come back, Lehman Brothers crashed. And we were all sat there in the lobby. It was a bit cloudy. It had been a beautiful weekend. It was a cloudy Monday in Monaco. And we were like, yeah, think this is the last time we do a trip like this for a while. And then recruitment got a bit difficult for quite a few years. But I you know, I stuck it out. I, you know, got promoted. I managed a team and...

Martyn Redstone (01:37.557)

you.

Elizabeth Willetts (01:49.678)

Then I eventually left in 2015 to move in-house and went to one of the big four and worked as one of their in-house recruiters. Again, brilliant experience. I learned so much being on the other side of the fence. So I think that has really set me up actually now working for myself because I feel I've had all those different experiences.

But like a lot of people, I was made redundant in the pandemic. It was September 2020. Obviously the world didn't know what was happening. I was due to come back from maternity leave and basically didn't because I was let go. And my children were one and three at the time. I really wanted a part-time job. I'd really struggled to have my eldest daughter. She was IVF and I just thought, you there's nothing.

There was no way I wanted to leave them after struggling so hard to have them and go back to work full time. But every time a recruiter approached me and I asked, will they consider part-time? I was told no straight away or ghosted me. I could see a lot of people doing a lot of things regarding flexible working and talking about flexible working.

but I couldn't see that a lot of people had necessarily direct recruitment experience. So I thought, do you know what? I have got the recruitment experience. At that point, I'd never recruited anyone part-time. We never even used to register people when they were all up asking for part-time when I was in agency. At that point, I'd recruited hundreds of people. I thought, do you know what? I'm going to try and be part of the solution. So I set up Investing in Women in June, 2021, and it was a job board focused on part-time flexible roles.

Martyn Redstone (03:24.755)

Wow, what a fantastic backstory. actually, you know, it's very unusual for me to talk to people who from a recruitment background and then set up a job board usually very kind of technologically, technology based background. so fantastic.

Elizabeth Willetts (03:38.766)

Really? Yeah, I'm not a tech person. I can navigate my way around tech now. I'm better. But I had £5,000 redundancy payout and I used that to pay somebody to build it for me and I didn't build it.

Martyn Redstone (03:55.144)

Okay, so you got somebody externally to build the job board for you.

Elizabeth Willetts (03:57.984)

Yeah, I use some money and it's just on WordPress.

Martyn Redstone (04:02.141)

OK, so you built it on WordPress. So how did you know it was time to kind of go all in on the job board? Was that kind of a... Was that it? You were saying, right, OK, I'm going to do this. I'm going to go for it. Or did you wait to see what it was like once you built it, tested the waters?

Elizabeth Willetts (04:17.906)

I thought I'm gonna go for it and I'm one of those people that will dive straight, know, I'll jump head first. Sometimes I'll jump head first and then regret it. But I am quite an action taker so I thought I'm gonna do it. Obviously I did go through my head desk like, should I do a job or shall I do a recruitment agency? And I did have that. But, rightly or wrongly, I thought a job board would be easier because having been in recruitment for so long, I know what it's like.

when you basically get a message, a phone call from a client saying so and so hasn't turned up for their interview and then you're trying to call so and so and they're on the tube. And I thought I could not be having that if I'm like being a mum, you know, it's like five o'clock and I'm trying to make tea and I'm trying to sort out somebody's interview, they're not turned up. So I thought if I do a job board, I don't have to get involved in all of that. So that's why I went down the job board route, being honest.

Martyn Redstone (05:09.653)

That makes sense. ironically giving you that flexibility as well by having that built forward.

Elizabeth Willetts (05:15.69)

Yes, and it is obviously much more like, know, I know you're the automation expert, but it is much more automated and you are much less involved in that day to day.

Martyn Redstone (05:27.093)

Yeah, absolutely. So, so going back to those early days, you know, when, when, when you first kind of create a job board or, or start up a job board, you have this kind of chicken and egg situation where, you know, do you, do you bring on clients first? Do you bring on, you know, job seekers first? Do you bring on jobs first, et cetera, et cetera. So tell me, how did you, how did you get over that chicken and egg situation? What, how did you get it started? Get it moving.

Elizabeth Willetts (05:49.846)

I can't.

