“Get involved in as much as you can. Put your hand up for a project that’s happening, to learn new skills and to gain as much experience as you can. That positive attitude, enthusiasm, and desire to succeed will take somebody further than they think” – Clare Garcia FCIPD, People Director at Places Leisure talks about the best attitude to have in pursuing a career in HR.
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 Clare Garcia, who has 20 years of successful generalist HR experience. Having started as a Personnel Assistant for Panasonic during her uni years to being an HR Coordinator and Manager at Avis Budget Group International, now, she is the People Director for the leading leisure and wellness partner, Places Leisure; a social enterprise delivering fitness, sport, health and wellbeing to communities across the UK.
Clare has always been interested in HR, pushing her to pursue a Personnel Management with CIPD degree at the University of Plymouth and supplemented it years after with an Employment Law Advanced Diploma.
Can you tell us what made you decide to pursue a career in HR?
I can link it back to the work I did with my Dad. I was 15 or 16 when I spent a couple of weeks with his regional HR manager. She was kind, knowledgeable and passionate about HR.
During that work experience, I just supported the team by preparing some interview packs for a recruitment day that they were running; I loved that structure, and the organisation required for that task. I loved the buzz of that role in the team. During university I did my placement year at Panasonic as their HR assistant. They had a large placement scheme and had around 20 students each year in different departments within Panasonic. The HR role was responsible for recruiting all of those students for the next year’s intake. So that’s what my role was. It was a big focus on recruitment and I was also involved in some other projects whilst I was there.
After I finished my degree, I went to Avis Budget Group, a car rental company. There, I met another really good role model. I think she saw something within me, took a bit of a chance and promoted me to HR manager very quickly. I was very flattered, but I was also petrified. I think I’d only graduated maybe a year or two years and thought this role is too much for me. But she mentored me, supported my development and pushed me outside of my comfort zone continuously. I think I learned then that it was important for me not to let fear hold me back from achieving my potential.
I later joined my current company, Places Leisure, one of the largest leisure management partners, managing over 100 leisure facilities on behalf of local authorities across the UK. Over my time here the company has seen substantial growth and is now home to over 6,000 colleagues. I’ve also grown both personally and professionally over these years, especially when I was promoted to People Director in October 2020.
What are the biggest challenges you are facing in your current role?
For a good part of 2020 and 2021, we were closed due to the pandemic so our employees were furloughed. Actually, not just our employees—the whole industry was affected. So the workforce had a long time to think about what they wanted from life. We had some great examples during the pandemic of our furloughed people retraining to work for the NHS, supporting their local communities and working in retail as well.
We’ve had a number of our employees either deciding not to return to work after furlough or coming back and then leaving us. But also because of Brexit, we have been struggling to recruit into some of our lower-skilled roles as well. As a result we’re focusing on recruitment and how we can get the best talent into the business, but then we’re also looking at how we can retain the talent that we’ve got at the moment.
Some of the things we’re doing include reviewing the benefits that we offer our employees. We’ve extended our staff-use of leisure facilities benefit and are offering many more discounts to encourage our employees and their families to use our facilities and get active. We’ve also introduced an emerging talent programme, our graduate recruitment scheme. We’ve got a lot of students who work for us and if they’re just finishing their degree in Sports Science or whatever it might be, they can also apply for those graduate roles that we are advertising both internally and externally.
We have a Lead with Spirit, management development programme, and will shortly be launching a succession planning and talent management process and mentoring programme. We want to be able to talk to employees about where they want to progress in their career. Because I think a lot of people don’t see working within a leisure centre as a career, but there are many career options for people. We’ve got so many examples of lifeguards that have progressed to senior management positions. Like you could be a lifeguard, but then you could also train to become a swim teacher or a fitness instructor or personal trainer or group work instructor. There are lots of opportunities for people, but I don’t think we have shouted about that enough in the past, which is what we’re trying to do now.
What advice would you give to anyone planning to pursue a career in HR?
Take the time to understand what motivates you and what gets you energised. If I think about my early career, there was a turning point when I was leaving Avis Budget Group. Unfortunately, I was made redundant from that role because two teams were merging. At that point, I wanted to work for a large household name, which would look really good on my CV.
I spoke to a recruitment consultant and they asked me a lot of questions about what I loved doing, what I felt passionate about and what gave me the biggest sense of achievement at work. That conversation made me realise that a highly corporate environment would probably not have fitted my personality and was not what I wanted to achieve within my career. That was really powerful for me, because I think I would’ve just gone off in a direction I thought was what I wanted to do, without actually thinking about what I wanted.
So I think because life is just so fast and people are always considering, ‘what’s next?’, ‘how can I progress?’, it’s a really important gift to be able to stand back and reflect on what makes us happy and what we want to achieve. It is something I would encourage everyone to do because it was a real-life, eye-opener for me. I ended up here, which is a company I’d never heard of before, but it fitted with my values and what I wanted to achieve, and I just love working here. I think that’s really important.
The other thing I would say is to be curious, to get involved in as much as you can. Put your hand up for a project that’s happening to learn new skills just to gain as much experience as you can. That positive attitude, enthusiasm, and desire to succeed will take somebody further than they think because they will be noticed and opportunities will open up.
Clare has been an integral member of Places Leisure since she joined in 2009. Then in October 2020, she joined the Senior Leadership Team as the company’s People Director. She was tasked to develop and deliver a people strategy that is best needed to successfully handle over 100 leisure centre sites and 6,000 employees.