People POWER

CM Event Recruitment is known for its people first approach to the events industry, with its staff taking top priority. Quick on its heels is the satisfaction of its clients, who regularly let Founder, Chrissie McLaren and Operations Manager, Richie McLaren know just how attentive and detail orientated the team have been. At the heart of this recruitment agency is a love of the process of events, not just the end goal.

Chrissie explained it is the company’s people driven approach which keeps them focused, motivated, and enthusiastic about their client’s experience: “We don’t just take the booking and that’s it – they’ll hear from us constantly.” Working events is clearly exciting to Chrissie, causing her to share the joy with her clients at every given opportunity: “Two weeks before we’ll message saying: ‘Hey, not long now! Don’t worry we’ve got a great team here; I’m going to confirm the names with you a couple days before.’”

Chrissie, who founded the business over a decade ago, with husband Richie joining the company in 2019, said: “We actually had our own staff at our wedding, the reason we did that is because we knew they’d do the job, and we knew they’d been well trained.” Between the event industry power couple is a combined 40 years of industry experience, with Chrissie’s expertise laying in recruitment and consultancy, and Richie’s laying in customer service and logistics – a match made in heaven.

And just because CM Event Recruitment attracts big names like Ferrari and Vivienne Westwood doesn’t mean Chrissie and Richie let this get to their head. Instead, they use the opportunity to let their carefully selected staff shine, showing just how skilled, personable, and dependable they are:

“Just because it says Ferrari doesn’t mean you can just go in and charge three times more.” Chrissie says: “it’s all about the service, we drive all of our staff to the events and all the cars have got spare black shirts, hair bobbles, belts, deodorant, and ties for black tie events.”

All its experience means the team have dependability down to a tee, Chrissie says: “We understand that it’s not a nine to five industry – we’ve had phone calls at 7pm asking for staff the following morning.” Over the years CM Event Recruitment has delt with its fair share emergency calls and cancellations: “Last week we had a phone call at nine o'clock at night, saying I really need 12 staff tomorrow. Within half an hour it was all sorted.”

One of the few occasion’s events are turned down is for the protection of its staff. The staff mean everything to CM Event Recruitment, demonstrated when Chrissie and Richie check up on their staff when they’re ill, sing Happy Birthday to them down the phone, and changed its staff shift group into a mental health group during COVID: “It’s happened before where we’ve had a new client and the staff haven’t been treated well and when the client contacted us for more staff, we’ve said no.”

Cmeventrecruitment.co.uk