Management is something that had always seemed like natural progression in a person’s working life. Something that would almost be guaranteed as you move through life. Much like wrinkles, developing questionable taste in fashion or an inclination to carry boiled sweets on all occasions. I always thought that if you work long and hard enough, you’ll inevitably end up managing someone. I’ve been the ‘Office Manager’ in several companies now. Most of the time, this has meant being manager of a department of three people. Me, myself and I. So yeah, one person. One person’s time to manage, one person to shoulder the workload with and one person accountable to me. June 2016 this all changed. My workload had increased vastly over the 18 months I’d been in my role and something had to give. Luckily that something was the budget to recruit a second member of office staff, which I duly did. Naively I thought that the hardest part was going to be imparting the knowledge I’d accrued over the past year and a half on to someone else. Often thinking ‘Ah, it’ll be quicker to do it myself than teach you how to do it’ and therefore never really making any progress in passing jobs over. How wrong I was. Not only was my newly acquired assistant astute and able but proactive as well. With just a bit of guidance she quickly picked up everything I threw at her and asked for more. My concerns were wholly unjustified and I haven’t looked back since. What has been challenging however is my own development in my new role and recognising that the skill set needed for managing someone else is completely different to those needed for managing yourself. Most management skills are best learned on the job. You’re going to make mistakes. Embrace them and learn from them. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from my experience so far. Aim to be respected above being liked
Zoe McCabe - Operations Manager I still remember the day six years ago when I was sitting in the living room with my parents discussing my future and new opportunities. How could we develop our two already successful businesses? We needed to be more financially stable to grow so we made the courageous decision to move to the UK. My dad helped out with his friend’s business and the idea of being able to open a third business was more possible than ever.
I decided that I wanted to move to the UK with my dad. The education system in my country was not as advanced and I wanted to better myself as much as possible. After battling through GCSEs and A-levels I came to the end of my education journey. I was now seeking full-time employment and a friend of mine recommended a recruitment agency that were seeking staff for their catering vacancies. Without a second thought I dived at the opportunity. I was pretty good at what I was doing and within only three months of working for them I was promoted to supervisor. I developed so much as a person whilst in this role. I was training people, ensuring events ran smoothly and minimising complaints. As things progressed and I got more experienced I was offered the opportunity to work directly for the agency itself as an Administrator. I worked closely alongside the recruitment consultants and assisted them with their needs. Again I progressed fairly quickly, I found the admin is pretty easy to pick up and master. I asked my manager to give me a bit more responsibility and he assigned me to manage the company's advertising on social media and recruitment, which I loved doing! In time the recruitment consultant that I was working closely with decided to move on from the company, which led to my promotion! They offered me a recruitment consultant position, and I took it! As time passed I felt that there was nothing further that I could learn, no skills that I could develop, so I decided to move on. I wanted to join a company whereby everyday was a challenge. I came across CPI Selection, a team full of driven individuals, a team with great mindsets and they are very motivated to succeed! Now, I'm learning new things on a daily basis and I look forward to every day at work, I can’t thank CPI enough for the opportunity they have given me. My journey is nowhere close to ending however, I still wonder where will I be in five years time. Alex Szabo Now I imagine upon reading the title of this blog, images of some self-proclaimed, incredibly handsome, world class recruiter come to mind… While all of the above are true my title has a somewhat more modest story attached. Growing up I would have been classed as a bit of a wild spirit by some, raving lunatic by others. With little to no regard for personal safety and a slightly selfish, thrill seeking personality, I spent most of my teenage years studying, partying, working various jobs and partying. At the near adult age of 21 I had a bomb shell dropped on my utterly self-centred world “I’m pregnant” came the words every young man longs to hear… Being a rather pragmatic individual I hugged my girlfriend, smiled and cried with er joy… With my life literally turned on its head I thought long and hard about my prospects and how on earth I could possibly feed and support a child when all I had in my fridge was a half can of fosters, empty BLT packet and my friends long and forgotten left converse shoe. Along came recruitment and specifically CPI Selection with the help of a family member. The opportunity sounded incredible, I mean all you have to do is find someone a job right? AND get paid for it, I mean how hard could that be?! I hated it… I couldn’t work out why companies didn’t want me to call them, I mean come on my service is free unless you like the guy and did I not mention I’m a genuine