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‘Don’t allow your past to dictate your future!’ – Interview with Ian Newbury-Milton-Scott

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[I]f you get offered an opportunity you want but don’t feel totally equipped for, grab it and learn on the job.” – Ian Newbury-Milton-Scott, Principal Executive Officer at Five Rivers, 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 Ian Newbury-Milton-Scott at Five Rivers, who began his career in HR as a Personnel Assistant for Sheffield City Council, later progressing to the position of Personnel Officer. From there, he advanced to a Senior personnel position at Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council. In September 1999, Ian took a job as Principal Personnel Officer at Derbyshire County Council before moving on to act as Group Head of HR & Organisational Development at The Regenda Group, subsequently taking on an interim position as HR & Change Implementation Manager at the Learning & Skills Council. This was followed by another interim role as Chief Adviser for HR & Management at Charter Community Housing. In 2004, Ian became Group Director of Human Resources at the Ruskin Mill Trust Group, later taking on a role as Head of Human Resources for Gloucestershire County and Gloucester City Councils and the Gloucestershire Fire & Rescue Service, including working closely with the NHS on integration. In February 2016, he returned to the Ruskin Mill Trust Group as Director of Change and Transformation, Chief Operating Officer, ahead of assuming his role of Director of People Services.  To show the true transitional skills of a HR practitioner, Ian has taken on the role of Principal Executive Officer at Five Rivers which is more involved in business growth and development along with touching on strategic HR.  His skills and experience in HR have been paramount in taking on this more organisational operational role.  Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? Well, it was really by chance. I initially studied Business Administration at Sheffield College after I left school, and when it came time to look for a job, I noticed that Sheffield City Council had a position open in Personnel. I was intrigued, and did some research on what Personnel was, then decided to give it a go. Shortly after I joined, I was seconded to a local college to help them transfer HR services from the central council over to their own control and ensure all their systems were functional and in place. That was followed by a position at Rotherham Council, and it all grew from there. Each challenge I was presented with was new to me, but I loved it. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? I think the biggest challenge for those in the more senior positions in HR is being able to sit on the decision-making board and actively participate in processes that could result in huge changes for the organisation. Senior HR leaders need to be asking themselves, ‘Although I have a seat at the table, is it just a token gesture?’ Even if it is, they have to do their utmost to ensure they have a voice. I’ve been in that position myself, and though what I have to say might sometimes be controversial, I make sure I’m heard. It’s vital that we gather all necessary information on changes we’d like to make and present it to senior leaders, and if it doesn’t go well, we know how to repackage it and make changes to it to get that across. It’s really important to remember that the only failure comes from not trying. More broadly, I would say that to work effectively in HR, we need to be able to acknowledge and understand the fear factors of the people we work with and what can make that fear of HR creep up in them. I’ve found that asking people how they would like to be interacted with and explaining things can really help to break the barriers down between you the wider workforce, so they see you as a person before they see your role. Something as simple as leaving a text or voicemail if you can’t reach someone over the phone to explain why you’re calling can put them at ease and reassure them that there’s nothing to worry about, even if you’re not sure they’re in that fear realm. That said, as much as we need to relate to people well and approach everyone as being trustworthy until proven otherwise when dealing with situations, we also need to be able to react well in a crisis, take control, and be an effective business partner as our HR colleagues have recently proven. We need to understand that we are recruited by businesses to work within their agenda and embrace the shifting sands of change, and filter that change down through the rest of the company as seamlessly as possible. If you know there’s a strategy out there that will enable you to do that effectively, you need to present it and try and get it signed off on as soon as you can rather than letting it lie. Organisations know where they are and where they want to be, but they need HR business partners to bridge that gap and help them do the difficult bit in the middle of actually implementing change. While those both inside and outside HR need to recognise that we are approachable and there for the wider workforce, they also need to recognise our potential beyond that. It’s very easy to unconsciously pigeon-hole HR as ‘people-oriented people’ and nothing more, when in fact HR forms a part of senior leadership, and contains leaders and managers just as any other sector of an organisation does. HR is about that balance between being able to make strategic decisions when needed, and providing ‘tea and sympathy’ practical support, I think. What career advice would you

