Finding My Niche in HR and Recruitment.

I’m feeling very reflective today. In the run up to what will be a very important week, my Linkedin activity has gone through the roof and I’ve come online to catch up and prepare for the week ahead.

I have been meeting a lot of customers recently. Every time I meet with somebody who needs my help, I begin by telling them my background. I am conscious that most of my network do not really know me and I always feel that it is important that they know the person who will be supporting them as they seek to improve themselves or ask me to recruit HR professionals for them.

So I tell them that I am a linguist. That my first love was languages, that I am fluent in not only English but also Spanish and Italian, and I can just about get by in French and Portuguese too.

These skills led to me having an almost 12-year career in a large global internet company where I ran specialist product implementation, customer service and internal account management teams across 14 European countries. In what became a large corporate multinational, no two days were the same and I had the support of a Global HR BP and L&D Manager who helped me to build talent management and succession planning processes for my team, which was spread across several countries. I loved to coach, mentor and challenge my teams – I supported them as best I could and was really proud when I saw them grow and move upwards within the company.

I was based in London but travelled frequently to USA and across Europe and was part of a Global Leadership Team for customer service and product set-up that was constantly improving, developing teams and driving change through multiple boundaries on a global level, using Lean Sigma and PMP methodologies.

I thought I had made it. This was me, I was the company’s “Mr International”. I had a young family, a great job in a global internet company, I drew upon my niche experience daily and got to use my languages.

So when redundancy came it hit me really hard.

I had had three promotions in almost 12 years and, while the company had started to struggle, I was stupidly blind to the threat of redundancy. The news came on the day that my paternity leave finished for my second daughter, just before Christmas and was delivered via telephone by my manager whom I never saw again. Nobody from HR spoke with me or consulted with me in any way until a week or so later when I sought them out.

The company was an online job board. Our products were all recruitment-related. All of my customers were Global Heads of Resourcing or HR Directors. I left thinking I was a Head of Account Management or Service of some sort but I quickly realised that I really enjoyed recruitment and knew a lot!

By this time I had relocated the family from London to my home town of Liverpool. I tried to find like-for-like employment with Linkedin, Indeed, Totaljobs etc… but they all wanted me to move to either Dublin or London, both out of the question, so there began a decision to re-invent myself as a recruiter. I had been teaching recruiters to use online sourcing tools for so long I decided to go native and do it myself.

I had a few years in interim roles as Internal Recruiter and Internal Recruitment Manager which honed my direct sourcing, Agency PSL negotiation and Assessment Centre running skills. Then an agency who had put me forward for a European Recruitment Manager role asked me to work for them recruiting HR professionals instead.

I had always thought that the world of agency recruitment was full of sharks, and perhaps it is, but if it is I have met very few. It is now 6 years since I started supporting HR professionals across the North West with their own careers and supporting HR clients with high quality HR candidates for their teams. I get to draw upon my years of not only recruitment experience but also HR and business experience too. I try to meet every HR professional I support and I put them through their paces in terms of HR knowledge, gaps, achievements and so on. I love this part of my job! I give CV, career and market advice to the candidates that I meet and I give HR salary and benchmark advice to the clients that I support.

I really enjoy meeting people and I love giving back to the HR community by running free HR Seminars where I source experts in their fields to present and impart HR knowledge, wisdom and advice. Once again no two days are the same in my line of work. I take great satisfaction in supporting people with their careers and in introducing high quality HR hires to my clients. I suppose I have been incredibly lucky to find two different careers that give me so much.

Nowadays I rarely use my languages and international business experience but I work 25 minutes from home for a flexible values-driven company that lets me run my department as I like. I get to spend time with my family and take them on amazing holidays and I get to do this by using skills that I genuinely enjoy!

So, those who really know me will know that I love to talk! The same is true of the written word. I started writing this merely to reflect on how I’m preparing for what I hope will be a busy and successful HR Seminar in Cheshire on Wednesday and I have ended up telling my Linkedin network a big chunk of my life story.

To those who have read this far, many thanks for listening. If you follow your dreams and interests you really can make a successful career out of it! Please feel free to leave your own stories below – I am genuinely interested.