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‘We need to deeply understand our people and the change required’ – Interview with Clare Wright

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“Cultural change isn’t just an HR responsibility, it’s an organisational responsibility. The most important thing for us as HR professionals to do  is to hold a mirror up to our organisations about what they need to do to implement positive change   and how they need to do it. To do that best, we first need to deeply understand our people and the change required.” – Clare Wright , Group HR Director for Jardine Motors Group, 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 Clare Wright at Jardine Motors group, who began her HR career as Customer Service Manager at Gilbert Lawton VW Audi before taking on a number of HR and Consultancy roles—including positions at Volkswagen UK, Stanley’s Casinos, the Shop Direct Group, Daisy Communications and E Front Global —ahead of returning to the automotive sector and joining the team at Jardine Motors Group in her current role in 2015. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I left school and went straight into work, and from there I got into HR by accident, really. When I first encountered HR, or Personnel as it was then, I was working in an operational role in a Volkswagen dealership called Gilbert Lawton VW Audi, and our Personnel system was literally our employee files locked in the accountant’s office. At the time, I was a Customer Service Manager, and we were working with Volkswagen UK on a leadership programme for the transition to a ‘bricks and clicks’ business model which incorporated both online and offline sales. As part of that programme, I started to network and talk to people about Personnel and HR in more depth. Hearing about HR made me realise that we needed to implement an HR strategy to make better quality hires and alleviate some of the negative feedback we’d been getting from our customers, so I persuaded my boss at the time—who was also the owner of the business—to allow me to go and start my CIPD qualification. Even back then, I was able to see where investing in my certification would reap rewards for his business. He agreed, after lots of negotiation so I went and did my CIPD qualification whilst working, then studied 2 nights per week at Manchester university  for my postgraduate qualification afterwards. At the same time, the business grew, and I actually ended up running one of our new locations as well as having overall HR responsibility for our sites The credibility that came from both understanding how to run a car dealership and holding a formal HR qualification to back that understanding up meant that I was able to consult on HR with more credibility  than ever before, which led to me being headhunted by Volkswagen UK to go and work with one of their consultancy partners on a large scale change programme to create a retail experience within their dealerships. The experience really honed my influencing and stakeholder management skills as well as my commercial skills. Since then, I’ve tried to take on as many career opportunities as possible, which HR has been perfect for; people are people no matter what business you work in. I’ve gained experience across lots of different sectors—motor and high street retail, telecommunications, and global software—to advance my career. Regardless of how long I’ve stayed with a particular company, I’ve always gone into businesses that are about transformation and change, because that’s what I really love. Although I’ve been here nearly six years, there’s still so much opportunity at  Jardine Motors, and that’s what keeps me interested. I think my passion for HR came from my knowledge that if you understand your business and your customers and then align that to your people, you’ve got a successful company. In my first role, when we improved our people, our customer satisfaction and profitability significantly improved . I could see the difference HR was making right from the start, and that was really exciting. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? A key theme of ours recently has been increasing our gender diversity, and I’m really proud of our achievements there. Our whole executive team has been committed to and feel responsible for that change programme, so whilst I’ve been sponsoring and facilitating our inclusion strategy, it’s fully supported and has been implemented right through the organisation. It’s been hugely successful, and we’re now focusing on extending the same approach to our whole diversity and inclusion piece; not because we’ve got massive issues, but because we have the opportunity to change and develop our culture and our business through it, to make it an even better place to work and for our customers to engage with .  I think the uncertainty of COVID has been our biggest challenge. Working in HR throughout this crisis has probably been the toughest thing I’ve dealt with in my career to date. There has been complete uncertainty on every level, and our agility and resilience as an organisation has definitely got us through, especially during a  tough reorganisation period.  We still face the challenge of continuing to adapt to the COVID, lockdown etc  as it evolves.  We’re currently looking at further developing our employee value proposition for the world we now live in, so there are still lots of great opportunities for change and development but we’re conscious that we need to have a contingency plan in place in the event that  we have to change direction again.   We’ve also had to work on ensuring that the organisation and our leadership  teams understand that the situation is highly changeable and that we need to continue to adapt, as well as the importance of keeping people motivated and engaged enough to continue

