In this interview with SME Today magazine, Jack Mellor, the CEO of Personnel Checks, shares insight into his journey as a second-generation entrepreneur and the path that led him to take the helm of the UK’s top-rated DBS check provider.
Can you walk us through your journey into the business and how you came to lead Personnel Checks?
I’m a second-generation family business owner. My parents built and sold several businesses over the years, so I grew up in and around entrepreneurship. I spent the summer holidays stuffing sales packs in envelopes. Business was a topic for discussion over family meals. It was always in the blood.
I spent the first part of my career exploring my passion for language learning and worked in a Franco-American software company in their Paris office. My path into Personnel Checks was through well-structured family succession planning. I purchased my shares back in 2017 through what I’d describe as a “family-style” management buyout, a process that took roughly five years to complete. That gradual transition gave me the time to earn the role, understand the business inside out, and step into the leadership position with confidence.
Personnel Checks has achieved over 300% growth in the last five years. What have been the key drivers behind that success?
300% sounds like a lot when you put it like that! The reality is that I’ve been doing this for nine years now, and we’ve achieved steady growth every single year (bar one, which was Covid). Some years have been stronger than others, but there are two things that have really driven us forward.
The first was finding a niche. We landed on the taxi licensing market, and to be honest, it wasn’t exactly planned. A local licensing authority rang us up because they were in a mess with their DBS checks processing. We tidied it up, and in doing so, we realised there was an industry-focused value proposition just waiting to be packaged and delivered to the rest of the market. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come knocking when you least expect them.
The second was investing in technology. Historically, our business model essentially involved repackaging a mix of third-party software tools to deliver our service. At the start of the pandemic, I made the (undoubtedly crazy) decision to completely upend this business model and instead commit a significant amount of resource to building the capability to develop, deploy, and evolve our own proprietary software.
This decision literally changed everything for us. The control we gained allowed us to streamline everything from internal processes to our supply chain. It sounds straightforward when you say it like that, but going from an engineering and product team of zero to seven in four years has been one of the hardest challenges we’ve faced. We work on it every day, we don’t take it for granted, and it was the best thing we ever did.
Looking ahead, all of our efforts are going into building a complete platform to help businesses hire the right people. We’re creating a totally frictionless experience that gives you the tools to conduct the right background checks and assessments, strengthening your organisation and reducing HR and compliance headaches.
How have you approached scaling the business while maintaining a strong, values-led culture, particularly as a B Corp?
We’ve always been bootstrapped, and it remains a core principle of ours to stay that way. That financial philosophy of stability and profitability sets a natural pace for our growth journey. I understand that might not be the most fashionable thing to say right now; there’s so much talk about start-ups, scale-ups, funding rounds, and Series A, B, C in the business space. There isn’t enough being said about steady and sustainable business growth.
By not moving too fast or snatching for outcomes too quickly, we can take our people on the journey with us. They feel secure at all times. We actively avoid the aggressive shunts that many businesses experience during growth phases, which almost always result in redundancies and cultural damage.
This approach also allows us to consider our wider responsibilities: our engagement with communities, staff, suppliers, and beyond. All of that is crystallised in our B Corp certification. It’s not a badge we wear for show, it’s a reflection of how we choose to operate.
What are the most common hiring and compliance mistakes you see SMEs making today?
The number one problem for any SME that’s trying to scale is hiring. When you make a bad hire, whether it’s a culture mismatch, an attitude problem, a skills gap, or you’ve simply landed a bad egg, it becomes all-consuming. It keeps you up at night and wakes you up in the morning. Speaking from experience, when I have “people problems” on my desk, it takes over everything, both in terms of time and headspace.
At the highest level, I think SMEs are simply not taking enough interest or ownership in their hiring process. They either outsource it, wing it, or avoid it altogether.
My fundamental belief in business is that the most important thing you will ever do as a founder or leader is hire people. I genuinely cannot fathom why you wouldn’t put a significant amount of time and effort into getting that process right.
I hear it all the time from other SME owners and founders: “Recruitment! What a nightmare! I hate it! I can’t be bothered! There are no good people out there! I’ve caved and started using an agency!”
The truth is, nobody teaches good hiring; at least, not for SMEs. But it’s a muscle. It can be trained. And once it’s strong, that is when you start achieving special things in your business.
If people have the potential to be the best or worst decisions you’ll ever make, why on earth would you not own the entire process end to end?
For SMEs with limited resources, what are the essential steps to building a confident and compliant hiring process?
I’d break it down into a practical, step-by-step approach that any founder can follow:
- Appoint yourself as head of recruitment. Even if you have a HR lead or a small recruitment team, this has to be one of your top priorities as a business leader. You set the vision and the standards for what good hiring looks like.
- Get crystal clear on what the job actually is. Focus on high-level statements of what “good” looks like. Use plain English and write the outcomes you’d like the hire to achieve. For example, “grow sales by 10%” or “implement a new project management process that the whole team is following by April.” Jobs are not endless bullet points of tasks.
