Looking back at 2025, we’re proud to reflect on a transformative year for the STR Group – one marked by strategic expansion, industry insight, culture-building and celebrations of our people. From strengthening our global footprint to championing inclusion and celebrating our 25th anniversary, this has been a year defined by ambition and achievement.
Strategic expansion and international growth
Securing E-2 visa status in the U.S.
One of our most exciting milestones this year was officially obtaining E-2 Visa status, enabling STR to expand U.S. operations and offer enhanced mobility for UK talent to work stateside and support our clients’ projects. This positions us to better serve our customers and unlock global opportunities for specialist STEM professionals.
This achievement underscores our long-term international growth strategy: bridging talent across continents with agility and compliance.
Our U.S. presence also strengthened with the transition of Talos’s Jack Rendle to our Michigan office. Jack recently made the move with his family, flying out early December. He’s relocated to Troy, Michigan, where he, his wife and two children are now settled in a house just five minutes from the office. Jack is working alongside Gary Cane and has already begun meeting with some of our clients across Michigan. While he is currently in the US on a five-year E2 visa, the plan is for Jack and his family to make Michigan their long-term home.
Celebrating performance and people
250K Club kick-back in Marbella
In July, we celebrated our top performers with a spectacular 250K Club trip to Marbella; an unforgettable three-night experience full of recognition, team bonding and well-deserved relaxation in the sun. This event was about acknowledging the dedication, excellence and high performance that drives STR every day. This year, we’re sending our top performers to Iceland! Watch this space…
Recognition and reward
Our Directors’ lunches, held quarterly, took place in some truly elegant venues this year including The Jetty at the Harbour Hotel in Southampton, and Ashling Park Estate, Chichester. These lunches are our way of celebrating our top performers throughout the year recognising their dedication and providing some well-earned downtime.
Award-winning in-house teams
Externally, our teams’ excellence was celebrated at some of the recruitment industry’s most prestigious events, including the Recruiter Awards in September, and the Global Recruiter Awards in November, where we walked away with the Most Effective Compliance Operation and Best In-house Training awards, respectively. A huge credit to our incredible internal shared services teams.
Thought leadership and insight
Throughout 2025, our blog content continued to deliver insights on both recruitment challenges and wider workplace themes.
- Talent attraction strategies: From benefits that attract top-tier professionals to diagnosing the talent gap in STEM sectors.
- Workplace culture and inclusion: Content on topics like neuroinclusion and World Menopause Day emphasised our commitment to diversity and well-being.
- Expert perspectives: We shared a compelling interview with Paralympian Liv Breen focusing on resilience and renewal, inspiring our community to bring energy and grit to everything they do.
- Founder insights: Clive Hutchings, our Co-Founder, featured on The Resilient Recruiter podcast, revealing lessons from STR’s growth journey, from its founding to today’s global presence.
These contributions reinforced STR’s role as a voice of thought leadership in specialist talent and organisational development.
Cive’s interview on the Resilient Recruiter’s podcast also coincided nicely with his 25-year anniversary at STR, and the silver celebration of the business itself. Congratulations Clive!
Partnerships and sector impact
Our brands continued building strategic relationships across sectors such as engineering, automation, life sciences and manufacturing, ensuring clients benefit from deep market knowledge and tailored solutions. Among these, strengthened collaboration in defence through our engineering, manufacturing and technology brand, Insignis, and Make UK Defence highlighted our ongoing commitment to sector-specific excellence.
Meanwhile, in our life science-focused brand, Blackfield Associates, we continued to build on our partnership with the UK Chapter of ISPE (International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering) and were recognised at their annual conference and awards in November as their Supplier of the Year. They highlighted our work in delivering our webinar series, GMPCast, helping to enable knowledge-sharing and best practice throughout the industry.
Culture, community and STR life
Culture stays central
Across the year, we celebrated:
- Global awareness themes and wellbeing topics, such as International Women’s Day, IDAHOBIT, Neuroinclusion, and World Menopause Day.
- Seasonal celebrations such as our Halloween costume party, legendary Christmas party, festive quiz and the ever-competitive tree decorating competition as the year wrapped up.
- Continual reinforcement of our values, from resilience to innovation, which form the foundation of how we show up for clients, candidates and colleagues alike.
Charity partners
Our charity work this year has included a mix of company-backed events and some extraordinary individual feats. Our more energetic employees, their family and friends, took on Tough Mudder for our charity partner Motiv8, which works to create brighter futures for young people across Portsmouth and the surrounding areas. We also held our annual Macmillan Coffee Morning, held our Christmas Jumper Day to raise some cash for Save the Children, and purchased over 50 Christmas gifts for children and their families in foster care for Fair Ways. 2025 also saw a Spinnaker Tower abseil (also for Motiv8), a London Marathon run for the British Heart Foundation, and hair cut and donated plus money raised for the Little Princess Trust.
A huge thank you to everyone who got involved this year!
Feedback and reflections
While 2025 brought many positives, honest feedback matters. Feedback from our quarterly employee engagement surveys show a range of employee experiences, from high praise for flexible and supportive culture to areas with room for improvement. Our overall high level of engagement rate suggests most employees and fully engaged and value the team environment, opportunities and compensation, while highlighting the importance of ongoing improvements in inter-brand collaboration and communication.
This feedback is an invaluable part of our journey, helping shape how we evolve as an employer of choice.
Looking ahead to 2026
As we welcome a new year, we’re energised by our expanded global capabilities, the insights we’ve shared with clients and candidates, and the incredible people that make STR what it is. Here’s to building on last year’s momentum: pushing boundaries, unlocking talent potential and making 2026 a defining chapter in the STR story.
Thank you to our clients, candidates and colleagues – people are at the heart of everything we do, and we couldn’t do this without you.
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