Helen Sanders

Every bad hire costs you £50-100K and 6 months you can't get back. I've spent 27 years making sure that doesn't happen.

My unusual journey started as the BBC's first female football commentator in 1997. While breaking barriers in the commentary box, I noticed something crucial: the teams that won weren't necessarily the ones with the most talented players. They were the ones where people just clicked.

That insight became the foundation of everything I do at HFBAC.

HFBAC = Hiring For and Building Awesome Companies (pronounced "Half-back")

WHY CLIENTS STAY:
Most recruiters disappear after the invoice clears. I don't.

13 companies I've worked with for 3+ years. 
11 more who've hired through me multiple times over 5+ years. 

Two partnerships spanning over a decade - including one where I've been their embedded Talent Partner for 10+ years.

My favourite success story? A US tech start-up company asked me to help build their UK team. I hired their second employee. Today they're 80+ people across both countries.

That's Chemistry First in action.

WHAT I DO NOW:
- Fractional Talent Partner: Your embedded Head of Talent - without the £80k salary. Hiring strategy, full-cycle recruiting, candidate experience. For growing teams of 15-100 who need serious talent capability without a full-time hire.

- Starter Retainer Monthly strategy: The bridge between DIY hiring and full talent support. For bootstrapped teams of 5-20 scaling fast.

- Project Hiring: Chemistry First methodology for critical hires - first hires, leadership, founding team roles.

I work with founders in the UK and US. British-American dual citizen who understands both markets from the inside.

WHY "CHEMISTRY FIRST"?

Chemistry matters more than credentials. Every time.

46% of hires fail within 18 months. 89% of those failures? Not skills - chemistry. 
That's why I test for values alignment and team dynamics BEFORE anything else.
Result: 90%+ success rate.

12-month replacement guarantee. Most recruiters give you 3 months. I give you a year.

WHAT DRIVES ME:

In 2008, my 3-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer.

Watching him fight - and win - taught me what really matters when pressure's on. 

People who show up for each other. People who refuse to give up on the team.

He's thriving today. 

Now I'm raising £1 million for Young Lives vs Cancer. A portion of every HFBAC engagement supports families facing the same fight.

When you work with me, you're not just building your team - you're part of something bigger.

LET'S CONNECT:
Growing a team? Let's talk → hfbac.com

Recruitment Strategic Partner | SME Recruitment Growth Specialist | CEO

There is an easier way to recruit and nurture new staff. Your People Partners can do it for you.

As a business owner responsible for every aspect of your company, knowing how to save time and money hiring your next member of staff is rather useful!

Would you love an easy, cost effective and efficient service to help you spend more time on the business and not just in it as you go about recruiting your next member of staff?

Good news.

You don't need to use a recruiter in the traditional sense.

I am Helen Sanders. And I head up a talented team of talent acquisition specialists who are Your People Partners.

You can use my 22 years (!) recruitment expertise in helping business owners like you to save time, save money, cut the risk of poor hires and remove the stress of the recruitment process.

Did I mention we are not an 'agency'?

If we work together, we're partners. We work together to make sure you hire well and your team can grow to meet your vision and better support your clients/customers.

Done-With-You:
We stand by you, jump in when you need, we guide and do the bits you cannot do, and you learn how to be really awesome at hiring. No, we're not trying to make you into a recruiter. Being a business owner who hires well can make or break your business. 

Done-As-You:
We are your in-house team. We ensure all people in touch with your company have an awesome experience of you, the business owner as well as your company. Given our partners (companies like yours) are between 3 and 50 staff, we know that you're competing for the talent you need.

All this for the same cost, or sometimes less, than a 'normal' recruitment agency.

Call me now on 0117 290 0208 for a chat about how we can take the stress out of your next hire, as well as support your growing team with all things 'people' and talent-related.

Tony Restell

I get a real buzz from helping B2B firms turn social selling into a growth engine for their businesses. Using LinkedIn in ways that mean the "Feast & Famine cycle" is no longer something that keeps you awake at night. Highly relevant for management consultancies, recruitment agencies and other professional services and SaaS businesses.