So I had a coach, I had my £5,000 redundancy pay and I used that money to basically pay this person to build the job board, pay for some contracts, because that was something else I had not thought about. And I spoke to some client and they were like, have you got contracts? And I was like, er, no. And that was like, actually it cost me more than the blooming job board to get these contracts drafted. And then I paid for a coach and she was really good and I paid for like 12 weeks of mentoring with her and what she said was,

Martyn Redstone (06:06.974)

you

Elizabeth Willetts (06:20.546)

And I think it was right that you're to have to basically offer it for free to begin with. So that's what I did. So I went to all my old recruitment networks, all the people I'd ever worked with, clients, people that, you know, I'd worked with an agency and said, look, it's free. Do you want to post some jobs? So that's how it started. So for six months clients just posted for free. And actually it built momentum quite quickly because it was free.

Martyn Redstone (06:24.691)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Willetts (06:47.958)

Yeah. And then it was then the chicken and thing was like, when do I start charging? I need to start charging. How much do I charge charging? But yeah, because I had the jobs and then I would also been posting for a few months on LinkedIn, had the candidates and then I acted like a recruiter to begin with, which is a model we've still actually carried on where we, was like, my mentor was like, right, you need to these jobs now.

Martyn Redstone (07:00.437)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (07:06.613)

That was it.

Martyn Redstone (07:14.313)

So you're very hands on, you know. Yeah.

Elizabeth Willetts (07:16.086)

Really hands on, so we were doing sourcing, I had LinkedIn sales nav, I was speaking to candidates, I say we because there is a we now, but at the time there wasn't a we, it was all me and I was advertising in Facebook groups, if clients posted a role, I had a newsletter, it was really, really, it was basically everything a recruiter does up until that interview.

Martyn Redstone (07:38.614)

Got it. Got it. So going back to the original kind of process, so giving away job slots for free makes sense, you build traction. So how did you convert that from free to paying? That must have been quite an interesting conversation to have with your clients who were so used to getting probably so much for free. How did you change that?

Elizabeth Willetts (08:05.996)

Yeah, well, they knew it wasn't going to be free forever. You know, I'd put it quite clearly on the website. You know, it's not free forever. And obviously when I was speaking to clients, you know, this is free trial. was meant to expire at a certain point, but then I had a disaster with the website. So the first developer, this was probably the most stressful time of my business. And it was right at the beginning. The developer I had originally paid.

had actually not done a very good job of building the website. So I just found her on a Facebook group and she had been laid off from her job. was COVID time and to be fair, I had not paid her loads to do it and she not charged me a lot. then she got a full-time job. So she said, I can't manage this anymore. You're gonna have to find somebody else. I recommend going to this person. So I went to this person and he was like, she's done a really crap job.

Martyn Redstone (09:04.872)

Okay.

Elizabeth Willetts (09:04.974)

He's like, I shouldn't really say it, but she'd done it. Now, now knowing a little bit more about tech than I did then, she'd used two page builders, which you're supposedly not meant to do on WordPress. And she should have done this at the other. So he's like, I'm going to have to rebuild it all from scratch. So that was then a nightmare because he wasn't actually very good either. But actually then it led me to somebody else that ended up taking over and I've been with him ever since and he was good. But.

The whole point is I was meant to start charging clients the beginning of September and it didn't really happen until end of October. So people got a few months free. yeah, and then I think the other thing that I found a little bit difficult early doors was I'd have a lot of big companies ring me. And this is when I first started charging, thinking I was like a charity and doing it for free and wasn't a business and be like, can you just share this with your community? Can you just share this opportunity? And they'd be like massive organizations. I'm like.

Martyn Redstone (09:37.119)

Okay.

Martyn Redstone (09:54.453)

Thank

Elizabeth Willetts (09:58.858)

you've got billions of pounds worth of profit, I know you have and I'm just, you know, me on my own, I need to charge you and it was sometimes that expectation that they thought I was like a charity.

Martyn Redstone (10:09.147)

Interesting, really, really interesting. And actually, I wanted to focus a bit more on that because earlier on in the conversation, you said, know, when you were a recruiter, know, third party kind of external recruiter, and also when you were in-house at one of the big four, you had never recruited for part-time staff before. what

What was the kind of traction on that? You say you talk to your old clients, your old network, et cetera, et cetera. Was there much of a need for hiring part-time, flexible women in terms of, because it's not something you'd ever come across before, or did you find in terms of the market need of that?

