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‘Make yourself invaluable’ – Interview with Milly Richardson

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“For me, the way to succeed in HR is to make yourself invaluable by bringing a different voice to the table. I’ve worked with some really good senior HR people who gave me the opportunity to sink or swim, and thankfully, I swam in most circumstances.” – Milly Richardson, Head of People at thortful, 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 Milly Richardson at thortful, who started her HR career as an HR Consultant at Unum before moving on to join the team at Thomson Reuters as HR Manager, later ascending the ranks there to the role of HR Business Partner for Real Time & Network Technology and HR Business Partner for CTO. In September 2012, Milly became the HR Manager for Northern Europe at Criteo ahead of joining News UK in May 2013 as HR Business Partner for Technology, and later becoming Talent & Development Manager. In January 2015, Milly became Talent & Development Manager at Hearst Magazines UK, before transitioning to the roles of VP for People at YLD, Head of Human Resources at 7digital, and People Director for UK & Ireland at WeWork. In July 2018, Milly moved to TheHRhub to take on the role of Consultant,  before progressing to the role of  Associate Director there moving to her r current role in September 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? Before I started in HR, I spent a considerable amount of time running a small village shop and post office with a relative.  Over  my seven or eight years there, I became a trained postmaster and we grew the business together. It was a lot of fun, but when i was  approached  about becoming a proper business partner, I realised that it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and that I needed to start thinking about my long-term career. I went to a recruitment agency who’d been advertising customer service roles, because the move from retail to office-based customer service seemed like an obvious one. When I was there, I was asked if I’d ever considered working in Recruitment. I explained I hadn’t, but the agency thought I would be really good at it and offered me a job with them as a trainee Recruitment Consultant anyway. I took it, and started doing general office recruitment for lots of administrative customer service and Sales roles. It turned out not to be for me, but I stuck at it for 18 months.  Towards the end of my time at the agency, a lot of roles were coming in for HR Advisors and HR Administrators, and as I was placing people, I realised that the roles took the People, Talent, and career development side of Recruitment that I loved and left behind all the stuff that I didn’t like. I started to look into it further, and ultimately fell into HR myself. I didn’t know of the sector before I started recruiting for it, but as soon as it came up on my radar, I knew it was what I wanted to do. Getting into HR itself was a challenge, and I did apply for lots of jobs before the right opportunity came up,  but I was fortunate to live in Basingstoke, where competition for HR roles was much less stiff than in somewhere like London. My first role in HR was at an Advisor level—I was able to jump the HR Administrator step entirely due to an employment law qualification I’d done as a recruiter. The job was with a very small HR outsource company that did HR for lots of different companies. It was a bit of a baptism of fire to go from never having done HR before to doing it for lots of different companies at the HR Advisor level, but it was really good fun and I learned a lot in a very short space of time. It was demanding, but a fantastic experience. I think my most career-defining role came at Thomson Reuters. I was originally recruited to a fairly junior-level role, but within a year and a half of being there, I was the global HR Business Partner for Technology looking after 3500 people in 30 different locations across the world. I definitely didn’t have the experience or the capability to do the role alone going into it, but I had the support of the CTO, the senior HR team, and everyone around me. That made it feel safe for me to push myself and fail comfortably if I needed to. It was an amazing chance to grow, and if it wasn’t for that experience, I don’t think I would be where I am now. When it comes to my current role, I’m really fortunate to have come to an organisation that’s working. I’ve joined others in the past that needed to change or do something differently and had brought me in for that, whereas thortful is a very different offering. We’re already doing really well, so my focus is on how I can make things better rather than fixing things, and that’s a very positive place to be in. I’m very lucky, because I definitely have a seat at the table here, and our founder really cares about people. That was my key driver in joining the team—I wanted to work somewhere that wasn’t just about turning a profit. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? At thortful, our main challenge lies in keeping the team happy and connected during COVID. We’re fortunate in that we’re an online business, so it has been easier for us to make the transition to our staff doing the things they’re used to doing without having

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“Having a higher level of communication and greater empathy towards others is key at the moment” – Interview with Jason Waterman

