Specialist medical recruiter Pathology Group has adopted many of the principles and practices of elite sport to drive the performance of the business. Louie Evans and Zack Feather, two of the company’s founders, played professional football and cricket respectively, and the company has continued to recruit high-performing sportsmen and women, with around 25% of its staff of around 80 coming from this background. 

Among those recruited are an ex-women’s hockey captain, the England women’s football captain, an ex-England netball international and an ex-professional badminton player. 

John Zafar, Pathology Group chief executive officer, told Recruiter: “One of things we believe really set us apart is they come into business with a level of competitiveness that is just on another planet to the man on the street, so we have consciously gone out to seek people from a similar background.”

Feather added that “people from a sporting background have that winning mentality, where ‘no’ is never accepted and good is never good enough, so we found it made a real difference to the calibre of people we have employed in the business.”

Pathology’s growth made it the second-ranked staffing company in Recruiter’s 2013 FAST 50 produced in association with mergers & acquisitions advisers, Boxington Corporate Finance. 

Zafar said that one aspect of elite sports such as cycling and rugby he “absolutely buys into” is the aggregation of marginal gains. This is based on the idea that 1% to 2% improvements across many areas leads to big improvements in overall performance.  

One example of adopting this principle is in the way the company uses its performance dashboard, which provides real-time information on consultants’ performance, including the number of calls, duration of calls, financial statistics, sales, revenue and time sheets, said Zafar. “This allows coaches to identify specific areas for improvement for creating marginal gains — that’s an area that we are investing in at the moment,” he explained. 

It also allowed the company to tailor its coaching and development for new employees, he added.