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‘We need to step forward for our businesses and our people’ – Interview with Lorraine Metcalf

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“It’s a really interesting time to be in the People function, but equally a really challenging one. There isn’t a rule book for what’s happening in the world at the moment, but we need to step up and step forward for our businesses and our people.” – Lorraine Metcalf, Chief People Officer at Quantexa, 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 Lorraine Metcalf at Quantexa, who has had a wide-ranging and diverse HR career in which she has taken on a number of leadership roles including HR Director for Studios at Electronic Arts, HR Director at Cephalon UK Limited, Human Resources Director at Human Resources Interventions Limited, HR Business Partner at Cable & Wireless, and Global Head of HR Operations at CPA Global. In November 2010, Lorraine took on a role as HR Director for UK and Ireland at Iron Mountain, before moving to Notonthehighstreet to serve as HR Director there in January 2012. In January 2014, Lorraine joined the Zoopla Property Group as HR Director, moving to the role of Chief Talent Officer in February 2017 before taking on her current role at Quantexa in October 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? My career started as a PA. I worked for an entrepreneurial company at first, and it was one of those entrepreneurs who saw talent in me and encouraged me to think about developing a career in HR. Although the role had a lot of admin, there was also plenty of Personnel involved, and he told me he thought HR would suit me as a profession. Via the company, he sponsored me to do what is now an FCIPD qualification, and I undertook it at Farnborough College while working. Initially, I was a bit sceptical about embarking on a career in HR and just wanted to expand my skills, but I soon realised I actually wanted to work within a dedicated HR function. Following that, I met someone who gave me the opportunity to embark on HR on my own via a subsidiary, allowing me to challenge myself and work with a really diverse group of people.  I’ve been incredibly lucky throughout my career to meet people who have introduced me to great opportunities, and the same was true of my predecessor at Electronic Arts, who I met at a recruitment event. EA were hugely progressive from a People perspective at the time—I’m still using things I did then in my practice now. I spent nearly 10 years with the company because I had so many opportunities there that gave me such a great grounding both centrally and when working with our client groups. They really valued people and put in a lot of People initiatives, and I couldn’t have asked for a better learning environment. Experiencing the development side of HR there was definitely the turning point for my career, as I could see the value that I could offer and the difference I could make, and that the people I worked with really valued the work I did. However, as the market began to consolidate under us, I knew I wanted to explore other niches and needed a new challenge.  Shortly after, I stumbled across an opportunity in a biotech company, and I really clicked with the person interviewing me. I had never worked in pharma before, but he decided to offer me the opportunity as he could see that my experience with the skills that needed to be applied to the role outweighed my lack of background in the pharmaceutical industry.  Once I had accomplished everything I could in that particular role, I then took on a few interim roles to try different things, and it was through an interim role that I fell into Cable & Wireless. Again, it gave me plenty of opportunities to implement changes and demonstrate what good People practice really is. I also did a couple of corporate HR roles, which were interesting, but not the direction I wanted my career to continue in. I then went to Notonthehighstreet, which was a fun role that enabled me to give back with my HR practice, and in 2014, I joined the team at Zoopla. Zoopla was incredibly fast-paced which isn’t for the faint-hearted, but I got so much opportunity there. In the time I was with them, we went public and IPO’ed, doubled our headcount size, did eight acquisitions and integrations, sold to private equity, delisted, and changed our whole strategy. The whole private equity process was an amazing opportunity. There’s something satisfying about making yourself redundant for the greater good and doing the right thing for the business and the investors. I took a summer off to recharge my batteries, and then through a contact from my Notonthehighstreet days, I was introduced to the opportunity at Quantexa. I went through the interview process, and on my last official day at Zoopla, I was offered the job. When I joined Quantexa, I saw a lot of the same qualities I had seen at Electronic Arts. I don’t think Quantexa realised how progressive they were from a People perspective. That’s a great luxury for me; the door is held wide open, so the only thing stopping me is my own imagination, creativity, and time. You only need to demonstrate the benefits to secure buy-in, and I’ve always been very transparent about pros and cons and giving the whole picture. We’ve done so much since I joined in October 2019, and my People team are brilliant—commercial, switched-on, connected with the business, super excited about the opportunity they’ve got, and passionate about what they do. When you factor in that I’ve got a CEO and a leadership team who are very People-oriented and open to learning and being challenged as well