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“…and make sure you’re asking the right questions and letting the answers feed into your plan for the future.”- Interview with Felicity Barnes

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“The world of work will never look quite the same again, and we need to plan for that. Try to think about the needs of your team, keep in touch with them as much as possible, and make sure you’re asking the right questions and letting the answers feed into your plan for the future.” – Felicity Barnes, Head of People & Culture at Fooditude, 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 Felicity Barnes at Fooditude, who began her career as an Administration Assistant at Marlin Financial Group (now part of Cabot Financial Limited), later taking on an HR Administrator role within the company. In December 2015, Felicity joined the team at Fooditude as an HR Officer, ascending the ranks to the role of HR Manager in April 2017 before taking on her current role in November 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? Like most people, I kind of fell into HR rather than having decided it would be my career from the start. I did a degree in International Hospitality and Tourism Management, so it was quite broad, but looking back, I unknowingly did quite a few People-focused modules around HR, training, and development in Hospitality, so the People space appealed to me even back then. I am very much a people person, so my career lends very well to that. Like a lot of new graduates, when I left university, I applied for jobs across a whole range of different industries. It was tough to navigate the job market at that time, because everything felt very employer-driven rather than candidate-driven, but I managed to secure a job with Marlin Financial Group. Originally, my plan was to take the job and keep looking for what I wanted to do long-term, but once I joined, I threw myself into life at Marlin and got involved with everything I could. I loved working there. When an HR Admin role came up within the business, those around me knew I was ready for a new challenge, and I was approached about going for the role. The HR team knew me from my involvement with social functions, and they were very interested in candidates who weren’t afraid to put themselves out there, meet everyone, and get involved with all the extracurricular activities, which I had proven I could do. I spoke to the Head of HR and came away feeling like I could do really well in the role. Luckily, she agreed, and I joined the HR team. I loved my first HR role—there was always something going on, and as a member of quite a small team, I could get involved with everything, which I found really interesting. The merger between Marlin and Cabot Financial happened while I was in that role, and the workplace changes we had to facilitate were fascinating. The HR team itself also went through a restructure and quite a few staff changes in a short period of time, and I was able to experience quite a lot of HR processes because of that. Because the team was in such transition, I got involved in a lot more than you usually would in an HR Admin role. The fact that it was just me and an HRBP at our Worthing site had a lot to do with my development as well—while we obviously had access to wider HR support, we did ultimately do most things ourselves.  That role was a brilliant introduction to HR because I was exposed to so much so quickly, but after nearly two years, it was looking like the business would go towards a shared support services model and I was ready for a change. I found that I wanted to reconnect with my passion for Hospitality and bring my love for HR into that. Fortunately, around that time, a family friend made me aware of a Hospitality-based company looking for HR professionals called Fooditude. Initially, Fooditude didn’t have an HR department and were using an HR Consultant, but as they grew, they decided to bring the function in-house and asked me to join them as an HR Officer. The company was family-run and their values aligned closely with my own, which was really important to me when considering a new role—I knew it was somewhere I wanted to work from the outset. It was a small company at first, so I was able to take what I’d learned from working in a big corporate company and use that to give it some structure and build on their processes to take them to the next level.  I was very, very fortunate that I got that job; it was the perfect role for me to get stuck into, and Fooditude is such a lovely company to work for.  The role grew as the company grew, so I started as HR Officer, then became HR Manager, and now I’m Head of People and Culture. My career has really progressed as the business has progressed, and the same is true of the whole senior management team I work with. My current role as ‘Head of’ has been a great opportunity to shape HR and carry out our HR practice the way we think it should be done, and I’ve had the freedom and flexibility to create great workflows, which has been amazing. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? One of the biggest challenges has definitely been managing the business growth and HR team growth at the same time, but I started to tackle them by speaking to the managers in the business, finding out what their pain points were, and looking at what we needed to focus on first, which for us was