Elizabeth Willetts (10:57.838)

think there's still obviously work to do because I think the stats show that only 3 % of roles advertised actually mention part-time. So there's definitely still work to be done. I think a lot of clients are actually open to it, like the end employer. Because I'd get jobs posted on our job board and I'd go back to the employer and say, actually, will this be part-time? And they'd say, yes, actually, we would. But for some reason, they hadn't written it on the job ad.

So then it would be a case of just manually adding that, et cetera. But I think the thing about part-time and why it's not an attractive commercial proposition for a lot of recruitment agencies is because it's the same amount of work for potentially a lot smaller fee because recruitment agencies charge a fee based upon the candidate's salary. And if a candidate's getting offered a part-time pro-righted salary, it's potentially a...

a pro-rata fee for exactly the same amount of work. So a recruitment agency is never going to push that. And so they're never going to mention it to the employers. it's just then the assumption that everything is full time because of that.

Martyn Redstone (12:06.237)

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. obviously a job board is a better proposition because you're just paying for the job slot or however you're kind of monetizing it. And therefore it doesn't matter whether it's part-time or full-time, it's the same rate. And is that how you're monetizing? Is it duration-based job slots? Is that how you charge your clients?

Elizabeth Willetts (12:19.906)

Yeah, it's the same thing.

Elizabeth Willetts (12:27.21)

Yes, we do duration based job slots. We also do full recruitment, full end-to-end recruitment because that's really how it started with the, know, may not have zero marketing budget so we couldn't run Facebook ads or Instagram ads. So it started with me sourcing. So we do offer sourcing packages, full end-to-end recruitment. We charge up front and we charge a lot less than you would do if you went to a recruiter because, you know, we charge regardless basically.

Martyn Redstone (12:55.133)

Yeah, OK. That makes sense. And actually, you just touched on something that I wanted to get onto next. So I'm going to go for it. You've got a I think it said something like 70,000 registered candidates on your database. I if I remember correctly, had a quick peek beforehand. And you just mentioned about Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising. It'd be great to understand a little bit more about your your acquisition channels, because obviously it's very, very niche. It's very specific.

Elizabeth Willetts (12:56.662)

Yeah. And then you have to chop.

Elizabeth Willetts (13:09.976)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (13:24.917)

in terms of the job board and who you're trying to attract. Can you talk us through a little bit more around those acquisition channels, those tactics around bringing in those 70,000 candidates?

Elizabeth Willetts (13:37.718)

Yeah, mean, predominantly we've built our business through LinkedIn, you know, and it's think it's always been, you know, I've been on LinkedIn now like four years and been always quite authentic and people, you know, I get most of the messages now that people have followed me since the beginning and can remember when I first, before I'd even launched the job board and talking about it and then obviously, so I feel like.

A lot of people have followed that journey from right at the beginning, so they're quite supportive. Even if actually they've moved on themselves, they maybe not need part-time work anymore, they're still supportive of the mission. So it's been through LinkedIn being really authentic in who we are, what we've posted. I mean, it's not been overnight, we're four years in, so it's definitely not an overnight success. We've also done a lot with SEO.

So that is another big acquisition channel for us. We've tried adverts in the past. So we've tried like Google ads and Facebook ads. But being perfectly honest, we don't have a problem attracting candidates. The candidates are there because there is, I mentioned, there isn't a huge amount of part-time work. So when we've got a part-time job, the candidates like come in. It's the clients that we, know, that's the one we always try and...

Martyn Redstone (14:40.263)

Yeah, I get it.

Elizabeth Willetts (14:57.014)

much harder to acquire because they're the ones that pay the bills basically.

Martyn Redstone (15:02.857)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I get that. so, so you mentioned about SEO, which I presume comes from a lot of content, you know, I noticed that you've, you've also written a book on the subject of this and the blog and what have you. So, so is that is that content, you know, and the SEO that that drives from is that helping you? Is that helping you on the client side as well as the candidates or a client, you know, getting them thinking out

Elizabeth Willetts (15:16.714)

Yeah, and we've got blog and...

Elizabeth Willetts (15:29.514)

Yeah, yeah, because when clients message, you know, in the form, in contact us form, we say, did you hear about us and a lot? We'll either say LinkedIn or Google.

Martyn Redstone (15:41.331)

Fantastic, fantastic. And do you get a lot of returning clients as well as new clients? Yeah.