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“Every day should be a learning day” – Interview with Samantha Lewis

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“Every day should be a learning day, and you should always be comfortable with where you’re working. If you’re in a role where you consistently feel unhappy, it’s really important to reflect on, and understand what changes need to be made for you to be happy in your role and to continue with your progression.” – Samantha Lewis, HR/People and Culture Director at NMITE, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.   We are committed to supporting candidates in developing fulfilling careers. As part of that commitment, we’ve invited some of the HR Leaders who are making a real impact, right now, to share the secrets of their success. This week, we spoke with Samantha Lewis, HR Director at the developing Higher Education Institution, NMITE. Samantha began her career in Fleet Management at the MOD, experiencing People Management for the first time within the organisation. In 2007, Samantha took on her first formal HR role as a Pensions and Personnel Officer—which later evolved into the role of Pensions and HR Business Partner—at a local manufacturing firm. It was in October 2018 that Samantha joined the team at NMITE as Head of HR, quickly ascending the ranks to take on her current role in June 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? “I initially started my career working for the MOD. I primarily looked after fleet management and the vehicles in the fleet. Due to my own personality traits, I quickly became a bit of a sheep herder; making sure people were in the right place, at the right time, and doing the right thing. It was around that time that I completed an online training module on Human Resources, and quickly found that it was area that interested me.  Two years later, a local manufacturing firm had an opening for a Pensions and Personnel Officer. They saw that I had excellent people skills and that I would certainly be a good fit for the role, and shortly after, they offered me the job. I was lucky in that the company then supported me through my HR qualifications and training, but admittedly, when I first arrived there, I didn’t know that HR was going to be my ultimate career path.  My plans when I first went to university were to join the Army – so that was all I’d ever worked towards. When that didn’t happen, I began to recognise the fact that I’d always worked with people and been able to read and support them – even looking back to when I’d mentored younger students whilst at school. I’d say it was that which led me to a career in HR. My new role at the manufacturing company was a bit of a gamble in terms of knowing if it would be the right fit for me, however, within six months, it was clear that people and I worked. Making myself known to the 800 staff who worked there and understanding their needs, along with the business needs, and aligning both, became a huge strength of mine. Everything grew quite organically from there, and I was allowed to expand my responsibilities to two different UK sites to continue my development. Every day was completely different, but demanded a lot of organisation and planning, which is something I loved. I was able to step up again when the HR Director moved on, which gave me a whole new catalogue of skills and experience from sitting on the senior management team, to developing an apprenticeship scheme and looking at organisational growth. In October 2018, I was informed by a close contact that NMITE were recruiting for their HR department. With NMITE essentially being a start-up organisation, I knew that the role would provide a unique opportunity to build the organisation from the ground up – something which hadn’t been done in this particular sector for over 40 years. I knew I would have complete accountability and responsibility for building the HR function, growing the organisation, implementing organisational structures and processes, and bringing in the senior leadership team.  The opportunities for development were incredible, and I liked the fact I would be giving young people based in Hereford a chance to continue their education locally, as well as potentially revitalising Herefordshire’s aging population with lifelong learning opportunities.” Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? “Over the next 12 months and beyond, we aim to recruit high-performing talent to the area to contribute to the overall success of NMITE. We want to deliver a hands-on learning approach, and that means we have to bring in the right people to effectively deliver that type of learning. We don’t typically have a ‘big city’ to sell to people, so we have to base the attraction on what we’re doing and what the project stands for. Bringing the right people in and supporting them properly is at the core of success for us. To further achieve that, we also need to focus on developing a suitable culture. At the moment, we’re driven by our values and principles in terms of our belief in trust, honesty, transparency, and the idea that everyone has a voice and a right to be heard without any retribution. While we’re at 41 employees, everyone is working in collaboration and those values are working like a dream, but we need to find a way of maintaining our family feel, culture of trust and open communication, because we’re going to expand our teams dramatically over the next two to five years.  In line with that, we’re looking at setting up a scheme with representatives from the student body, staff cohort, employer partners, and our external stakeholders. This will ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute to decision-making. We’re focused on examining how we can best go about making the right decisions to make the overall experience more positive for our future learners. Inclusivity is an important