- Identify the skills and traits you need. Read back through your role description and highlight every point where you can align a specific skill or trait. If you’ve described someone who “calmly and confidently responds to customer queries in a warm, personable tone,” then you’ve just identified friendly communication, listening skills, and problem-solving ability. Pull those out and make them measurable.
- Articulate your company culture (properly). Culture is not the five words you scribbled on a whiteboard during a team planning day. It’s the behaviours you expect to see. Company culture is seen in the moments the CEO is not in the room; in the moments when a colleague is twenty minutes late to a meeting, or when a client texts at 9pm asking for a report. What your team do in those moments is culture.
- Use tools that bring your process to life. You can get started for free using a decent application form and a well-organised inbox, or you can invest in an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
- Write a compelling job advert (and include an Easter egg). An Easter egg is a small, hidden instruction buried in your job advert, something like “include the word ‘pineapple’ in your application.” It’s a simple way to test whether candidates have actually read the advert properly. You’d be surprised how many don’t.
- Incentivise your team to share the role. The power of personal networks is massive. In my business, we pay £750 for a successful referral. Get the job on Indeed, LinkedIn, and any niche job boards that make sense for your industry, but don’t overlook the reach of your own people.
- Involve your team in the interview process. Get at least two, but ideally four or five, of your team to interview each candidate. Have them score against each skill, trait, and culture pillar you’ve established. Scoring forces you to ask targeted questions and make structured assessments, rather than just having a random chat.
- Run your background checks. For candidates you wish to progress, initiate profiling and run your background checks. I’d start with a straightforward set: right to work, references, and a Basic DBS check. You can go deeper as you move further through the process.
- Guard against bias. Don’t let interviewers confer with each other before submitting their scores. Biases are real, and your hiring process should create a safe space for your team to say what they genuinely think, not what they think you want to hear.
- Use the data to make your decision. Bring together all the quantitative and qualitative data points and debrief with your stakeholders. And here’s the crucial bit: if nobody is right, don’t hire. Walking away from a bad fit is always better than filling a seat for the sake of it.
With over 150,000 DBS checks processed annually, what trends are you seeing in hiring risk and due diligence?
The overarching trend is positive; more companies are conducting background checks every year, which tells us that awareness around hiring risk and due diligence is growing. Employers are increasingly recognising that pre-employment screening isn’t just a compliance box to tick, it’s a genuine safeguard for their business, their team, and the people they serve.
We’re also seeing a shift in the types of checks being requested. It’s no longer just about criminal record checks. Employers are looking at a broader picture such as right to work verification, reference checks, qualification verification, and adverse financial checks. The appetite for a more comprehensive, layered approach to due diligence is definitely increasing, particularly among SMEs who are waking up to the real cost of a bad hire.
Based on what I’ve seen and the people I’m speaking to, there are three areas that could be contributing to these trends:
- An increased awareness of the rise in job scams/recruitment fraud and similar things. This has been all over the news recently, and with tighter margins for businesses, people don’t want to leave anything to chance. This is likely the primary driver for the broad increases that we’re seeing.
- UK business following the example of their US counterparts (over 90% of businesses in the US perform regular background checks on their staff).
- A lot of people I’ve spoken to have been burned before and understandably don’t want to be caught short a second time. I get phone calls from friends and other business owners all the time asking how they should handle a bad hire situation. The only advice I can give at that post-hire stage is to refine their hiring due diligence to minimise the chances of it happening again.
Through your role helping shape industry policy, what changes or developments should SME leaders be preparing for?
SME leaders need to prioritise the importance of their hiring process now more than ever. The upcoming Employment Rights Bill (ERB) is going to fundamentally change the landscape. Finding the right person to help build your business has never been more critical.
The bill is set to introduce significant changes, including day-one employment rights such as stronger protection from unfair dismissal. For SMEs, this means the traditional “safety net” of being able to part ways with someone during a probation period where it hasn’t worked out is going to shrink considerably. The balance of power is shifting towards the employee, and employers will have less flexibility to course-correct a bad hire after the fact. That makes getting your hiring process right from the outset absolutely essential.
Beyond the ERB, I’d encourage SME leaders to lean into and actively support proposals around the use of digital identity verification to speed up the recruitment process. Both on the right to work side and the DBS side, digital IDs have the potential to make hiring faster, more secure, and significantly less painful for everyone involved.
Looking back, what is the most important lesson you’ve learned as a CEO that other SME leaders could benefit from?
In my nine years as an SME leader, I’ve learned that in order to take your business to the next level, you are not going to be able to do it alone. You have to build and engage the team that’s going to do it for you.
You have to be endlessly fascinated by this idea to achieve the best results. And for me, building great teams all starts with hiring.
It has been a nine-year learning curve so far, and I have no doubt I’ll still be learning after the next nine years. But one thing that I can say is:
Learn how to hire well, and you will unlock doors to areas in your business that you didn’t even know existed.