“Think about who you want to be and how you’re going to be that – whether that’s what you want or what the organisation needs – and then keep learning.” – Katie Dominy, Head of Human Resources at Soil Association, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Katie Dominy at the Soil Association, who began her career as a PR Accounts Manager at Chazbrooks Communications. Katie gained further administration experience with Surrey Police, before working as a Childminder for two years. When she returned to HR, Katie joined CWR in the role of Conference Manager, later transitioning to HR Officer, a position she held until 2010 when she joined Computershare as HR, Recruitment and Business Support Manager.
In 2012, Katie joined Castelan Group in the role of HR Manager, later adding Head of HR to her responsibilities. She was then successful in being appointed as Head of Human Resources at the Soil Association, which commenced in May 2019.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I remember doing the careers quiz in year 10 at school and personnel, as it was called then, came up as one of my possibilities. As a result, I spent a week on local work experience at the University of Surrey. It was my first administration insight and gave me the inkling that what I would end up doing would be around people.
I didn’t always find my education easy and just a week after I finished my A Levels I got a job with a public relations company. Initially I was doing admin work but I worked my way up into an account manager role with my own clients, which was really exciting.
After two years an opportunity to join Surrey Police in their personnel department came up and I took it. It was a really inspiring place to work. The HR Director was confident, bold and playful and suddenly I thought, you can be like that at that level. She worked alongside really important people yet was so accessible and approachable. I’m quite rational and logical, sometimes too serious, and I operate well in the policy and procedure world and so I could see myself fitting into that type of space.
In 2002, my friend was growing her own childminding business and she asked me to join her. Again, it was a role that centred around people and working with the children and building relationships with the parents was really rewarding, but after two years I was just tired, it was such high energy work. I also realised that I needed to move on for financial security, wanting to buy my first house, so I joined a local charity who gave me the opportunity to move back into HR.
The charity had about 100 people but they didn’t have a HR or personnel function and the company secretary, who was retiring, held most of those responsibilities. I got in touch to say I think there’s an opportunity here and I’d love to study and learn and work in this role for you. It was a safe and supportive space where I could start putting policies in, help line managers, commence training and start supporting employees. For me, that was my career defining moment, where I fully committed to HR and began studying via evening classes on top of my full time job.
Since then I’ve spent time working in corporate and financial service companies, but I always wanted to return to the charity sector. I wanted to work for a values-led organisation and I think in my heart I’ve always thought charity was the place to deliver that. My heart is in that ‘people, community, cause’ kind of space and so I wanted to invest my professional time there as well.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
As an environmental charity we are fortunate that people care about the work we do and historically, we have been inundated with people who want to work for us, often because they’ve learnt about our work through their university studies or personal interests. However, in the last six to nine months we’ve seen a shift and now recruitment is a challenging issue for us. It’s forcing us to redesign how we put our reach into the world, perhaps we became a little complacent and now we’ve got to work harder to engage people due to changes in the marketplace.
Part of tackling that challenge will be looking at where we land on hybrid working and the workplace of the future. We’ve just launched a ten year strategy and that’s been built into a three year plan in which our biggest people task is workforce planning and organisational design. We have so much expertise but the business risk is if that specialist knowledge is sitting in one person and they move on, the organisation is exposed. So we’re looking at how we can be really intentional about creating pathways for people and promoting opportunities and progression. Hopefully by the end of March we will have clarity and structure around that and we can start communicating it to our staff.
Looking at our EVP, we’re asking, how do we break from the norm? In the past our adverts and profile have been quite traditional but now we’re trying to move away and talk more about you as a person and your contribution, how we are missing you in our organisation? Part of that is getting people to think more broadly about job descriptions, departing from a task-oriented style towards broader scopes of impact where people can recognise ways they could contribute. Hopefully there’s a different audience who will engage with that and say, this is something I can and want to be a part of.
There’s definitely some work we need to do around reaching a wider and more diverse candidate pool and I think in part that’s where hybrid working comes in, because then we could roll out more of our vacancies to a UK candidate pool, rather than just Bristol and Edinburgh where our offices are based. We’re a great charity that wants to succeed in changing the world for the future. We want to find good people to work for us, with that shared vision, and so we’re assessing how do we find them and how do we sell our story so they want to join us?
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
Firstly, you will always learn, and you should be really open to that. Whether that’s through formal study, seeking feedback, or gathering knowledge and experience over time spent in your role and interactions with others. In HR we’ve got black and white policies to try and make sense of the world, but then they need to be applied to the grey mass of humanness, and that’s where it gets complicated and exciting. To handle that you need to be confident in your knowledge and theory while also being open to responding differently to new situations. Whether starting out or later in your career, the need to learn never goes away. It may feel harder to do later when you feel like you should know it all, but learning is lifelong, and sometimes showing vulnerability is good.
My second piece of advice is to ask yourself, who do I want to be in this role? This is important when you change roles, but also every day on the job. I’ve always thought that credibility and accessibility are important. There are times when you’re sitting across the table from someone and they might not like the process they’re in but you can be human and empathetic in the way you handle it. In HR we have to wear many different hats, so think about who you need to be in this particular situation. Ask, what does the organisation need from me today? And be aware of it in advance. Self-awareness and self-reflection are very important.
So in summary, think about who you want to be and how you’re going to be that – whether that’s what you want or what the organisation needs – and then keep learning.
Katie is a fellow of the CIPD with over 15 years’ experience in generalist HR, including three years as Head of Human Resources at Soil Association.