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“Leadership is so much more than just being able to hit numbers.” – Interview with Paul Southgate

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“Leadership is so much more than just being able to hit numbers.” – Paul Southgate, Head of People and Performance at MyBudget, 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 Paul Southgate at MyBudget, who began his HR career in Recruitment before transitioning to a number of HR Leadership roles including positions as Senior Consultant at Connect2Staff and Leader of the Fintech Division at Expand Executive Search. In September 2017, Paul joined the team at MyBudget as People and Culture Leader, ascending the ranks within the company to assume his current role in December 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? In my twenties, I was intent on seeing the world, so I wasn’t worried about sticking to one career, but by the end of them, I realised I needed a stable career and some experience, sought it, and got offered a role in Recruitment. I enjoyed the opportunity to use my people skills in a generalist role, and I quickly found I was able to build strong networks with clients as well as really getting to know candidates and what they wanted to achieve in their own careers in order to find them the right job. My role with Connect2Staff gave me great knowledge around Recruitment in general, but my Recruitment career really took off when I joined Expand. I focused on the Payments sector initially, but I quickly found that it was part of a bigger picture, which was the Fintech industry. There were some big organisations within Payments that I built good relationships with, but ultimately I didn’t feel that was the direction the exciting part of financial services was heading in. Instead, I was excited by Fintech and the emerging technology being created by start-ups around that.  At that point in time, now-major Fintech companies had teams of 20-30 people and highly contactable CEOs, and I found that when I got out there and started networking, I was managing to get face time with the CEOs themselves. I was on a really steep learning curve in terms of my knowledge then, but I found that if you got in front of people and showed genuine interest, then told them who you were, what you were doing, and what you’d done previously, you could break into an emerging industry.  I managed to build some really good relationships, and I found that the stronger they were, the more trust clients were putting in me to find their big hires. Because of that, I was able to hire for senior management and C-Level roles, which built up my reputation as well as allowing me to continue to build my network and work with more and more exciting clients. Thanks to that network, I became a thought leader in the Fintech recruiting industry—someone that people could engage with and ask to be an introducer as much as find hires. I got to that place within a year, so it was very fast-tracked, but fantastic. After three years, I decided that I was interested in looking at a career that wasn’t exclusively Recruitment. I realised that even at the highest level, once you make a hire, your contact with the candidate and ability to follow their career is limited. I wanted to be able to find the right person, get them in the right role, and then nurture them to ensure they’re successful in the long-term. I wanted to have an influence on the company culture, see product development and other hands-on aspects, and have day-to-day  contact with those on the ‘front lines’ of the company as they built and delivered the technology. Around this time, I attended Money20/20 in Copenhagen—the biggest Fintech conference in the world—for business development and to meet clients. I met the Founder/CEO of MyBudget whilst I was there, and started working with the business as my client initially, but once we’d built up a relationship, Tammy offered me the position of People and Culture Leader. The current HR Manager was scheduled to leave two months after I joined, so I used those two months to really get an insight into what she’d done in terms of workforce training and Learning and Development.  Since then, I’ve built out the People and Culture team, and overhauled our recruitment strategy in terms of introducing behavioural assessments, topgrading documents, and a range of interview techniques. As a result, we are currently experiencing the lowest churn rate of the company’s 20-year history. Alongside that, we have also launched a mentoring programme and a leadership development programme in the last 12 months to nurture our emerging talent. One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is promoting overachieving members of staff to leadership positions without also equipping them with the correct experience, toolkit, or understanding of what’s required of them, and we were keen to overcome that. I’m still on a learning curve. Leadership is so much more than just being able to hit numbers, and creating a leadership development programme has contributed to my development as a leader as well as that of those in the programme itself. I constantly get good feedback about it—all our executives have signed up to mentor people, and regularly put clear plans in place to help their mentees achieve their goals. Our mentoring programme is open to any employee—from those working in Client Experience to mid-level management—and we’ve seen some great results. Seeing people benefit from Learning and Development and having their careers advanced and nurtured by the way our People and Performance team operates is exactly why I left Recruitment. I joined MyBudget to have an impact, do really positive things for people in the workplace, and see them grow. That’s what I love Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges

