Our story

Meet our founders, Will Larcombe and Alex Colwell.

We wish we had a Dragon’s Den-level back story, but as you find with many successful businesses, we were simply working together in a consultancy and got frustrated by things we felt were not being done properly.

We believe we deliver excellent client service and integrity in the way we work, but accept that coming up with creative name ideas is not our forte. So William Alexander Recruitment was born in 2010.

The agency has been placed in Recruiter Magazine’s Hot100 for the last nine years (plucked from a pool of 40,000) and has seen over 1,000 happy jobhunters find their perfect role in IT and change management.

In 2020, when clients still wanted people to work flexibly on projects but stay compliant with new IR35 legislation, the creative name fairy struck again and William Alexander Consulting was launched.

And as before, this was done properly, with heavyweight consulting hires, aka Scott and his team. We created a premium fully contracted out service that took recruitment agencies having a bash at writing Statements of Works (SoWs) and knocked them out of the park.

FUN FACT

When we were deciding on the name for Stellarmann, we tried to create a story around the café where we used to meet to plot our future. Sadly, it was just a local branch of Giraffe, and Raffe Consulting never saw the light of day.

We don’t have to add the obligatory “and then Covid hit” disclaimer here. The business thrived, even as everyone was zooming from their kitchen table, winning large contracts with a central government department, Talbot AIG and Convex. Even now, most of our team work remotely, giving us the whole of the UK as our talent pool, rather than a 20 mile radius from our HQ in Brighton.

By 2023, if we had had Deborah Meaden on board, we reckon she might have advised us to change our name. Clients were telling us to after all. Our service encompasses so much more than pulling together the very best people for the job. The payment model that sees us only get paid when deliverables are, well, delivered. The quality of the SoWs that means risk is both shared and minimised. The way we look after our teams.

But what we get told more than anything, is that our teams of associates are all stars. Niche skills. Highly motivated. Correctly incentivised. Turn off and onable. Not picked off a bench.