“…and make sure you’re asking the right questions and letting the answers feed into your plan for the future.”- Interview with Felicity Barnes Read More »

“Get out of the HR bubble and get to know your business…”- Interview with Declan Ball

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“Get out of the HR bubble, get to know your business, be able to speak their language, and don’t be afraid to go back to your basic principles when you need to. If you can’t justify the decisions that you’re making to yourself, you won’t be able to justify them to a board of directors.” – Declan Ball, Managing Director of Al Massar Declan, 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 Declan Ball at Al Massar Declan, who began his HR career in Training roles for the Ministry of Education in Sudan and the British Council in Damascus and Riyadh respectively. Declan’s first Leadership role was as Manager for Learning and Development at the Saudi Telecom Company, following which he joined the Financial Services sector as a Human Resources Manager at Riyad Bank. In 1995, Declan transitioned to the role of Senior Human Resources Manager at NCB, becoming Middle East Director for Human Resources at Ernst & Young after four years there. In 2002, Declan joined the team at Banque Saudi Fransi as Group HR Advisor/Division Head for Human Resources, transitioning to the Head of Human Resources role at Dubai Bank in 2004. In 2006, Declan joined the team at EFG-Hermes, based in Egypt, as Group Head of Human Resources. After taking on the role of Group Advisor for Human Resources at Al Khalij Commercial Bank in Qatar, Declan would later return to a Senior HR Leadership role as Human Resources Director for the Middle East at PwC. In 2013, Declan joined the team at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank as Executive Vice President of Human Resources and Head of Organisational Effectiveness, later returning to his Consultancy capacity as Human Resources Advisor for Invest AD, also in Abu Dhabi. This was followed by a Global Human Resources Advisor role at FINCA Impact Finance, a microfinance bank headquartered in Washington DC with a network of 20 banks globally,  which he carried out alongside his current role from July 2018 until June 2020, at which point he turned his attention to Al Massar Declan full-time. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I had an unusual path into HR in that I didn’t start out wanting to work in the sector. My original intention was to become a solicitor, so I undertook my Law degree, my postgraduate degree, and was on track to do my qualifying exams. Tragically, my mother died before I could, meaning I was without both parents as my father had died when I was very young. As a result of that, I decided to take a couple of years out and travel, and then went to Sudan to work as a teacher for three years, which was a very grounding experience. After that, I was presented with an opportunity to go and do my PGCE under the British Council. I went on to teach in Syria and Saudi Arabia once I had my teaching qualification, and that was the best thing I ever did. After that, I had to make the decision about whether to remain in the Arab world and switch professions or go back to England and become a solicitor. I ultimately chose to switch paths; I went to study Arabic in Cairo and then took on a Learning and Development role at Saudi Telecom. After three years in that role, I decided I needed to build a career for myself and got a job in a bank as a training supervisor, which later evolved into the Human Resources Manager position—I had a real lightbulb moment in that role, because I fell in love with Financial Services. I was fascinated by the complexity of it, enjoyed being surrounded by extraordinary professionals, and I liked that you could be open and straightforward with people. On top of that, I was drawn to the level of transformation that both that particular bank and the Arabic banking world at large were going through. Transformation within Financial Services became the hallmark of my career after that, really. I found it very stimulating, and rose up to become Head of HR within 11 years. Thanks to the time I’d spent in the Arab world prior to starting my career, I found it easier to communicate with and think like the Arabic people than other Western consultants involved in transformation. I think that has hugely helped advance my career over the years, because rather than trying to apply Western business models to a completely different culture, I can take international models and apply them with a Middle Eastern perspective in mind. I originally got into HR because of my ambition to build a career for myself, but it wasn’t until I worked in Jeddah with the National Commercial Bank (NCB), that my current approach to HR began to develop. At that time, NCB was the largest bank in the Middle East and also the largest privately-owned bank in the world. It was also in a dire financial condition and at risk of collapse, as Lehman Brothers did in 2008. The only solution was a radical overhaul. Headcount was reduced from 7800 to 4200 employees in 30 months and the bank was completely restructured, as part of which the discredited and bureaucratic HR Division was dissolved. No HR Division for many years and the world did not stop turning! Instead, HR functions were decentralised to the businesses. Rather than existing in different departments, I saw HR functions  as being interlinked and present at all levels of the business. At that point, I began to actively work with the business in my HR practice rather than just working with a siloed HR division. In that role, I was given complete freedom, and that’s where I built my career and my practice. Can you tell