specialist? Candidates were rude, didn’t turn up, didn’t want the incredible life changing opportunities I was representing and quite frankly had no idea what they wanted. Then my views completely changed, I made a placement! Walking to the bell felt like a school child being awarded a gold star for good performance, I remained cool and rung the bell as a genuine superstar. From there on in I honed my skills and became a genuine specialist. My client list was flooding in as where the candidates in my network, progression was never ending and I was on fire… So at what point did I become a God? Well during the down time when I felt like recruitment might not be for me I went home and sat there with my little lady and just thought about the financial impact of raising a child. She looked straight at me with huge loving eyes, raised up her tiny hand and gently stroked marmite across my brand new suit… Shortly after this as she lay asleep in her cot It suddenly dawned on me, in her eyes I am a god, I am her world and all that she knows, I will impact her in such a profound way that how could I possibly give up on the opportunity of a lifetime just because I find it hard.. I had been given the opportunity to keep my family financially secure and in a world where many people do not have opportunities how could I just give up? So I didn’t, and now 4 years later I have 3 baby girls with 3 sets of marmite covered hands and more dirty suits than I dare count. Josh Moy The evolving world of sales & communication…my take on youth to (almost) middle aged selling!8/9/2016 November 23rd 2004 was the day it all changed, I had gone through a couple of interviews and had met the ‘new team’. This was my first day in my new job and in all honesty...I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, or how fast actually this roller coaster of a career was going to be for me. I was 27 years old, relatively a late starter into recruitment, I had just bought my first property with my girlfriend, driving around in a brand new Vauxhall Astra SXI. Disposable income was a wonderful thing and my weekends tended to start on a Wednesday! Prior to this I held a couple of sales positions for a large retailer and then a national hotel chain. Yes I had been on all the training sessions on sales processes, negotiation, and how to make a proper hand shake! (Yes, I actually went on a course on how to shake hands professionally!) But in all honesty I never really knew what selling meant! It wasn’t until I became a recruiter that I actually learnt how to sell, suddenly I was faced with all sorts of objections now that I was in recruitment, I had only really come up against pricing objections in my previous jobs but now I was on the rollercoaster…and had no idea how to handle all these objections; rebates, pricing objections after an offer had been made, clients rejecting a CV because a candidate hadn’t put something of relevance on their CV, and no one even told me about the number of sales calls I would have to make. All of a sudden I was now the middle man, I was now juggling more balls than I ever had to deal with I had to keep everyone happy. I had to manage 3 people’s diaries and I had to make sure the candidate arrived and performed well enough so I could send the invoice as quickly as possible. I still maintain to this day that the buzz you get from telling a candidate they have been offered a job is an amazing feeling…but don’t get me wrong the calculator is firmly in my grasp working out what fee I have just created. Anyway, earlier I mentioned about the sales bit…now that bit I still find interesting! I’ve done this for 12 years now, and yes there have been good years, awesome years and like any sales job I have had my challenges along the way, my girlfriend is now my wife, we have 4 amazing kids and the car is now a Citroen Grand Picasso. When I first started in recruitment LinkedIn was only just an embryo, although he was probably applying for his place at university Mark Zuckerberg was only 20 and Twitter was a word only associated with birds! The tools we have now without a shadow of doubt are a huge advantage to us making money in recruitment – 35% of new applicants will approach social media before applying to a job and will use some form of mobile device to search for that new position. I love my gadgets, I love my iPhone, iPod, iPad and I love waiting for Apple to launch their latest device. As much as this technology makes me shiver with excitement, the biggest device I have and the best bit of technology I use and what I believe is the best tool in the box is my mouth. I control it, it doesn’t need updating, yes it has got me into trouble at times but with all the tools we have I’m still a firm believer in using this method of communication, by far in my opinion it beats all the latest mod cons. My only real concern that as we all move with the times we will soon start to forget about how powerful this sales tool is. Career is totally irrelevant if we lose our personality! Technology and social media is a wonderful thing, and I thrive on using it but let’s not forget the tools we use to get us to achieve our goals, sometimes the oldest tools are still the best method. Bob Hoskins once said – ‘It’s good to talk’ When I say I never really knew what selling was, what I actually mean is I never really knew how to use my mouth as a tool, a bit like social media – many of us know what it is but do we know actually how to use it? (And like I have, make money from it!) Paul Chalwin Every day someone will ask me, at least 5 times, ‘how do you do it?’ or ‘you must be Superwoman!’