Ephram Stephenson starts another recruitment business

There is no stopping the Australian recruitment industry’s most optimistic business owner, Ephram Stephenson. It appears he’s the face behind the just-launched executive recruitment business, Leo Jackson: Executive Search, HR & Human Capital.

The leojackson.com.au domain name was registered at the beginning of this week. Clicking on “Contact Our Team” brought up the prepopulated email recipient [email protected], which was replaced the following day with [email protected].

The Leo Jackson website is a perfect example of saying a lot but communicating precisely nothing, which is the tell-tale sign of a business owner who wants to remain anonymous.

The company’s mission is one of the most mind-numbing missions ever constructed.

“At Leo Jackson, our mission is to empower organisations and talent through exceptional executive search services.

With a focus on integrity, client satisfaction, and measurable results, we aim to be the trusted partner in shaping leadership for a thriving future.”

The Leo Jackson back story was equally distinctive and compelling.

“Leo Jackson is a team supported by over fifty years of recruitment experience, specialising in top tier senior roles across Australia and beyond.

Over time, we’ve cultivated a vast network of qualified executives and senior management professionals.”  

Full of stock photos some with cliched slogans (eg “Disrupt or be disrupted” and “The only limit to our realisation of tomorrow will be our doubts of today”) the site could not have been more bland and more generic had you asked a LLM to construct you the most faceless executive search website ever (hmm,…come to think of it……).

Hilariously, the invitation to “..see us in person” fails to list any physical location (maybe there’s a virtual reality office?), although the Leo Jackson LinkedIn page lists their headquarters as Perth (where Ephram Stephenson lives).

In all my years of looking at LinkedIn, I have never seen a company page without any people attached to it – until now.

Astonishingly, for an executive recruitment team that boasts “..50 years of experience in Executive Search, Recruitment, HR and Human Capital, having earned a reputation as leading award winning recruitment specialists,” it seems none of this experienced team owns a LinkedIn profile.

The only Australia-based Leo Jackson I could find on LinkedIn was based in a Perth suburb, and he has no experience in recruitment.

The pièce de résistance was to be found in the section, Our Values.

Aside from the debatable nature of some of these being values, the descriptors used for each value are word salad nonsense (“Our expertise is your expertise” – seriously?), the grammar is cringeworthy (“Integrity is one of our vital values” – so which values are non-vital then?) and the page hasn’t even been checked before publishing (the final sentence in the descriptor of the first value listed is obviously incomplete).

Well, full marks for persistence to Ephram, he’s no doubt got his sights set on winning CEO Magazine’s Start-up Executive of the Year for the second time in five years.

In keeping with the wise principle of ‘learning to crawl before you try to walk’, let’s see if Stephenson has learned how to pay a BAS statement on time and in full, first.

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