Elizabeth Willetts (15:45.549)

Yes, we've got clients that we've worked with like since the beginning. Yeah, and a lot of work for this a few years, quite a good few years now.

Martyn Redstone (15:50.037)

Yeah, that's fantastic. And how are you thinking?

Interesting. Okay, that's good. Fantastic as well. And how are you keeping, you know, that audience of client and candidate engaged? you, have you got kind of, you email marketing set up? Be interesting to understand how you're, you know, how you're keeping people kind of engaged and on platform as well.

Elizabeth Willetts (16:13.836)

Yes, we've got email marketing, so everybody that comes on the job board, there's a pop-up, you know, sign up for fresh jobs, etc. So a lot of lead magnets on the website, free CV templates.

flexible working templates, things like that that would be of interest to our candidates and then candidates sign up for one of the lead magnets or webinars. We run loads of webinars as well, which we would view as a lead magnet. Then they go into our welcome sequence and then they're added to our weekly newsletter. So that's obviously email marketing is huge for us and we see a big spike in website traffic the day the newsletter goes out.

goes out on Monday and then we see a big spike on Mondays. Yeah, and then we have podcasts, so we do that once a week and, you know, that's obviously popular and people listen to that. And then we also host loads of events. We're doing a lot of LinkedIn lives. That's how we started the business, doing weekly LinkedIn lives. I said zero marketing budget. But yeah, and then we do look like we did a big thing for International Women's Day. So we did like a week long summit.

Martyn Redstone (17:13.823)

Okay.

Martyn Redstone (17:17.557)

you

Elizabeth Willetts (17:23.53)

we do quite a lot and then a lot of collaboration as well where I will guest on like now like somebody else's podcast in somebody else's Facebook group to someone else's community or someone else's Instagram live and things like that and then that really helps as well.

Martyn Redstone (17:40.159)

Great. And I suppose that also, from a personal branding perspective, you you've built up a really good name for yourself as well. I presume that personal brand also helps, you know, bring in the interest in the job board. Yeah.

Elizabeth Willetts (17:54.158)

Yeah, I think so. I yeah, because I get messages to me all the time on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. So yeah, so definitely.

Martyn Redstone (18:03.669)

Excellent. Okay, just moving away from those subjects and thinking more around kind of impact and metrics and all those kind of things. Be interesting to understand, know, I think you work with, you know, probably hundreds of employers now. Be great if you could share with us an employer story that really kind of embodies the mission of investing in women. You we've got a great kind of success story.

Elizabeth Willetts (18:30.24)

Yeah, I have. And these are one of my favorite clients. So they were actually a construction company. And we work with actually quite a lot of construction companies because as you can imagine, they don't have a lot of female staff and that is something that a lot of them want to increase. So this particular client came to us two years ago now and they, I think they were like running about 10 % women in their organization. was small. And they wanted to hire more women and they

they identified some roles where they thought maybe we could do something with these physicians and they were lab technicians and what they do is they produce mortar and cement and things like that. So the lab technicians are the ones that actually test that mortar, they test that cement, make sure it's up to standard, that goes out with like 25, 30 year warranty, et cetera. And it's in a lab, but the lab's actually in a plant. It's not like a medical lab or anything like that. So it's not actually the most glamorous.

Martyn Redstone (19:10.101)

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Willetts (19:26.934)

of settings. So they came to me, they'd never had any women that had worked in this particular lab and they had two vacancies and they said, do know what we want to do? We're going to split these two vacancies into four. So we're going to make them all part-time and we're going to see if that helps attract women. And we're going to put that you don't need experience. It's going to be like a retraining opportunity. You can do this in school hours, et cetera. So yeah, so we just completely like

you know, from having had it before where it would have been full time, you needed to have this experience. It now became retraining opportunity, part-time school hours. We were inundated with applications for it and we did the full end-to-end recruitment for them and it was brilliant, it they hired four women and also what they also said and I hadn't even tricked them but then they said also everyone had like a different ethnic background as well. So it was like a really

diverse team, they're still there now and you know, I said we're nearly two years on and that is something that I think really embodies what you know, we're trying to do in the actually cancel jobs. You know, I get a lot of clients say they want to hire more women, but then they make no adjustments whatsoever to those jobs or their recruitment process in roles where they have obviously never hired a woman before and so there is a disconnect. Whereas this client was so bought in.