. As a full time working mother of 3 children (4, 5 & 19), creating the ideal work-life balance is constantly a challenge and is based around juggling my precious time. But getting the balance right between work and motherhood is only half the challenge. I find that it is just as important to adjust my brain to put a separation between the two equally crazy worlds. Too much overlap between work and being a mum not only has a tendency to cause chaos mentally, where I end up with to-do lists on every white board and coming out of my ears, but it also makes it harder to give 100% attention to my kids when I’m with them. I try desperately to not deal with work emails or calls in ‘child’ time, and try hard to stop the constant train of thought drifting into work mode. But this is really hard and I know that sometimes I have no idea what the kids are up to as I am sitting in my home office, and inevitably they will play up to get my attention. This has included drawing on the walls, drawing on each other’s faces with permanent pen, trying to flush the cat down the toilet, all of which have taken a lot of explaining to my husband!! As more employers are becoming more receptive to working from home this certainly has benefited parents like myself that want to continue a successful career and are looking for that elusive ‘perfect work life balance’. One of the positives is avoiding the daily commute which gives me hours more in the day, but it certainly makes it harder to separate work and home. As a freelancer at CPI I am fortunate that I sometimes work from home and sometimes in the office, but there is no doubt that it is much harder to make that mental transformation from Recruiter to mum when I only have to walk through the door from the office in the garage to the main house than when I had the M4 & M25 to navigate! My top tips would be:
But the bottom line is that I choose to have this life and live it the way I do (obviously barring a lottery win) and I am driven and motivated to make as much money as possible to give my kids and my family everything they want in life. I feel blessed that I am able to work this way and that I get to do all the daily routines with my children that I missed out on with my older son – the breakfasts, the school runs, the school plays/events and bath time. My family are happy and no matter how hard it is some days the high’s definitely outweigh the cons, almost the best of both worlds. I wouldn’t change a thing!! Anneka Wilkins June 30th 2014 was my first day in recruitment, and I can be completely honest in saying I was unaware and naive to what my actual job was going to be. I saw a sparkly OTE figure on an advert, thought “I would love to earn that much money” and clicked apply. I had no idea what I would be doing, I knew the basic ‘finding people jobs’ and ‘finding jobs for people’, but not the specifics. Off the back of some 3 or 4 solid weeks of training, and with my mind robotically programmed to the High Street expectancies, I was beginning to get the idea of it. Call a company (any company), pick up a job (any job, be it in a warehouse or a HR director), arrange a price (at a discounted, not negotiated, fee), find an ideal candidate (or throw mud at a wall until it somehow sticks) celebrate the rewards you will have to do 2 to 3 more times that month to hit your target. I loved the job, the buzz of hearing how well an interview had gone, and then mentally putting that fee on your figures without hearing from the client. To finding that CV which was a needle in the haystack, and you had been looking for, for weeks, and doing the exact same thing with your figures. That being said, I also hated the job. The cats that passed away so a candidate would have to cancel their interview, the candidate who wouldn’t answer or return your calls, the client who tries to bring the cost down after offering a candidate, the client who shouts at you because a candidate did x wrong or said y in the interview, the clients who said they ‘wanted to see more candidates, even though you have repeatedly told them these candidates do not exist’, the gatekeepers who tell you to email ‘info@’, to which they will ‘forward on to the correct people’ (they didn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t even have access to that email account). As far as I was concerned, the cons were beginning to outweigh the pros, and so I began looking elsewhere to find something new. A few applications left, right and centre, and I found myself sitting in front of the management team here, being resold the recruitment dream. It was different this time though. A new outlook. I knew what I was doing, I had the skills, it was just a case of fine tuning them. The thought of joining CPI Selection was compelling, so I did. Now I was working for a specialist recruiter, I was only talking to candidates who knew what they were doing, we were talking numbers and targets, successes. I was talking to Sales Managers and Directors within businesses who were only interested in 1 thing, “is the candidate you are selling me, going to make me money”. It was a completely different kettle of fish, and I was beginning to specialise in a specific field, and was beginning to grasp a better understanding and a better focus in my job. It wasn’t throwing a net out and hoping I would catch fish, it was hunting, and targeting what/who I wanted to work with. The different between being a specialist sales recruiter, and a High Street recruiter, is the same difference between being Picasso and just completing a paint by numbers you bought at the pound shop. Both are technically paintings. Sam Hyde |
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January 2017
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