Tracey Thompson
After many years working in financial services firms in London, I then had 13 years of self-employment to enable me to work from home and bring up my children. It was a good balance for me at the time and I'm very proud of the ongoing achievements of my 2 amazing sons.
As a family, we're active with sports, schooling, social and community support activities. I juggle to fit in theatre, travel, gardening and cooking exotic dishes.
I hugely enjoy the work I do today - it enables me to be in contact with professionals all around the world and it is certainly refreshing my knowledge of geography! I relish the diversity of stories I hear daily, and marvel daily on how so many companies just haven't got their HR functions "ship shape" after so many years of investment! I have no shortage of projects for the team and we've got plenty of ideas for how we can do things even better and faster. Our team is very social, and we actually enjoy spending time with each other outside of work - I think it helps that we all share similar values even though our interest areas are so different, and we're really quick to laugh at ourselves!
Referred candidates are hired at roughly 30% versus 7% for candidates sourced any other way, and they pass probation at 98%, compared with a 78% average across all hires.
Trust grows when people feel their differences are acknowledged rather than erased or forced into agreement.
One of the biggest mistakes senior professionals can make is disappearing from their network for years and then suddenly contacting everyone when they need new employment.
The organizations making genuine progress are working backward from a specific, well-defined operational problem — not forward from "what can this AI tool do."
Staffing your HR shared services function well requires a very different read on candidates than say, talent management or employee relations. The skills that matter are less visible, and the failure modes are easier to miss in an interview.
Experts have been predicting an end to all the 3rd party agents supporting people to find jobs, and companies to find people.
Culture fit has traditionally been a fundamental part of the recruitment criteria. However, more recently this element is being dropped.
In this day and age, how can any hiring leader not be supplying timely feedback to people they have interviewed?
...look at this CV, this person has been working for 30 years, which is longer than I've been alive!
HR has an unrivalled view across the organisation and regularly deals with serious and complex issues that have an impact at all levels.