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The Success Story of Janet Sutcliffe, Head of HR at United Response

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“[T]he most important thing to have in HR is a genuine interest in people, because if you don’t have that, it won’t matter how good your policies are or your employment law knowledge is. You’ve got to be able to talk to people and get them to explain things, and you need to be passionate about finding out what makes them tick and how you can make things better.” – Janet Sutcliffe, Head of Human Resources at United Response, 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 Janet Sutcliffe at United Response, who started her HR Leadership career as HR Project Manager at William Hill. Janet later joined the team at Anchor Trust as Group People Development Manager, later moving to the role of HR Business Partner. In December 2010, Janet took on an interim role as HR Manager at the Cheque Centre, later assuming the same role at Sesame Bankhall. In September 2012, Janet joined United Response as Senior HR Business Partner, later ascending the ranks to the role of Head of HR Partnering & Support before taking on her current role in May 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I actually came from quite a varied background before I got into HR, as I initially worked in mortgage sales in the Banking sector. I worked at First Direct in their early days, and they were very keen on people moving departments and moving roles—I got the opportunity to go into the Training department, and from there, I moved into Learning and Development leadership. I’ve always been one to take on extra tasks, so that was how I first encountered more generalist HR. I got into it by chance, really.  I’d always had an interest in people and been looking at what was happening on that side of things, but after I did my CIPD, I moved across from Learning and Development to a generalist HR role to make it my career. I chose to make the jump because I loved seeing people develop and helping them find solutions to challenges they were facing. I think my Sales background did come into it in some respects as well—Sales has a really good resonance with HR, because you’re selling ideas and solutions to staff members and leadership teams alike. In my role at William Hill, I had the opportunity to pick up projects that sat outside the normal day-to-day HR remit and were more in the realm of change management and redefining roles. That was a huge learning curve for me, but a great role for learning new things and getting to grips with change.  The betting industry is huge, and it changes on a daily basis, so while it’s very different to what I’m doing now, the role offered a vast amount of opportunity for development. It also taught me how much I liked working with operational colleagues—we were tackling big challenges, so there was no way we could have operated standalone. We had to be hand-in-hand. When I moved to Anchor, I did a lot of development on a shared services centre, so it was a mixture of the Project Management aspect and the HR aspect whereas the Cheque Centre role saw me delve deeper into the HR Leadership stuff. That was a good HR role with lots of very rapid change, but it ultimately wasn’t where I wanted to be long-term. After that, I took a role with Sesame Bankhall, who were in financial advice. I worked for an absolutely brilliant HR Director there who I learned loads from, and that’s probably where I became much more generalist. It was a smaller company with a much smaller team, so we covered everything. Working at United Response since then introduced me to the Health & Social Care sector. Whilst the work we do here is quite different to finance or betting, it meshes really well with my personal values. I’m still very, very proud of what we do on a daily basis, even after nearly nine years.   Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? Our biggest challenge is recruitment, and I think that’s true of the healthcare sector as a whole, not just United Response. COVID has added a real fear factor to our line of work, because we’re working with people in care homes who are significantly more at risk from contracting the virus and getting seriously ill. To tackle that, we’re working very hard to look at people who are changing careers and sell the healthcare sector to them as an option, but that’s not always easy. In terms of the type of people we’re looking for, we want to bring in anyone who has a passion for helping people and making life better for those with disabilities. The job is incredibly diverse, so it’s much more about people’s values than previous experience. Following on from that, we’ve been working really hard to retain the people we have, which has been difficult. COVID hits us right at the front line, and keeping staff working whilst ensuring that they’re safe has been a massive challenge. For me, our biggest challenge moving forward is going to be the transition back to normality, whatever that looks like. People are great in a crisis, but I worry that we will lose some of the culture of coming to the fore to overcome challenges as things start to get a bit easier and we start to see changes as a result of more widespread vaccination.  There are lots of small challenges under the umbrella of COVID, but a constant challenge throughout the pandemic has been that people have expected HR teams to know all the answers ,when in

