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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