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Engagement Webinar with Richard Crow

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We are pleased to announce that on November 9th at 1pm BST, we’re partnering with Richard Crow, Business Engagement Manager at Engagement Multiplier for an engagement webinar to discuss a challenge lurking for leaders that can impact everything from employee engagement, to culture, to success during a period of change.  Whether or not you believe your organisation is suffering from The Leadership Perception Gap, Richards’s webinar will provide you with invaluable insight and practical steps you can take today with what he refers to as ‘The 7 C’s”.  He will be providing some practical, free resources that will help you overcome many of the challenges business leaders face today and for the foreseeable future. Make sure to register using this link. Looking forward to seeing you there!

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First Human #HR Hackathon

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We hosted our first Human #HR Hackathon on September 30th. It was a great session discussing challenges including engagement, equity and inclusivity in a segmented workforce, overcoming the challenges related to COVID and many other issues. You can find the link to the recording here. Make sure to register and join us for our second Hackathon, on November 25th at 1pm BST Link to registration is here.   Enjoy!

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“Listen more, ask more questions, and try to engage others more” – Interview with Jon Thurmond

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“Listen more, ask more questions, and try to engage others more, but know that even then, you may never have everybody 100% where you want them to be. When you’re working with people, you’re working with the strangest commodity on the planet.” – Jon Thurmond, Regional Human Resources Manager at Team Fishel and Podcast Host and Producer of the #HRSocialHour Half Hour, 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 Jon Thurmond, Host and Producer of the #HRSocialHour Half Hour Podcast and Regional Human Resources Manager at Team Fishel. Jon took on his first HR role in October 1999 as a Recruiter with CBS Personnel.  He then moved to an Accounting and Finance Recruiter position with Acsys.  In May 2001 Jon began working as a Human Resources Generalist and Recruiter for CORESTAFF Services. He joined the team at Dominion Virginia Power as a Senior Recruiter in June 2005 before taking on subsequent roles there as a Supervisor for Staffing Talent Acquisition and Labor Relations Consultant. In October 2013, Jon became an Instructor for Career Prospectors, later taking on a role as a Recruiting Consultant for Titan Group LLC alongside this. He transitioned to his current role within Team Fishel in December 2014, starting his work on the #HRSocialHour Half Hour Podcast alongside this in January 2018.  Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? Before I started on the HR path, I was a public school music teacher teaching band and choir. However, I quickly figured out that that career path wasn’t for me. I got out and went to a temporary agency intending to apply for temp work, but when I explained some of the relationships I’d built up while teaching to the recruiter, they told me I’d be good at their job.  