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“…it’s always important to talk to our colleagues about how we feel. I find HR teams sometimes run on tea and quiet swearing!” Interview with Emma Cannon

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“It can be quite easy to take on emotional burdens when we’re dealing with issues, so it’s always important to talk to our colleagues about how we feel. I find HR teams sometimes run on tea and quiet swearing!”– Emma Cannon, Head of People at Duco Technology, 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 Emma Cannon at Duco Technology, who began her HR career by taking on a number of HR responsibilities—both in her role as Assistant Newsroom Manager for EFDEX and as PA to the Managing Director at the Level 5 Group—before transitioning to HR full-time. In 2003, Emma embarked on an HR Consultancy path, becoming an HR Consultant for various companies including Pfizer and Aventis Pharmaceuticals. In May 2004, Emma became HR Manager at ABgene Ltd, later joining the team at Gullivers Travel Associates Ltd in a continuation of her HR Manager role in August 2007. Emma then became Head of HR at AXA Assistance UK Ltd before transitioning to an HR Business Partner role at C. Hoare & Co. In November 2014, she became Employee Relations Specialist at Causeway Technologies, carrying that focus through to her next role as Employee Relations Manager at Norton Rose Fulbright, before transitioning to her current role in October 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? It wasn’t intentional!  When I left university, I wanted to be a journalist, and I was lucky enough to get a job in the newsroom at EFDEX (Electronic Food and Drink Exchange.)  After a year of working in planning and writing stories for live news feeds, I got promoted to Assistant Newsroom Manager, which had a heavy Personnel element to it. I worked closely with the Personnel team, and ultimately developed an interest in and an aptitude for the work they were doing.  When EFDEX closed, I took a role with the Level 5 Group as PA to the Managing Director. As a tiny start-up, they had no HR function, so I took that on as well. It turned out that the PA role was not the best fit for me, but I was kept on to work on the HR function. I built it from scratch, and that experience proved to be incredibly useful for my career. It allowed me to get exposure to absolutely everything HR-related and solve problems independently, as well as building on a wide range of skills. Even at a very junior level, in those kinds of roles you find yourself writing policies, making compensation decisions, dealing with employee relations matters, and even defending at tribunals. It’s not a comfortable learning curve for everyone, but it is a very steep one.  If you like learning, it’s an incredible experience. I think the reason that HR stood out to me initially and has stayed with me ever since is that it allows me to make a tangible impact; not just at a company level, but at an individual one too. It’s important to me to be able to see the impact of my work. The sheer variety of HR has always appealed to me as well, as you have to be competent in so many different areas.  I find it very intellectually stretching in that way, but of course the human element of it drives me as well. It’s the interaction of the two that I enjoy so much. As I built experience, I was lucky enough to reach the role of Head of HR for AXA Insurance. After four years, I was then offered the role of Associate HR Director reporting into the Global HR Director, but decided to turn it down. I knew that if I took it, I would lose the interaction with colleagues and the day-to-day hands-on HR work which I loved and was really good at, and instead I would be almost exclusively focussed on strategy and planning. For me, seniority and status aren’t everything. You’ve got to love what you do, and I knew that I wouldn’t love what I would’ve been doing there. So after leaving AXA, I moved to C. Hoare & Co. bank as an interim HRBP while I thought about where I wanted my career path to go.  I finally decided to specialise in employee relations, as I think ER underpins just about everything else in HR. A company can offer a really sophisticated compensation and benefits provision, or great training and development programmes, but without a solid trusting relationship between employer and employer underpinning it all, things will always be an uphill struggle. If you can just get that core relationship right, everything else naturally succeeds. I also love the challenge of working out how to achieve goals within legal constraints and getting the business to where we need to be, while keeping people at the centre of everything I do. I keep a small file of notes and cards I’ve received from employees and colleagues over the years, and I take it out to look at on blue days to remind myself of the importance of what I’m doing. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? One of the challenges I’ve noticed for us as HR professionals, especially during the COVID19 pandemic, is that we tend to put everybody else first, and don’t always focus enough on our own needs.  HR can be a very hard and gritty job at times and it’s all too easy to take on the emotional burdens of the people we’re dealing with, so it’s important to talk to our own colleagues about how we’re feeling.  I’ve noticed that HR teams sometimes seem to run on tea and quiet swearing!  Now more than ever, we need to be mindful of our own wellness.