Martyn Redstone (20:41.194)

Yeah.

Elizabeth Willetts (20:51.614)

so willing to change. And that's something I'm really proud of. And one of the women has actually had a promotion now as well.

Martyn Redstone (21:00.309)

Fantastic. Well, what a fantastic success story. And an industry that's probably quite traditionally male-oriented and very masculine working environment.

Elizabeth Willetts (21:08.162)

Yeah.

Elizabeth Willetts (21:11.726)

Yeah and we've worked with them so much more and tied lots more women into that organisation now so it's definitely much more above than 10 % now.

Martyn Redstone (21:15.807)

That's great.

Martyn Redstone (21:21.269)

Fantastic. What a wonderful success story. Thank you for sharing that. So on the business side, it'd great to understand. So it's been what? Just coming up for four years since you launched. So where are you at in terms of numbers? When you talked about the numbers of candidates registered, number of job seekers registered, working with hundreds of employees, what does the underlying metrics look like in terms of success rates, in terms of...

Elizabeth Willetts (21:30.594)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (21:47.893)

in terms of commercials, all those kind of things. What's that looking like?

Elizabeth Willetts (21:51.234)

Yeah, so we became profitable quite quickly. think, you know, we've never taken any external investment. It's all been bootstrapped and I'm really proud of that. We're now a team of three that work school hours. So, yeah, so that's something I also was really passionate about. I'm really excited to do that. I wanted to be able to employ people on part-time contracts that I couldn't find. So now I'm really proud that there's now three of us in the organisation plus our freelance.

developer and you know that the business supports that and yeah I mean in terms of profit I mean we're still profitable it has been a little bit quieter since the budget I don't know if some of your other guests have said that but the job market generally has been quite squeezed and I also do career coaching so I know speaking to candidates there's been a lot of redundancies that have happened since then but I think you know it feels like maybe we're gonna turn a corner because it has been you know quite a busy month I'd say.

Martyn Redstone (22:31.081)

Thank

Elizabeth Willetts (22:50.074)

I think January was a little bit quieter, but I think it's definitely started to pick up as we got into March and hopefully April as these costs, business costs are realised with the additional NI and things like that.

Martyn Redstone (23:00.329)

Yeah, coming into the new financial year, hopefully makes a big difference. And actually, I know you raised the point around the budget, the UK budget and how that kind of stretched employers quite a fair bit. But one of the other questions I wanted to ask you, running a niche job board is tough, but running a diversity focused niche job board tends to be even tougher. And I know that there's some strong kind of headwinds that are going against

Elizabeth Willetts (23:20.173)

Yeah.

Elizabeth Willetts (23:29.87)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (23:29.877)

diversity efforts right now. I wondered whether you had seen any impact of that or any kind of thoughts on this kind of war on diversity that seems to be going on in different parts of the world.

Elizabeth Willetts (23:42.678)

Yeah, mean, there has been, had, was quite funny, a D E and I coordinator role added to the job board last month, but the client didn't want to call it that because she was worried it was a little bit political. So we had to call it something else. So that was quite an interesting thing. And then, yeah, and then we've actually changed all the messaging that we have now on our sales page and then our sales brochure. So it's less fluffy. It's less.

Martyn Redstone (23:56.713)

interesting.

Elizabeth Willetts (24:09.23)

this is a really good thing to do. It's more like this actually makes much more business sense for you. It's much more commercially savvy because if you hire part-time staff, it's no longer, oh, this is the right thing to do. It's actually if you hire part-time staff, could reduce your payroll by 30%, your payroll costs. So therefore, you're more likely to increase your profit. 70 % of candidates' site flexibility is the most important factor when looking for roles. If you want to attract the best talent, you're going to have to...

So it becomes much more of a commercial decision for businesses rather than it's just the right thing to do, even if it is the right thing to do. We've had to change that messaging to adapt to that.

Martyn Redstone (24:45.621)

Yeah, that's interesting, but it makes perfect sense, know, but that is quite interesting as well. OK, so one of my kind of favourite questions to ask guests is what are some of the key lessons that you've learned as a job board founder that would surprise other job board founders and leaders?

Elizabeth Willetts (25:08.174)

my gosh, I lie. I I think the main one was so much harder than I thought it was. I honestly thought this is going to be easy. It's going to be so much easier than being a recruiter. yeah, definitely not easier. Different. Definitely not easier. And yeah, I think it's harder than it looks.