Within a few weeks, I was working for the temporary agency itself, placing people in entry-level clerical and manufacturing jobs. Recruiting seemed to be a great fit for me right away—my manager once told me they’d never seen anyone pick up ATS systems so quickly, but to me, working out the role played by each of the components and how they interacted was just like reading a musical score. I also found that I loved learning about jobs. Meeting a range of different companies, seeing how they operated, and getting to work with their management teams made my own job interesting.  Eventually, I moved from Kentucky to Virginia to get married and started recruiting for a mid-tier accounting and finance company—until one particular client I was placing candidates for told me that she was going on maternity leave and not coming back, so I needed to apply for her job as an on-site manager for a staffing business who worked within a local electric utility company. I did a lot of generalist HR work in that role, and it was my first real taste of a dedicated HR function. After four years, the electric utility company itself approached me to interview with them and  hired me as a corporate recruiter. I was in that job for a year and a half before a leadership opportunity came up, then I ended up taking on a Supervisor role to teach others how to recruit. I had a team of 18 people filling about 2000 jobs a year, and we reduced time to fill by four days even with a 65% increase in staffing. After two years, I got burned out and decided to move on. I was approached to work with labour unions within the same company, which led to a whole new career, and I spent five years working with unions in the New England market. That was a very eye-opening experience, but after five years, I had effectively worked myself out of a job.  We negotiated contracts to sell the plants I worked with, and then there was no need for me. As a result of that Labor Relations job, I was able to bring together all the experience I had gained to really understand all the pieces and parts of the HR function. I would never trade that opportunity for anything, because it taught me so much more about HR than I had known while recruiting. Even though I was dealing with union leads rather than individual employees, I found that the issues they were facing and the need to build relationships was the same, so I learned a lot about how to handle interpersonal things better. Once I had left that job and taken some time off to spend with my wife and sons, I took a six-month recruiting contract. I went in and streamlined job postings, started social media recruiting via Twitter and LinkedIn, and did a lot of government compliance, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do in the long run. After that contract ended, I found my current job with Team Fishel, and now I get to do a little bit of everything. I recruit, I train, I work on investigations when we have issues, and I get to piece together what I call the ‘People puzzle’. It’s been quite an interesting adventure, and I love that although I’ve been in this world for 20 years, I’m always learning something new and the work we do only continues to grow. My co-host Wendy Dailey and I started the #HRSocialHour Half Hour Podcast in February 2018 as an outgrowth of the #HRSocialHour Twitter chat that we started in September 2017 following the ‘Not at SHRM’ chat we held for the 2017 SHRM Conference in New Orleans. Almost 60 people from nine countries showed up to commiserate the fact that we weren’t at the conference, and talking to them really resonated with me.  I told Wendy that I wanted to keep hosting

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The Success Story of Carol Elderfield, Consultant HR Director for Inclusion, Change, and Transformation at Amey