If you would like to bring more predictability and consistency to your sales funnel, getting your social selling strategy right is the key to achieving this.

A few examples to help you picture what good looks like:

🔹 For a newly launched consulting business, we grew their prospect audience by 798 people in the first 3 months, generated sales meetings from week 1 and set up a webinar and sales call funnel that resulted in us producing 80% of their revenues in their first years in business.

🔹 For an established consulting business, we grew their prospect audience by 902 people in the first 3 months and transformed their in-person client prospect events from having ~30 attendees to having 100+ attendees (and subsequently being able to run them more frequently, too).

🔹 For an established recruitment business, we helped them launch into a new fast-growth sector in a country they had never worked in before. We grew their prospect audience by 936 people in 3 months and then secured client meetings and speaking engagements from this audience.

🔹 For a new SaaS business, we grew their prospect audience by 954 people in the first 3 months and then secured hundreds of trial users and trialists' feedback to successfully launch the business.

So, my question for you is this: do you have a well-defined B2B audience that your firm wants to win work from?

If you answered "yes", it'd make sense for us to have a chat. I'm happy to share what works.

You're welcome to email me on 📩 tony.restell@social-hire.com 📩 or you can book a call either via my profile here, or via the Social-Hire.com homepage.

Keynote Speaker for University & Business School Careers Services

Engaged by leading MBA schools and universities across Europe to present in-person and via Zoom on subjects relevant to current students and alumni groups:

- How to use social media and LinkedIn to further your career
- How to use LinkedIn to get a career in your desired sector when you graduate
- How business leaders can leverage social media for themselves and their organisations

Have travelled extensively across Europe and presented at schools including Bath University School of Management, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass Business School), Cambridge University (Judge Business School), City University, Durham University, EADA Business School, EDHEC Business School, EM Lyon Business School, Hult International Business School, IESE, Lancaster University Management School, Leeds University, Manchester Business School, SDA Bocconi, SKEMA Business School, Vlerick Business School and WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management.

If you are looking for a keynote speaker for a forthcoming event, feel free to message me here to discuss further.

💥 This is NEW from LinkedIn - and hugely significant in terms of the recent algorithm changes we've all seen.

I received a new type of email from LinkedIn overnight, one highlighting 5 posts suggested for me. None of which I've seen in the homepage feed before.

❓ What's really interesting about this?

Of the 5 suggested posts, only 1 of them is from a connection. The other 4 were all written by 2nd degree connections.

Here's why this is so significant:

The massive algorithm change that rolled out last year changed who sees the things you post.

Whereas previously your posts were initially shown to a selection of your connections, with the new algorithm your posts are shown to people LinkedIn thinks would have an interest in them (whether they are connections or not).

Hence all the suggested posts / posts from 2nd degree connections / posts from weeks ago that we've all been seeing far more of in our feeds.

This new email looks like LinkedIn doubling down on this way of selecting who sees our posts, doesn't it?

I have the maximum 30k connections allowed on LinkedIn, so this email could easily have been filled with 5 posts from my existing connections. The fact that it's 80% posts from outside my own network is very telling.

Of course, this is a sample size of 1. So I'll be keeping an eye on the next few of these to monitor if that pattern continues.

Has anyone else received this email yet? What was the breakdown of posts in your email?

Helping B2B firms use social selling to end the feast & famine cycle | Founder of Social-Hire.com, a B2B social media agency | Ask me about our guaranteed results and industry-leading client retention rates

New "Suggested posts" email from LinkedIn

Want more visibility on LinkedIn?

Well, I've tested this (again), so you don't have to...

Despite LinkedIn encouraging us to repost other people's posts (adding in our own thoughts), this type of post performs horrendously.

By which, I mean off-the-scale bad!!

✅ So if you repost to build relationships with the people you're reposting, then feel free to continue doing that.

❌ But if you're reposting to actually get your insights seen, you should drop this activity from your 2026 plans. It's torpedo-ing your visibility.

I periodically test this by reposting posts that are closely aligned to what I post about, adding in my own insights as commentary. These reposts consistently get ~5% of the impressions I would expect from a regular post.