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“These are tricky times for everyone, so having a higher level of communication and greater empathy towards others is key at the moment.” – Jason Waterman, Director of Talent at 11:FS, 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 Jason Waterman at 11:FS, who began his HR career in the Recruitment sector as a Recruitment Consultant at Matchtech, where he later ascended to the role of Senior Recruitment Consultant before going on to found his own venture, Seek Technical. In December 2012, Jason joined the team at Advanced Resource Managers as a Senior Recruitment Consultant, later transitioning to Badenoch + Clark to take on the role of Principal Recruitment Consultant ahead of becoming Recruitment Manager there. In September 2016, Jason became Lead Recruiter at BCG Digital Ventures, moving to the role of Talent Acquisition Manager in September 2017, and becoming Head of Venture Talent in November 2018. After taking on the role of Global Talent Acquisition Manager at 11:FS in September 2019, Jason moved to the Head of Talent role in July 2020 ahead of transitioning to his current role in October 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I’ve been doing People-related roles in some form or another for 12 and a half years now, a big chunk of which was in Recruitment. I worked in agency recruitment for about eight years, mainly in the technology space, and then I joined BCG Digital Ventures to help them build start-ups in partnership with Blue Chip firms. The teams at BCGDV create digital products and I then recruited the founding teams for the start-ups, as well as setting them up from a cultural perspective. We covered everything from interview processes to establishing policies suited to that particular company, and built their culture, vision, mission, and values. Nothing was one-size-fits-all, which made the job really interesting. When I joined 11:FS in September of last year, my initial focus was more on the Recruitment side of things. We did a lot of recruiting in a lot of different areas, and it was a lot of fun. It was also incredibly fast-paced—as you can imagine when you’re a company doubling in size in a really short space of time—but COVID-19 put the brakes on that quite rapidly. During the pandemic, my role shifted from being weighted more towards the Recruitment side of things to the People side of things. I’ve spent the last six months creating a career development pathway and progression frameworks for our entire business, defining the technical skills and values expected at each level all the way from graduate to C Suite, and focusing on diversity and inclusion within our candidate pipeline as well. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? COVID-19 has definitely posed challenges in terms of needing to adjust the weighting of what we do within the People function. Before the pandemic, we spent a lot of time and money on the Talent Acquisition side of things, but that has balanced out with Talent Development, which actually proved to be slightly behind in comparison until the pandemic hit. When I came into the business, we had to change our onboarding process entirely to facilitate bringing in 30 people a month into a system that was built for 5 people a month. Since COVID, we’ve had to change how we onboard and the number of new starters has obviously dropped, but we’ve put a lot of work into this so that any new starters don’t feel lost at sea, as well as giving them an immediate network of peers. We’re currently recruiting across areas like Engineering, Products, Social Media, and Sales, and we’re seeing some fantastic results from our new approaches. COVID has been extremely difficult, and has seen us having to go through unpleasant processes such as making redundancies, but it has also allowed us to spend more time developing our talent. Making our people feel well looked-after, happy, and safe in their jobs while ensuring that they still feel able to progress in the current climate is definitely a priority for us. In terms of remote working, we’ve been fully remote and out of the office since March, although we have opened up a COVID-secure communal space for people who wish to use it. That also means that any communication with anyone who has started with or left us has all been over Zoom calls and Google Hangouts, which is very new and also difficult at times.  We’ve always been a flexible company who have made it possible for people to work from wherever they want, but I think that we’ll get to a point now where people will be in the office a lot less. I think London will always be our ‘home’ as such, but I would imagine people will only visit the office one or two days a week once we do open its doors again. It will be totally flexible, but totally different.  We’ve reduced our office space from 250 seats to about 100, and our plan is to be hot-desk focused in the future. That way, people can come and go as they please, but still have a space to come together and be social and creative when they need to as well. Looking to the future, I think that the flexible approach will definitely make things easier for us from a Talent Acquisition point of view. It will allow us to identify talent from within a wider radius, attract individuals who we may otherwise have missed out on because they weren’t looking to relocate to London, and potentially even broaden our reach across the UK and Europe. I hope companies don’t slip back into old habits on flexibility and how people

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The Success Story of Alys Martin, Head of People at Zappar