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“[I]t’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to do within and get out of a role. You need to ask yourself what it is that you absolutely want to do, as well as what experiences you need in order to be able to get yourself in that position.” – Carol Elderfield, Consultant HR Director for Inclusion, Change, and Transformation at Amey, 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 Carol Elderfield at Amey, who began her HR career as a Personnel Manager at RHM Foods before joining the team at Greggs PLC as Personnel Director for the Midlands. In 2005, Carol took on a role as Head of HR at Dollond and Aitchison, later moving to an interim role as HR Director for the Cross Country Bid Team at Virgin Trains. In April 2008, Carol became joint Group Head of HR and Director of HR for Wickes within the Travis Perkins Group, later transitioning to Holland and Barrett to serve as Director of Human Resources. In June 2011, Carol became Human Resources Director at Initial Facilities, later moving to TNT Express to become Global Interim HR Director for ICS and GBS. Carol joined the team at Amey in April 2015 as Divisional HR Director for Local Government before transitioning to her current role in September 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I was originally qualified to work in Hospitality, so I fell into HR as opposed to it being my initial career choice. I started off in an operational role running restaurants, then moved into retail and started to develop an interest in Training. While I was at RHM Foods, the Personnel Manager went on maternity leave, I was asked to cover it, and that was it. I’ve stayed in HR ever since. Hospitality can be a good gateway into HR in some respects, because you end up managing high numbers of people from a young age, so you have to understand how to lead people very quickly, and that stays with you. Even as I began covering the Personnel Manager role, the intention wasn’t for me to build a career in HR from it. I went into it wanting to dip my toe in the water and see what happened, and I really enjoyed it, so it stuck. It helped that I had a really good mentor who taught me the fundamentals of employee relations. For me, that was the most challenging aspect of HR—I think most of HR aside from that is about having good judgement when it comes to decision-making, and my commercial skills and operational experience really helped there. That particular manager decided not to come back from maternity leave, so I stayed in the role and ultimately decided to make HR my career—both because I enjoyed it so much and because it enabled me to have the work-life balance I needed to start a family of my own.  I have a very active mind that constantly needs to be challenged, so I’ve moved across a range of sectors throughout my career. I’ve never really been a steady-state HR person, so my career has been change and transformation oriented because it keeps those new challenges coming in and is perfect for keeping my brain ticking over. It has been challenging to change roles at times, but what I’ve found is that the People challenges are no different across sectors—the dimensions of them you tackle are what’s different. I’ve never found it difficult to move across sectors. When I joined Amey, they really embraced the fact that I’d got different sector experiences and seen things done differently elsewhere, because they recognised that they were very  traditional in their way of thinking. If you have different sector experiences and position new viewpoints to your business as something that might be worth trying rather than something that other businesses are better at, that can be really powerful. It’s a great place to be. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? I think the key themes and challenges I’ve seen throughout my career have probably been the same in all the different sectors I’ve worked in. There’s a big challenge around leadership capability and getting enough of the right people to do jobs that need to be done, and I think that remains true at all levels of a business. It’s getting even more challenging as time goes on, because the market is becoming increasingly competitive. In terms of commercial challenges, there’s always a need to do more for less, so businesses find themselves constantly resizing. I think HR professionals are always being challenged by that, particularly if they’re seeking to prove that you don’t always have to turn to downsizing to achieve better results. Linked to that is the issue of motivation and reward strategy. At Amey, we’ve got a really forward-thinking Chief Executive, and she made a commitment as soon as she was appointed to pay the real Living Wage. She’s taken that leap of faith because she knows we’ll have better people and better performance as a result, and therefore that we’ll win more work. She’s at the forefront in that regard—other HR professionals I speak to say that their organisations are nowhere near that point yet. Diversity is a huge challenge for us going forward. We’ve got to be able to attract difference into any industry that we’re working in because the way that younger people coming through want to work is very different to the way that we might have worked 20 years ago. People expect a different work-life balance, and you’re not going to be able to create that unless you’re open-minded about the way you recruit. That’s an

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“Don’t underestimate your worth.” – Interview with Kelly Anderson