“…it’s always important to talk to our colleagues about how we feel. I find HR teams sometimes run on tea and quiet swearing!” Interview with Emma Cannon Read More »

Strategic and Commercial Chartered MCIPD Senior HR Professional

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We are currently representing a driven individual keen to find their next role. This person is a strategic and commercial Chartered MCIPD Senior HR Professional, available immediately.   They managed the HR of a large multi site account, employing 1300 people across 4 locations.   Increased the workforce by 550% within 18 months and remotely managed and mentored a team of 20+ home-based employees across the North and Scotland. They are also highly skilled in organisational design, coaching, mentoring and performance management.   Please let us know if you think they can add value to your company or if you know someone they can help.

Strategic and Commercial Chartered MCIPD Senior HR Professional Read More »

“Expose yourself to as many environments, industries, and responsibilities as you can” – Interview with Lorna Hunt

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“Expose yourself to as many environments, industries, and responsibilities as you can, because you will experience a whole range of areas and concepts that will enrich your career and pave the way to a bigger role.” – Lorna Hunt, HR Director for NCE and Asia at Mirion Technologies, Inc. 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 Lorna Hunt at Mirion Technologies, who started her HR career in an HR Administrator role at Esso, later moving into Recruitment to work in the organisation’s graduate and internship programmes. In January 1998, Lorna became HR Administration Manager at Pfizer, then transitioned to a Business Partner role ahead of later taking on the Human Resources Manager role at First Drinks Brands Ltd in May 2004.  In January 2011, Lorna took on her first senior HR Leadership role as Head of HR for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at William Grant & Sons. In January 2014, Lorna took on the role of Head of Human Resources at TW Metals, where she remained until taking on the role of Senior Manager for Human Resources in TE Connectivity’s Aerospace, Defence & Marine divisions, and later transitioning to her current role in March 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? My introduction to HR was with Esso at their Fawley Refinery base in Hampshire back in the 90s. I started off in an admin role with lots of exposure to elements like change management, union activity, and employee relations, so it was a really good initial experience in HR. On top of that, with Esso being such a large organisation, there was plenty of scope for development. As part of that, I started to study for my CIPD with Esso’s support, because I knew that I really wanted to progress, which went hand in hand with learning the inner workings of an HR team. While I was undertaking that qualification, I moved into the Recruitment team attracting young talent to the graduate and internship programmes. I was travelling the length and breadth of the UK to attract really high-calibre students backgrounds by conducting interviews and supporting presentations, which was great, but quite cyclical. Once I’d finished my CIPD, I found that I was hungry for more HR exposure, so I made the decision to leave Esso and go into an HR Manager role at Pfizer. This was my first management role, and Pfizer provided great training and support to succeed. They had a strong culture and a very entrepreneurial attitude, as well as an HR Leadership team that encouraged me to take risks, be creative, try different initiatives, and learn from my mistakes. From there, I moved into a Business Partnering role in a generalist capacity, and just continued to love