Brigitta on how she got here, how small and medium businesses should be hiring, and why the human side of service is about to matter more, not less.
From a research lab to recruitment
Brigitta moved to New Zealand from South Africa at 18 and studied science at Waikato. A stint in a London research laboratory put her alongside the sales reps who called on the lab, and when she came home she went looking for a scientific sales role. The recruitment agency she approached hired her instead, on the basis that recruitment is sales: you sell a job to a candidate and a candidate to a client. That was more than 22 years ago.
She spent thirteen and a half years helping scale a major firm and running its Waikato branch before deciding, on a summer walk along the beach, to build a business that reflected her own values. RecruitNet was the result: a Hamilton agency built on long-term relationships, trust and deep knowledge of the industries it recruits for. Read more about how RecruitNet works.
A strategic adviser, not a supplier of bums on seats
Brigitta spends a good part of this piece on what recruitment looks like when it is done for a small or medium business rather than a corporate. The large-agency template, where the measure of success is the number of placements, was never going to fit the way Brigitta wanted to work. For an SME owner the recruiter is closer to an adviser: someone who knows the business, understands what a particular hire has to achieve, and will say so when the role, the salary or the timing is not right.
Slow the hiring process down before you speed it up
Brigitta’s advice to business owners is to stop and evaluate before the advert goes up. Is this role still the role the business needs, or has it drifted? Does the job description describe the job as it is today? How will a new person land in the existing team, and what does the team need from them? Owners who rush past those questions tend to hire the wrong person quickly, then spend a year dealing with it. Our job description template covers the same ground in more detail.
Onboarding is non-negotiable
One of the strongest points here is about the 90-day trial period. Too many businesses treat it as their safety net, then do very little to set the new person up properly and are surprised when it does not work out. Brigitta’s view is that proper onboarding is what actually protects the hire: a clear plan for the first weeks, someone responsible for the new person’s success, and regular check-ins. Relying on a trial period instead of onboarding sets people up to fail. There is a practical version of this in our 30/60/90-day onboarding guide.
Why human service will outlast AI
The title comes from the last third of that thinking. Brigitta is not against AI. It is already taking work out of the admin side of recruitment and she expects that to continue. What it cannot do is sit across from a candidate and notice what they did not say, or tell a client an uncomfortable truth about the role they are trying to fill, or hold a relationship over fourteen years so that a candidate placed in 2012 comes back as a client in 2026. As the efficient parts of the job get automated, the value of the person who listens properly and can be trusted goes up. That is true for recruiters, and Brigitta argues it is true for most service businesses.
Governance, giving back and protecting your energy
The conversation also covers the things Brigitta does outside the business: serving on a school proprietary board, mentoring through the Wahine Collective, and the property investing she uses to build financial security for the next generation. Asked how she keeps it all going, the answer is boundaries. Non-negotiable time for family, training and the occasional retreat to Opito Bay is what makes her better at the work, not a distraction from it. It is advice she gives to the business owners she works with as often as she follows it herself.
The short version for business owners
- Evaluate the role, the job description and the team before you go to market.
- Treat onboarding as the safeguard, not the trial period.
- Hire people who will still be worth having when the routine parts of the job are automated: the listeners, the relationship builders, the ones who can be trusted with a hard conversation.
- Look after your own time and energy. The business gets a better owner.
If you are planning a hire and want a second opinion before the advert goes up, talk to Brigitta. It is easier to help before the proposal is written than after.
