In Your Shoes - Brian Creegan

St Andrew's Day

How quickly Monday has come around again; usual 7:30am start to get prepared for the week ahead and answer emails. I also have a St Andrew’s Day post planned for social media which has me wondering why it just doesn’t appear to have the same razzmatazz as St Patrick’s Day in Ireland, so I ask that on my post.

Unlike St Patrick’s Day there are no distractions, which means business as usual. I’m getting in touch with a few people I met at a networking event the previous week, to discuss how we can work together on their 2021 recruitment strategy and the recruitment training needs that they - or their HR or Internal Recruitment teams - may require.

A Festive Tender

A pretty big day for me, not just because I classify this as the start of Christmas, but more importantly, I have a project meeting with a new client. This sadly means that I missed the DACC event.

This project is different for me in that I rarely work on one-off vacancies. Most clients engage with my services to create a longer-term people strategy for which I source and build shortlists of talent which are based on “will” as much as “skill”, long before the client has a vacancy. People are our most important commodity in business yet so many companies have little-to-no proactive recruitment strategy in place.

Christmas Cheer 2020

Woke up this morning to the news that the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine has been approved and will be in use from next week. Apart from the obvious delight at this news, my mind automatically turns to business and what this means for companies, agencies and job seekers in 2021.

Today is a typical Wednesday in 2020, with a few client Zoom meetings to discuss their recruitment marketing and training plans for December. This is interspersed with creating a new CV for a wonderful Sales Manager, as well as hosting two sessions for LinkedIn and written sales training for recruiters.

I love the diversity of what I do, and today typifies that. Having my own business and working to help people be the best they can be is so rewarding.

From Manila to Montrose

They say that every day is a school day and today I joined an early morning team meeting in the Philippines on Google Hangouts to discuss plans for a client’s world-class applicant tracking system. I have the honour of creating the user functionality on the system, which is both a challenge and very rewarding.

The challenge is to try to remove the antiquated “CV and manual screening” process we are all familiar with and to replace this with a non-biased selection process, based on both soft and hard skills. This is critical, as we desperately need to encourage increased diversity in the workplace.

Being your own boss can mean long hours, but it does give me the flexibility to get to the gym late afternoon - which is long overdue!

Writing

Every Friday I have two weekly training sessions booked in the mornings, one with a very talented recruiter in the life sciences sector. I get a great sense of pride from seeing someone relatively new to the recruitment industry pick up things so quickly and put them straight into practice.

This afternoon I am writing my new 2021 marketing guides for agencies, businesses and private clients. Trying to get the messages across that what I offer is unlike any standard recruitment agency and how that offering differs, is a real challenge in just two pages. Luckily, I have my own personal marketing expert to hand in the form of my wife, and I’m hoping that it will cost me no more than a bottle of wine at 6pm.