working in the fast-moving, exciting world of the pharmaceutical industry. In 2004, Pfizer relocated to Surrey, but I opted to stay where I was in Winchester and move into the drinks industry with First Drinks Brands and William Grant & Sons. Although I missed working in pharma, I quickly found that that fast pace I’d loved didn’t even compare with the pace of the drinks industry. It was constantly really exciting, with lots of competition, change, and opportunities to climb. My final role in the drinks industry was as Head of HR, which again was really exciting with lots of change management. William Grant actually approached me to take on a bigger global role, but I had to think of my young family and knew it wouldn’t work for me personally, so I made the difficult decision not to take it. Instead, I started to apply for other roles which would offer challenges but I also realised that manufacturing was missing from my background.  To fill that gap, I moved into a standalone role with TW Metals, where I set up the HR function from scratch. That was quite a challenge, but very rewarding, and great for my experience in terms of knowing what needed to be present within an HR function, what the compliance areas were, where we could be more flexible, and how to introduce best practice. Following that, I moved to work for the aerospace provider TE Connectivity in a global role which entailed lots of integration and travel, and ultimately saw me spending a lot of time in the West Coast of the US and Mexico. It was a fabulous opportunity, but not what I wanted for myself at that point, so I made the decision to leave after almost three years. At that point, I joined Mirion Technologies, which is an organisation providing technical equipment for the nuclear industry. As HRD, although I’m based in the UK, I oversee the UK, Northern Europe, and Asia.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? When I started at Mirion, there was quite a robust induction plan in place for me, but as I joined in March 2020, the lockdown started very soon after. I was able to spend my first week in Paris, but haven’t travelled otherwise—my focus very quickly changed to furloughing people and organising home working.  I had also been due to hire for a support role, but wasn’t able to do that until August, so I was dealing with responding to the pandemic on my own until then, which was extremely challenging. Working in a global business, I haven’t had the opportunity to meet many people face-to-face either—including my manager, who is based in the US, and my business leader, who’s based in the South of France. I would say that I’m quite a resilient and tenacious person, which is definitely needed during this pandemic, but it’s still been tough at times. On an organisational level, the biggest

“Expose yourself to as many environments, industries, and responsibilities as you can” – Interview with Lorna Hunt Read More »

Multilingual HR Director with experience across MENA

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We recently had a great conversation with a Multilingual HR Director with a depth of experience across MENA. Having returned to the UK they are now seeking an opportunity to support organisations to effect change and develop their People Strategy and / or organisational structure. They have a proven track record in identifying, coaching and mentoring successors and high potential employees to ensure a tangible ROI on human capital investment and business continuity. Please let us know if you think they can add value to your company or if you know someone they can help.

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“Having a rounded picture of the HR and People challenges of the whole business is much more valuable than drawing from a single area of experience.” – Interview with Ben Wharfe