These last weeks I really ramped up this testing.

I wanted to have a break from creating original content so I would start 2026 refreshed - and so I have pretty much only shared reposts these last weeks.

This is at a time when I know peers have had some mega successful posts (there've been far fewer posts to compete with in getting people's attention in the run up to Christmas and into the New Year).

While their quality original posts were doing just great, some of my reposts didn't even get 100 impressions.

My best performing reposts didn't hit 500 impressions.

Normally I would expect my best performing posts to get tens of thousands of impressions.

So TL;DR --> reposts destroy your visibility, they are only good for forging relationships with the people you choose to repost.

I assume you've been seeing the same patterns?

The most recent algorithm changes are a massive win for experts who have something real to say, but a nightmare for the 'engagement hackers' out there.

From the patterns I’m seeing across our clients’ posts, alongside various in-depth reports I've read, these are the things to be factoring in:

- The algorithm is no longer just counting clicks and engagement, it's looking for real signs of interest in your post

- That means things like time spent on the post, post saves and the depth of comment discussion being generated are key.

- I suspect that if you’re still ending your posts with "Agree?" or "Comment below!", there's a good chance you’re being penalised for engagement bait.

- The LinkedIn 'Golden Hour' is dead for all but generic content (eg. "we won an award last night").

- Any content with a niche focus, or that's written for a specific profile of person, is no longer being distributed the same way. It's being shown to people who LinkedIn thinks will have an interest in that post.

- Which may mean it takes a day or two to show your post to enough relevant people to form a view on how much interest it's generating  (hence the golden hour approach being redundant)

- LinkedIn now cross-references your content with your profile and posting / commenting history to verify your authority on a topic before it grants your post lots of reach.

All of which explains why we’re seeing specialist, expertise-led posts staying active in the feed for weeks on end...

... and why you're seeing more "suggested posts" in your feed from people outside your network (the ones I'm seeing are really spot-on relevant for me, how about you?)

Meanwhile, generic posts and those relying on engagement pods are seeing their reach plummet after just a few hours.
(think how many fewer of these posts you've been seeing of late...)

So, if you want to win on LinkedIn in 2026, you need to change your approach to content posting.

If your post can’t hold a professional’s attention, or the comments it generates aren't meaningful, the algorithm will likely bury it.

Building on that, I suggest you treat your comments section as a forum. Nurture real discussion there.

A "Great post!" comment is now worth next to nothing. But genuine, multi-reply conversations, show that your posts are being appreciated by the niche you serve.

Are you seeing your more niche posts outlasting your broader content lately? Or are you finding it harder than ever to get the same reach you had a year ago?

Phew! The snow stayed away, and I was able to get to Cambridge to deliver my 6th annual session for the Executive MBA students there yesterday.

Reflecting back on what's changed in those 6 years, I'd say yesterday's group had far more executives who were already invested in using LinkedIn for their careers and had their own first-hand experiences of what had worked / not worked for them.

How the algorithm has changed, and is rewarding niche / expert content now, was one of many topics that really caught their interest.

The importance of profile optimisation, so as to be found by recruiters and decision-makers, was another.

Anyway, thanks for having me Cambridge Judge Business School - and appreciate all the questions from the very engaged group of students. Look forward to hearing about your progress in the coming months!

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Here's a 60-second exercise that's well worth doing...

Ask Google what your company is best known for.

The AI answer that comes back will help unearth how Google's AI currently views your business - and what the key sources are it's pulling that info from (if more than just your website).

You may find, as I have for Social-Hire.com, that your LinkedIn company page is one of the top info sources Google's AI is pulling its information from.

Depending on what you do find, that should spark some ideas about website changes, LinkedIn company page changes, etc., that you ought to prioritise making if you want Google's AI answers to start recommending you for the right specialities.

Hope what you find is a good reflection of your business!

taplio

The Battle

Helen Sanders

Tony Restell

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreTony Restell's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Helen Sanders

Tony Restell

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Tony Restell's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreTony Restell's LinkedIn Performance