Getting to Know You: Caroline Connaughton & Victoria Clarke, founders, The Job Show

Co - Founders Caroline & Victoria

Earlier this year, The Job Show was shortlisted for The Positive Social Impact Award.

Dubbed the “Oscars of great British Business” by David Cameron, the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards will reveal its winners on 13thNovember.

In the run up to the Awards Ceremony at The Grosvenor House Hotel, we caught up with founders Caroline Connaughton and Victoria Clarke.

What do you currently do at your company day-to-day?

Together, both Caroline, Managing Director and Victoria, Director, have created a quality face-to-face recruitment and careers event which takes place at premiership and championship football clubs, with no financial funding.

Armed with just our lifetime skills in sales, marketing, advertising, PR and management, [we have] successfully managed to create an innovative module that would attract some of the biggest corporate employers in the country and the most iconic venue destinations in the world! [The] perception to the outside world is that we have a team of 100 staff located in luxurious offices in the city centre, but [the] reality is that ‘just the 2 of us’ are working tirelessly with dedication, passion and pure determination from an office [in] the back of the MD’s home!

What was the inspiration behind your business?

Both driven by childhood humble beginnings and sparked by our own ‘life changing’ family redundancies – and doom and gloom of the economic climate, we, as responsible corporate citizens wanted to give something back to the community that would benefit us all!

So back in 2013, The Job Show was born; a quality recruitment and careers event that [would] produce 50 shows by the end of 2018. We attract over 30,000 visitor registrations making a positive social impact throughout the country, making a difference within the community and changing hundreds of people’s lives.

Who do you admire?

We admire anyone that has the passion, drive, vision and pure determination to succeed and live their dream no matter what age.

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

We have been on an amazing journey in such a short space of time…and without the challenges we have overcome and the risks we have taken, The Job Show™ would not be the success it is today.

What defines your way of doing business?

By being different from the ‘competition’ and creating an innovative and simple [model] that can be replicated anywhere in the country and in whatever language all over the world!

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

Listen to what others have to say—friends, family, experts, even yourself. Be a solution. Keep it simple. Make your own luck and most of all, believe you can do it!

Meet The Job Show and hundreds of other ambitious British businesses at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards ceremony.  Book your place here for the 13th November, Grosvenor House Hotel, London.