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“I think the best thing about working in HR is that no two days are alike, although that can also be challenging. You can plan for anything, only to find that one thing happens and everything changes, and you just have to roll with the punches.” – Alys Martin, Head of People at Zappar, 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 Alys Martin at Zappar, who began her career as Events Assistant at Raymond Gubbay Ltd, later transitioning into roles as PA to the HR Director at Penguin Random House UK and PA to the Publisher at Little, Brown Book Group. In September 2010, Alys embarked on an HR career of her own, taking on the role of PA to the HR Director and HR Coordinator at FremantleMedia, where she would later ascend the ranks to Assistant HR Business Partner, and later International Reward Analyst.  In April 2015, Alys became HR Manager at Runpath, which was followed by subsequent HR Manager roles at Bounty UK Ltd, The Leading Edge, and Naked Communications Europe. In March 2017, Alys became HR Business Partner at Reach PLC ahead of transitioning to her current role at Zappar in February 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? My transition into an HR career really came as a result of my PA work within the HR sector. I started off working as a PA in an HR department in the Publishing sector, and then I took a job as PA to the HR Director working in Television. Around that time, I decided I wanted to go back to university and do a Master’s in Medieval Literature. I began saving for it, but my boss at the time approached me to ask if I’d ever thought about doing a Master’s in HR instead because she thought I’d be good at it.  By that point, I knew I loved working with people, and I was conscious of the fact that unless I progressed in the job, I would be doing the same thing year in, year out, whereas the Master’s would keep things interesting. I took the offer and did a part-time MA in HR Management while I stayed in my job, which gave me some amazing generalist experience. As well as working with a number of specialists within the HR department, I got to work across all our different client groups and experienced two major restructures as well. At the end of my MA, I went into a junior Business Partner role, and then took on a specialist Reward role for about a year. That was a really interesting global role that gave me great exposure to working with senior management, but after a while, I realised I was disconnected from those who worked around me and I didn’t like that very much. After over four-and-a-half years at FremantleMedia, I knew it was time for a change. I was then offered two jobs—one as a standalone HR Manager in a tech start-up and the other as a Senior Advisor in a massive HR team within Affinity Water. The jobs themselves and the industries they were situated in were very different, so I found myself having a bit of a crisis of confidence at first, but I opted to take a leap and go for the standalone maternity cover job in tech. That was a bold choice, but the best thing I’ve ever done. It was a great opportunity to test the knowledge and experience I’d gained, and I not only got to drive growth in a really interesting role, but also discovered I absolutely loved working in the tech industry. After the maternity cover ended, I took on a few HR Manager roles in other sectors, then went to Reach PLC. I engaged with the tech client group in that role as well, but on a much greater scale and with all the added process that came with being a public limited company. While it was a great experience, it was definitely slower-paced than my other roles, and I found it hard at times to balance the procedural element of being in a large HR team with my direct work with client groups. Following my time at Reach, I was offered my current role as Head of People for an augmented reality company called Zappar. The fact that the role was based in tech, standalone, and back in a smaller team really appealed to me, so I took it. I was our first HR hire, so I put in a lot of work setting everything up and building organisational structures to facilitate growth, implementing more flexible ways of working as well as upskilling managers to equip us for the future. I love being back in a close-knit environment; it’s so exciting to implement something that makes a massive difference to the people you work with and having that impact seen as well as feeling it instantly. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? At Zappar, we have quite a young demographic in our workforce; for many, this is their first job. When I first joined, some members of staff who had been with us for longer were acting as ‘middle management’ for the newer cohort. They didn’t always have a massive amount of experience with management themselves, let alone managing others. To address that, we focused on how to promote those management skills to get the best out of people and on modelling what that ‘middle management’ relationship might look like. Another challenge I faced when I first joined was that I overestimated how much people would know about the commercial side of the business. A lot of people come to us from areas like game

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Human HR Hackathon #2

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We had an amazing time on our second Human #HR Hackathon that took place on November 25th 2020. Some of the topics we discussed during the hackathon: Maintaining a consistent approach across countries How are people maintaining their culture remotely? Toxic workplaces and how do we manage them? How to re-engage the workforce in a remote world and many more.   If you want to check out the recording, please click on this link.