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“Don’t underestimate your worth. Even though HR traditionally fought for a seat at the table, businesses are now looking to you to drive change in terms of working practices, workforce strategy, and culture. The HR space is changing, and we have a real opportunity to redefine our capabilities.”– Kelly Anderson, Owner, Director, and Consultant at Nspire People Ltd, 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 Kelly Anderson at Nspire People Ltd, who began her HR career as an HR Manager at Sainsbury’s. This was followed by a role as HR and Training Manager at WM Morrison Supermarkets PLC. In 2005, Kelly joined the team at Tarmac, taking on a number of roles that culminated in the position of Senior HR Manager for Operations. This was followed by a role with Hazlewoods as Head of Human Resources.  In October 2014, Kelly joined the team at L3 TRL Technology as HR and Security Director, later moving to the roles of Vice President of Human Resources for Sector at L3 Intelligence & Mission Systems, and HR Director at L3Harris Technologies respectively, ahead of assuming her current role in March 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? Once I left university, I went to join the graduate training programme at Sainsbury’s as a Department Manager, which provided great grounding and full exposure to all aspects of the retail operation. I ended covering maternity leave within the HR function and my career within HR began.  I really enjoyed the fast pace, and the changing demographics of who we were trying to recruit. I found that my management skills transferred over to HR well. I loved working in retail, but after three years, I was ready for a new challenge, so I went over to Morrisons and did a formal Personnel Training Scheme. After that, I got given my own store and was tasked with managing a number of other store openings. I loved that role and the ramp up of resourcing and development it offered, but I was finding that unless you were in a regional role, you didn’t really get to experience  the strategic element. You did workforce planning, recruitment for roles you needed to fill at Christmas, and low-level investigations and disciplinaries, but the role had limited exposure to Organisational Development, talent management and other key strategic elements of HR. I knew that my next move was to get into more strategic and operational HR and experience a different industry, as well as focus upon studying for my MCIPD. I was approached for a role as HR Advisor job at Tarmac who are a leader in their field of construction. I didn’t get that role based on not having my CIPD, but clearly made an impression, because they offered me an Assistant HR Advisor role instead! That was where I really fell in love with HR and learned my craft, and Tarmac supported me through my CIPD and to continue to progress my HR career.  They were a fantastic company, but once I had children I didn’t want to travel so much, so I transitioned to more local roles. I did a stint in an accountancy firm and then was approached for an amazing sounding role and went over to L3. I had the most diverse experiences of my career to date there, eventually going from Head of HR to Vice President of HR for an international sector of five businesses across Australia, the UK and Canada. I decided at the start of this year that I wanted a new challenge that would enable me to apply all of my learnings and experience to give something back to the local community, and I’m doing that in a few different ways. I took on the role of Governor at the local school my kids are at, and I’m working to provide a full-scale People and Culture consultancy offering to businesses in the Gloucestershire region. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? Our biggest challenge is without a shadow of a doubt the COVID-19 pandemic. HR functions across the sector are being confronted with organisational change, reorganisation, and downsizing, as well as assisting their organisations with embedding remote working and working out how to lead teams when company cultures prior to this have largely been driven by spending time together both inside and outside the office. Along with that comes the challenge of managing people remotely—both on paper in terms of having a working from home policy and the proper risk assessments in place and in ensuring your teams are still performing at high levels while away from the office. The other challenging area is Talent Acquisition. Whilst we’re seeing a downturn in recruitment in some traditional organisations, in the high-tech and cyber sectors, it’s getting busier. For HR professionals in those areas, the focus will be on ramping up and scaling up recruitment strategies during this time.  Smaller cyber and high-tech companies often have remote working embedded into their cultures and philosophies already, whereas larger organizations are now having to compete with that because of COVID. I think there’s beginning to be a realization that while it’s a good thing that we can get talent from everywhere in the world with remote working, that also means that everyone else can get talent from you as well. Retaining your staff necessitates working on your culture and employee brand to ensure that people are engaged and happy in the workplace.   What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career? I think one of the most valuable things you can do for your career is to obtain your CIPD qualification.

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Hiring Boost: Why NOW is the time to get ahead of the talent curve

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Why NOW is the time to get ahead of the talent curve! How would you like your recruitment process to be 10,15 or even 50% more effective? Check out the recording below about how daily or weekly marginal gains can take your hiring to the next level and why now is the time to take action. During the session Amy covered topics including: Not only how to identify talented individuals but also how to attract and engage them. How to make your hiring process more efficient without dehumanising How to make the best out of an interview – whether on zoom or face to face?   Click here to watch the recording. Enjoy!

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