Ben Riley built six firms. Then he brought them together.

Ben Riley’s business went to the pictures. At Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, CSG Talent gathered to watch a film about itself: colleagues talking about the company, its values and where it wanted to go by 2030. Other offices held watch parties. For an enterprise devoted to finding people for other organisations, it was an afternoon spent looking at its own.

There is a pleasing reversal here. Recruitment usually asks people to describe themselves to strangers. This time, the colleagues were the cast and the audience. Riley had joined the filming, too. A founder who wants everyone to understand the same ambition must eventually submit to the camera along with everyone else.

The screening offers a way into his career. Riley has built recruitment businesses, joined them together and watched them spread across borders. The recurring question is what connects the people inside. A company can acquire another address rather more easily than it can acquire a common understanding.

Nine months before the first door opened

His recruitment career began at Ellis Fairbank in 2000, after a degree in European Studies with Law and French. He advanced through the firm, reaching management. Before setting up independently, however, he served nine months’ notice. Entrepreneurship occasionally wears the costume of a dramatic exit; Riley’s departure required a calendar.

In 2003, he and Wayne Underwood founded Rilwood Associates. Underwood was a colleague from Ellis Fairbank, where he had started in 1998. The partnership therefore began with the two men already knowing something about the business and about working alongside each other.

Core Consulting followed a year later. Further ventures brought their total to six specialist recruitment firms. This was a period of creating separate businesses, each with its own name and focus. The next consequential decision would concern how all those separate parts should operate together.

Six names become one

By 2015, the collection included Rilwood Associates, Blue Marble, BW Penman, Core Consulting, Core Care and Whiterock Executive. They merged under CSG. The change gave a single identity to businesses whose activities sometimes overlapped. A client could be forgiven for preferring one introduction to a small directory.

The reasoning went beyond presentation. Bringing the firms together created an opportunity to share working methods, invest in support functions and develop international offices. It also helped facilitate a group share option scheme. Those are decisions about how a business distributes resources, knowledge and participation.

For Riley and Underwood, the merger marks a shift in the kind of building required. Starting another firm adds an entity. Getting established teams to use common resources asks for cooperation between people who already have ways of doing things. The name on the door is the most visible part of that work, and perhaps the easiest to photograph.

There is a useful tension in the decision: specialist recruitment depends on close knowledge of a particular market, while a larger organisation needs people to see beyond their own desks. CSG’s structure had to give those two requirements room to coexist.

A second Australian address

In April 2018, Riley announced CSG’s Melbourne office. It followed Sydney, becoming the company’s second Australian office and its sixth globally at that time. The new location was in the city centre, on Collins Street. Here was an international plan expressed in the practical language of somewhere people could actually go.

The announcement described a broader Australian reach for candidates and clients. Alongside recruitment searches, the Melbourne team offered talent mapping, salary surveys and employer branding services. Finding a person for a vacancy sat beside work intended to help an employer understand its position in the market.

That distinction matters to the career Riley was building. Recruitment can begin with an immediate instruction: find someone. Advice about available talent or pay asks what should happen before the vacancy becomes urgent. The relationship has more chances to continue when the conversation includes the decisions around the appointment.

Today, CSG’s business spans Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Riley remains based in Leeds. Geography supplies the setting; the daily challenge is keeping an international organisation useful to the people who turn to it.

The business that went its own way

One revealing episode ends with another company becoming independent. In August 2021, Clear Edge’s founders, Terry Batty and Tom Fox, completed a management buyout of CSG’s shareholding. They took full ownership of the recruitment business they had established in 2011.

CSG had helped it get going through capital and services including training, IT, finance and back-office support. By the time of the buyout, Clear Edge had developed internal capabilities that helped make the transaction possible. The administrative work had a rather satisfying outcome: a business able to stand with more of its own equipment.

Riley welcomed the chance for Clear Edge to follow its own course and offered continuing help. It is an episode that gives his entrepreneurship some texture. Growth can mean supporting a separate team until its next chapter belongs to its founders.

There is little glamour in accountancy provision or an IT system. Yet their absence can consume the attention that a young firm needs for its customers. The Clear Edge story makes that supporting work visible, which is a useful correction to the founder photograph at the centre of most business stories.

A missed target stays in the picture

Riley’s public account of early 2026 began with an admission: CSG had missed its January target. In March, he described the response, saying February had become a record month for the UK business. He credited contributions across the organisation and cooperation between offices as well as teams.

The first part gives the celebration its shape. A record announcement on its own tells readers very little about what preceded it. Keeping the disappointing month in the account allows the response to become part of the story. It also gives colleagues something more particular to recognise than an isolated total.

Riley also stays involved in the work itself. His role includes coaching colleagues, joining client meetings, supporting searches and handling assignments of his own. Internal hiring is part of the job as well. That combination puts the chief executive in contact with both sides of the recruitment problem: helping an employer choose someone, and choosing people for his own organisation. It gives the discussion of development a concrete setting. A colleague can need advice on a live assignment long before a formal review comes around. The work provides occasions to teach, and the founder still has reasons to listen.

His explanation of performance places considerable weight on habits. He emphasises attention, effort, learning and the willingness to accept feedback. Individual development includes recognising other people’s progress. For an industry with readily countable results, that is an argument for looking at what happens before the number arrives.

“Success is measured in different ways.”

Ben Riley

He connects success with reaching personal potential. That leaves room for ambition without pretending every career should follow an identical route. It also creates a demanding standard: a person has to learn what they can do, then keep working at it. There are more convenient definitions, particularly for anyone hoping that a job title might settle the matter.

The work behind the next chapter

In September 2025, Riley wrote about the value of inbound business and the support that helps recruiters develop relationships. He described newer colleagues benefiting from candidate and client enquiries that could become work for their desks. He also acknowledged that cooperation across business functions takes time to develop.

That detail connects the founder’s earlier consolidation to the present. Shared support only becomes meaningful when someone doing an assignment can use it. Marketing, for example, has a practical consequence when an enquiry reaches the right colleague and becomes a worthwhile conversation.

The same month, he discussed expanding CSG’s contract offering, with Deborah Doyle joining the board to lead its global development. He connected that growth to the Manchester office and additional colleagues. The business was widening the ways it could serve clients, with leadership and operating space required alongside the ambition.

The services also put an ordinary obligation behind a large ambition. CSG describes its work in terms of identifying senior and technical gaps, understanding particular industries and advising on the skills businesses will need. For a founder, each promise creates a question that can be asked of the organisation: can the team deliver it for this client, in this location, with this requirement? A global presence is useful when it makes that answer better. The map can be impressive on a wall; a customer still needs someone who understands the assignment on the other end of the conversation.

By January 2026, Riley’s outlook for the year emphasised adapting to changing markets and considering skills from related industries. His optimism was conditional on businesses responding to change. The proposition is practical enough: an employer’s familiar route to talent may need another turning.

Which brings the story back to the cinema. The film gave colleagues across the business a chance to describe a shared future. Underwood enjoyed it, although he had a reservation about the size of the popcorn bags. Even a discussion of 2030 must contend with the immediate requirements of its audience.

Riley’s next chapter depends on what follows the screening: conversations between colleagues, work passed between offices, a client helped by more than one team. The six names have long since become one. Making that unity useful remains a daily occupation.