I you need to have, unless, I mean, I wasn't a brilliant techie person. I don't think you can do everything actually being a job board. So I think if you're a techie person, then you probably need more support with the marketing or something like that. It's very hard to do this all by yourself and to get that traction. And when there's such big job board players that we know about LinkedIn, monster jobs, total jobs. yeah, I think that's it. It probably requires more investment.

you know, whether you bootstrap or not, then maybe if you just set up as a normal recruitment agency and you could just do it, you know, one person on your own with a phone, because there is so much more complexity to it.

Martyn Redstone (26:13.747)

Yeah, I get that. if you were going back four years, you know, to kind of the very beginning, what would, if you were able to kind of talk to yourself four years ago, what advice would you give yourself?

Elizabeth Willetts (26:26.264)

think I'd still go for it because I've done so much more than just recruitment because I managed, I got a book deal which was amazing, I've got a podcast, we do other things that isn't just recruitment, know, I've done consulting, we've done the career coaching. So there's a lot that we do that isn't just the recruitment and I think if I'd just done normal recruitment agency I probably wouldn't have had the platform that I have to be able to do all the other stuff.

I over it, think, you know, it's not one of these that we're, we're definitely not millionaires, you know, it's not like, maybe we'd have been more profitable if we'd have been like a recruiter, but I think all the other experiences, more than make up for that.

Martyn Redstone (27:10.395)

Excellent, excellent. While we're on that subject, why don't you tell us a little bit about your book, Flex? I think it was cool.

Elizabeth Willetts (27:16.718)

Flex, yeah. yeah, that was so random. I was offered that. It was like last November, November, 2023, I got an email when I was in the car working while my daughter was doing a craft lesson. And I thought it was a spam and I just was like, this is joke. It didn't respond. And then a few days later, I oh, maybe. So I wrote back and it was genuine. So the book, I mean, that was a lot of work because I had six months to write it.

which isn't actually a lot to write 50, 60,000 words. And then it was launched in January and it's basically a career manual for anybody. I think for anybody, know, whatever they're at in their job search. it starts off, the early chapters are all about how to define what you want basically. So what's, what your strengths. I'm really, I believe that people enjoy what they're good at. So how do you define your strengths? Then your values, what's your measure of success? And then you sort of know them what to work towards. So then

advice on how to make a career pivot if you found that you're working in the completely wrong field or how to skill stack. So if you're in the right job, how to get further along. And then there's loads of chapters on CVs, LinkedIn, networking, interview prep, even a chapter on starting a business.

Martyn Redstone (28:33.589)

Fantastic, fantastic. And you mentioned all of these kind of additional services, the consulting, the book, the podcast, et cetera, et I know a lot of businesses and a lot of job boards that I've spoken to, they find that they've got their core job board and then they start creating kind of additional revenue streams outside of that. How did you make that decision to do all of this stuff? Or was that just from a marketing perspective, like you said?

You didn't have a marketing budget, so it was all looked at as free marketing. Or did you specifically think actually there's additional lines of revenue that we can create out of this?

Elizabeth Willetts (29:11.938)

Yeah, I mean, the career coaching was a no brainer because I was getting messaged all the time asking for help with CVs, interviews, LinkedIn. that was sort of like in the end, I resisted it for so long. thought, I'll just package it up, just sell it. So that was just something that we were asked for. And then the consulting came about because I was doing a lot of work with clients that would come to me and think that just advertising on a job board like ours would be a silver bullet and solve, you know,

any like diversity issues they may have had within their business and actually you know if you don't make a change as an organisation no matter how many adverts you put on a job board like ours it's probably not going to work so there's a lot of work that actually goes the job the advertising on our job board should be the last thing you do basically there has to be all that work done before and so that's how the consulting bit came came about.

Martyn Redstone (30:05.981)

Interesting, fantastic. Well, thank you so much joining me today. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?

Elizabeth Willetts (30:12.442)

thank you for having me. So I'm mostly on LinkedIn. So it's Elizabeth Willits on LinkedIn. You can obviously visit our website as well, which is investinginwomen.co.uk.

Martyn Redstone (30:23.385)

Fantastic. Elizabeth, thank you so much for your time and sharing your story and your experience. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you today. Thank you.

Elizabeth Willetts (30:31.53)

Thank you for having me.