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“If you’re interested in HR but haven’t broken into the field yet, it’s never too late. Business experience is just as much a part of HR as the People side of things. Having a rounded picture of the HR and People challenges of the whole business is much more valuable than drawing from a single area of experience.” – Ben Wharfe, Chief People Officer at Fiit, 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 Ben Wharfe at Fiit, who began his career as a Business Analyst at Accenture before branching out independently as a Freelance Business Consultant. In 2011, he joined the team at EDF Energy as Business Consulting Lead, later moving on to become Principal Business Partner and Future HR Programme Director there.  In January 2018, Ben became Non-Executive Director for Recruitment Smart, a responsibility he carried out alongside his role as Director of Operations for Fiit until December 2018. He transitioned to his current role in July 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I got into HR via a different route than normal. I actually started out as a Business Consultant at Accenture working on large IT implementations, and I was there for a couple of years before I chose to freelance and contracted mainly for BP on their business transformation projects. After another two years, I decided to go to in-house work, and took a job working in transformation for EDF Energy. When they told me I was going to be working on an HR transformation, I wasn’t that passionate about HR at first. The company explained that the project was really struggling and asked me to go in and set it up anyway on the understanding that they’d move me onto something else after a few weeks. I caught the bug, and six-and-a-half years later, I was leading all of EDF Energy’s corporate HR projects and programmes from IT implementations to HR strategy to company restructures. When you’re implementing such a range of different projects, you really get a view of every single component of the HR lifecycle. I became excited about what made companies tick and what differentiated good companies from great companies, and I saw that it came down to the same thing every time. Every company has access to pretty much the same technology and customers, and there aren’t many who offer something so unique that it can’t be copied, so the key differentiator is in the people. Around that time, I was doing a lot of public speaking across Europe—and a little bit in the States—about the future of work and digital disruption. I would talk about diversifying ways of working, the challenge around people potentially working until they were in their 70s or 80s, and the resulting evolution of our view of careers, yet I was returning to a workplace where little was innovative or disruptive. I decided I wanted to go and be one of the disruptors rather than one of the giants waiting to be disrupted,  so I made the transition from working in the big corporate world—which I had still enjoyed every minute of—to building something with a start-up; whether that meant starting something myself, joining a venture early on in its life, or starting a consultancy. Within a week of my search starting, I’d been offered two jobs for two different start-ups which I ended up taking both of, and that started my life in the start-up world. It’s been one hell of a rollercoaster!  Coming from a mammoth company like EDF Energy where everything’s set up and very structured into a place like Fiit where you’re setting up and designing everything from scratch has proved scary at times, but it’s also been very liberating.  People and businesses alike have evolved over the years, and it almost feels like the business models and HR strategies of big companies haven’t kept up, so it’s refreshing to be able recreate the world of work from a blank sheet of paper. When lockdown was brought in in the UK, for example, we gave everyone £350 to set up their home workspace, and £150 to spend on wellness, whatever that meant to them. We actually beat lots of businesses to the punch on that, because in a start-up, if you think of something worthwhile, you can put it into action within 24 hours in most cases. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? One challenge that’s always jumped off the page for me is performance management. Thinking about the processes that I myself went through before I joined Fiit, they followed the standard practice of setting objectives at the beginning of the year, sometimes having a check-in halfway through the year, and then getting a performance score at the end of the year. The infrequency of feedback and information always stood out to me as an element of the system that was broken, so that’s why we run a quarterly cycle at Fiit. It’s more engaging, more interactive, and offers people ‘real-time’ feedback on their performance and development. The other thing that I find hugely broken is the employee engagement cycle. We used to run our employee engagement survey once a year, which it took about six weeks to analyse the data from. Adding in time for each person to take an hour to complete it, we’d finally get the data about three months after the initial survey, by which point it’s already out of date. Even if it’s not, you’re only taking data from one fixed point in the year, during which time someone might be having a bad week or month, so that data might not be representative of their experience the rest of the year. Now, we

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Highly focussed, values driven Senior HRBP/Head of HR

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We are representing a great individual keen to find progression in their next role. This person is a highly focussed, values driven Senior HRBP/Head of HR, available in Q2 2021.   They have received recognition for managing change and restructure programmes across a large employee, multi site base.   Having developed a broad knowledge base in HR, they are now focusing on organisational effectiveness across capability, change management, coaching, talent management and workforce planning.   Please let us know if you think they can add value to your company or if you know someone they can help.

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