When the Cobbler Fixes His Own Shoes: A Q4 2025 Look Back at RMG
There’s an old saying that the cobbler’s children have no shoes — and in recruitment, that phrase can land a little too close to home.
As a business that spends its days advising clients on leadership, structure, succession, and talent strategy, it’s remarkably easy to overlook one important truth: we need to apply the same discipline and intent to our own team as we do for our clients.
Q4 2025 marked a conscious shift for RMG. It wasn’t just about delivering for the market — it was about strengthening ourselves for the next phase of growth. And that meant investing in people.
Strengthening the Team: New Appointments at RMG
During the final quarter of 2025, we welcomed three new team members into the business — each bringing complementary skills, energy, and perspective, and each already making a commercial impact in their early days with us.
Alisha Cheetham
Alisha joined RMG with a strong grounding in research-led recruitment and candidate engagement in the Education sector. Her early focus has been on building high-quality pipelines, mapping markets thoroughly, and supporting consultants with delivery on key roles. Her high pace recruiting background and strong A&P knowledge from her time as a PT has assisted Alisha in “picking up the lingo” and she has already contributed commercially through candidate generation to placements, and her adaptation to a new hiring sector has been impressive.
Liam Bott
Liam arrived with a blend of curiosity, structure, and pace, added in with some specific sector experience alignment to RMG’s work. He has shown that he can build momentum quickly and lean into different mandates being thrown at him by the senior team. Liam’s background academically (MSc Sports Science) and competitive football career has been of benefit to him as he assimilates some of the technical nature of the briefs we handle. His early commercial contribution is a testament to how quickly value can be added when fundamentals are done well.
Sam Judd
Sam joined RMG with a strong appetite to develop his craft having spent some time in house hiring and running his own niche hiring business. In a short space of time, Sam has developed credibility with our candidate base, and has already spent some time in client development alongside some of the senior members of the team. He too has played his part in revenue delivery, underlining the importance of attitude, coachability, and consistency in building a successful recruitment career.
Collectively, Alisha, Liam and Sam have strengthened RMG in areas that matter deeply to us: research quality, candidate experience, delivery rigour and future capacity. Importantly, all three have have shown that they fit into RMG’s business, have shown their value to other team members and have made a commercial contribution, reinforcing our belief in investing early and properly in people.
Recognising Progress: John Langley’s Promotion
Alongside new beginnings, Q4 was also a moment to recognise growth already underway within the business.
After a highly commendable year of sales performance, client development, and professional maturity, John Langley was promoted to Senior Consultant.
John Langley
John’s progression reflects more than just numbers on a board. Over the past year, he has development some trusted client relationships, handled increasingly complex mandates and demonstrated the behaviours expected of a senior member of the RMG team — accountability, consistency, team leadership and being a sounding board for new team members, as well as some longer-term joined up thinking about the areas of the market he is going to focus on.
His promotion is a clear signal of what progression looks like at RMG: sustained performance, trust with clients, and a mindset aligned with building something durable.
Looking Ahead
Q4 2025 reminded us that the strongest recruitment businesses are built the same way we advise our clients to build theirs — intentionally, patiently and with the right people in the right seats.
Fixing the cobbler’s shoes doesn’t happen overnight, but this quarter marked a meaningful step forward. With new talent embedded, internal progression recognised, and early commercial returns already visible, RMG enters the next phase of growth on stronger footing than ever.
And this time, the cobbler is making sure everyone has shoes.
