“Look for the right inspirational leader to work with; I’d be less worried about the industry sector, as finding the right leader will give you game-changing HR experience.” – Christine Reynolds, Head of Human Resources at Hachette UK, shares what’s helpful to have a fruitful HR career.
As part of our commitment to support candidates in developing fulfilling careers, we’ve invited HR Leaders from a wide variety of organisations to share their insights on building a career, the challenges they face and what advice they would share with those hoping to follow in their footsteps.
This week, we had a great conversation with Christine Reynolds, the Head of Human Resources of the publishing company, Hachette UK. Christine’s expertise came from her experience in creative and tech industries in Australia and England – including broadcasting, digital services and printing solutions, recruitment and HR consulting.
Throughout her 18-year career, Christine has acquired her proficiency in various HR competencies like organisational and cultural transformation, training and development, talent management and much more.
Can you share with us what made you decide to pursue a career in HR?
Throughout high school, I was keen on becoming a Business Analyst as I was interested in understanding how to turn around failing companies. I wanted to know the levers to pull to return a business to a position of strength. Through my studies, I realised that the most significant lever for any business is its people assets. So, naturally, it felt like the right direction to go into HR if I wanted to be that linchpin of an organisation.
My career commenced at IPC employment, where I performed a recruitment role managing a large caseload of individuals who had long-term barriers to employment. This role chimed with my passion for diversity and inclusion, which has remained a key focus throughout my career. My caseload required my support across a broad spectrum of blockers, such as gaining employment with a criminal conviction. Helping each person find the right role and connecting them with a great employer was endlessly rewarding. I progressed within IPC Employment into their Regional HR Consultant and, after several years, left to start my own tech start-up, The Fruit Guys. My driver for this was to test my HR skills and put in practice a number of initiatives that felt too ‘wild’, including allowing staff to work from home, having an international remote workforce to provide 24/7 customer support and utilising government subsidies to employ staff with long-term barriers to gaining employment. These don’t sound as ‘wild’ now, but this was 2007 in Australia. Working from home was considered taboo! This endeavour was hugely successful. I learned a lot along the way, which still proves fruitful in the advice I provide to CEOs and MDs I partner with today. Fruit Guys changed many lives in the employment opportunities offered to ex-offenders, staff with disabilities and staff with significant barriers to employment. Many team members remain friends for life. I sold the company after I received a fantastic offer from an organisation that the Australian government was backing at the time. It felt like the right time for me to travel and secure a visa to move to England. We all parted ways on good terms, and they are still in operation.
Upon moving to the UK, I secured a great role with Ricoh Europe. I commenced as their HR BP, quickly moving into the EMEA Strategic HR Projects Manager role working on large-scale projects across their 29 operating companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
I then moved to Channel 4. As their Head of HR, we were always looking to make bold moves in our HR projects, such as launching the industry’s first Menopause Policy in 2019. Our most challenging project was meeting government demands to open four new sites across the UK to spread our London workforce and commissioning into the regions. It involved large-scale change management, collective consultation and relocation aspects but was hugely successful.
What challenges are you currently facing?
Retention and attraction of talent are our key challenges reflecting the impact we are all experiencing of the ‘great resignation’.
Our big game changer has been implementing a tool called Talent Mapper. This tool enables large-scale, real-time talent assessments – something we couldn’t achieve using excel and PowerPoint. We wanted to gain talent intelligence of the entire organisation through talent mapping but found our manual processes really slow and labour intensive. It hindered management engagement and our speed to remedial actions. The great resignation requires a speedy response; we didn’t have six months to map our talent. We needed talent intelligence now and to be able to update this information quickly and regularly. Without the tool, we would have only focused on our top 1-2 tiers of the company, which wasn’t where we saw our churn.
The talent mapper tool highlights critical roles, flight risks, succession gaps, top talent, horizontal moves, org design impacts and inconsistent and underperformance. It then recommends learning interventions managers can select to support performance improvements against each behaviour. We are enabling managers to create robust individual development plans and to have a language for development discussions. The Talent Mapper tool provided us with powerful talent insights, which was the crucial data we have been missing as HR and Managers. It’s been essential in helping us with retention and our internal and external attraction work.
What advice would you give to those planning to pursue an HR career?
Try not to pigeonhole yourself too much in a particular industry. Look for the right inspirational HR leader. I’d be less worried about the industry sector, as finding the right leader will give you game-changing HR experience. Seek someone who is inspirational, quite strong, but a very empathetic manager who is implementing game-changing HR projects. I’d recommend seeking someone who is pushing the envelope, especially within the diversity and inclusion space. A breadth of industry experience will help you move into different roles and give you more distinction in the market whilst also expanding your creditability to your management stakeholders.
One final tip would be to try not to appease managers at the cost of creating a precedent. A small move from your usual processes can quickly become that painful rod for your back. So hold firm whilst being fair and consistent in your approach. Your company will thank you in the long run, and your creditability will always remain high.
Christine graduated with a Commerce degree with a major in Human Resource Management in Australia, where she practised HR for 8 years before relocating to the UK. Her current role as Hachette UK’s Head of HR started in November 2020 when she joined the publishing company.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.