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‘Just be resilient and focus on what you can deliver’ – Interview with Sarnjit Kaur

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[S]etbacks will happen, and you will face challenges and adversity over the course of your career, but it’s important to pick yourself back up and carry on when they happen. Just be resilient and focus on what you can deliver, and it will get you through.” – Sarnjit Kaur, HR Director for Commercial Businesses at Cox Automotive UK, 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 Sarnjit Kaur at Cox Automotive UK, who started her career in Finance by taking on roles including Customer Service Adviser, Customer Service Banking Team Manager, and Banking Marketing Manager at Abbey National PLC. In February 2002, Sarnjit became Diversity Manager for the company, later taking on the role of HR Business Partner. In January 2009, Sarnjit took on the role of Interim Organisation Development Consultant for Sheffield City Council, later returning to the Finance sector as Senior HR Business Partner for Santander UK before ascending the ranks to Divisional People Projects and Performance Manager. In June 2017, Sarnjit turned her HR talents to the automotive industry, becoming Head of HR for Manheim UK—part of the Cox Automotive UK group – and moved into her current role in January 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I actually stumbled into HR. After I graduated from university, I first fell into banking because I lived in Bradford, where Abbey National had a big network of branches. At first, the aim was just to pay off my overdraft; I never envisaged staying, but I did. Starting off as a Customer Service Advisor, it became apparent very quickly that that there were many opportunities for growth I could take up, and I progressed to Team Leader, followed by projects, and then marketing. At the time, the banking world was going from strength to strength, and as long as you were mobile, the world was your oyster. Although I enjoyed those operational roles, my dream job came up in the form of a Diversity Manager role that sat in the HR function. If I’m being honest, I didn’t know anything about HR at that point, I just saw the job role and knew that was where I needed to be. It was a big move, though, and at first, I kept talking myself out of it as a lot of women do. I even withdrew my application at one point because I knew other people who had HR experience had applied.  The Imposter Syndrome kicked in, but I remained true to my instinct and realised I was being silly and re-submitted my application.  The rest is history: I travelled to Milton Keynes, successfully landed the role and that’s how my HR career started. I’ve never looked back. I loved my Diversity role—it was a blank canvas that allowed me to tackle many issues that are still rife today. Educating colleagues, leaders and customers on inclusion and diversity matters was a real privilege as I realised it was a quite a taboo and often scary subject for people.  My strategy was very simple and one which was focused on the strap line “Value People As Individuals“. After a few years, Abbey National wanted to amalgamate the role into a more generalist HR Business Partner role. At the same time, the business structure transformed and the Business Partner roles available had more opportunity than ever. I therefore made the decision to put myself forward for one despite knowing that I’d never done generalist HR beyond a bit of recruiting. While my technical perspective on things perhaps wasn’t as developed as it could have been, my results orientation, communication and influencing skills made me stand out, and the organisation decided to give me the role despite my technical shortcomings. I really enjoyed the Business Partner role, and went onto become business partner for the UK contact centres where I had started my career.  Knowing how the contact centres operated, their KPIs and the people priorities as I had experienced as a team leader, enabled me to achieve several successful achievements in my role as HRBP. During that time, Abbey National started outsourcing many of their contact centres.  By that time, I’d been there 12 years, gained my CIPD qualification and gained diverse experience across the bank.  I made the decision to take advantage of a restructuring programme and sign on the dotted line in November 2008 and left Abbey National. I didn’t have much of a break as I started work as an Organisation Development Consultant at Sheffield City Council in December 2008.  That was an interim role, but an interesting experience. In that time, I learned that the public and private sectors were like chalk and cheese, and how much the public sector was held back by bureaucracy. I learned a great deal there, but by the end of my contract, I was ready for a change. That summer, Abbey National—who had rebranded to Santander — announced the acquisition of Alliance & Leicester.   As with all acquisitions, there was plenty to do from a HR and people integration point, so I welcomed a call from my HRD at Santander, asking me to return and support the business harmonisation, integration and optimisation plans. Progressing into a Senior HR Business Partner, I did nearly five years of transformation to streamline contact centres and tackle duplication after the acquisition, as well as closures and business optimisation, and of course, standard HR Business Partnering. Returning at this point in my career was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me: I progressed greatly in that role and became more involved with our global functions and senior leadership team. Santander was such a large organisation that I didn’t have to move out of the business to take new opportunities or move between teams

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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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