Is This Room Free?

This week's guest is Susan Harrison. I'm sure that you'll be fascinated to hear about Sue's story as her overview is of someone who went from her first HR role to HR Director in only ten years but she's then operated at the senior level for the past twenty years.

What we learn from this conversation is how Sue put herself outside her comfort zone and sought out additional responsibilities in order to develop her career quickly. However, she also explains how crucial it is to really get under the skin of the business you work for and truly partner with your stakeholders in order to be able to make an impact.

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I'm really excited for this week's guest as I have Maxine Blake joining me. Maxine is someone who has been operating at the senior HR level for a number of years now, having originally come from an operations background in the hospitality industry.

Maxine is a great example of someone who has used that Ops experience and broader understanding of things like sales, finance, marketing to make her a very rounded, commercially astute HR professional. She's also someone who wasn't highly academic at school but has more than made up for that in later life and holds a Bachelors degree, an MBA and a HR Masters.

Trust me that this really isn't an episode to be missed. I hope you all enjoy listening.

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This week I'm delighted to be joined by Maria Hawley on Is This Room Free? 

I've become a bit of a fan of Maria having seen many of her posts on LinkedIn and asked her if she'd kindly like to come on the show. Thankfully, she said she'd be pleased to and here we are. 

Maria is a HR Director but is someone who believes passionately about HR's role in ensuring how an organisation treats their employees. This has led to some amazing initiatives that she kindly shares during our conversation. She has worked in both the public and private sectors, honing her skills as a HR practitioner and learning best practice along the way.

It was an absolute pleasure chatting to Maria so I hope you enjoy listening.

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What a fantastic episode I have for you today. This week's guest is Sophie Metcalf who currently works as a Head of HR. 

The reason I think you'll enjoy this one in particular is that Sophie is someone who has actively changed the way HR is thought of in the organisations she's worked for. During our chat, she shares how she was given her first opportunity to work in HR but said she'd only accept if the Directors viewed HR more holistically and not as a compliance function. Since then she hasn't looked back and now has a track record in creating HR functions that add value to businesses.

This was such an insightful talk with Sophie and I could have kept picking her brain for hours as she has so much knowledge to offer. I hope you all enjoy listening.

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Have you ever felt your career wasn't really going anywhere? Or maybe you're just not sure how to get it moving how you envisaged? Well today's guest is Kirsty McDaid (Robinson) and her story may be especially helpful for you.

Kirsty did a HR degree and was then unsuccessful with every graduate programme she applied for. She ended up accepting a general admin role in a recruitment business but there wasn't a huge requirement for HR. Slowly she got more exposure and experience but after three years there was no scope for the position to develop and she felt like her career had hit a bit of a wall.

So she looked for a new position and the next three years saw her get three promotions and she is now a People Operations Manager.

There's so much insight and value from this episode and Kirsty's story will resonate with so many listeners. So I hope you enjoy it.

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On this episode I have Deborah Mowbray join me. 

Deborah has been working at the Senior HR Business Partner level for the past four years. However, she has also spent her professional career working exclusively within major, global brands (Harrods, McDonalds, William Hill, Uniqlo, and Lacoste). I was therefore keen to not only understand how she operates as a Senior HRBP but what it's like working for organisations like this.

Deborah shares with us her story from getting on the graduate programme at Harrods to taking a role in a slightly more entrepreneurial environment that will help her take that next step to Head of HR. We talk through how learning a Gold Standard of HR early on gave her the discipline for the rest of her career but how it's important that you always stay authentic.

There's plenty of great learnings and takeaways from our chat so I hope you all enjoy listening.

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Today's guest is Emily Bretnall and what a fun episode this one is. 

Emily currently works as a HR Advisor for a company within the nuclear industry. I suspect her  story will resonate with a lot of listeners. She's someone who wasn't sure which direction her life should go when she was young. She toyed with the idea of going into beauty, maybe working on the cruise ships. Even during university she was still feeling a bit lost. However, an internship with a really bad employer planted a seed which led her into HR.

Emily explains that by finding her vocation in her mid-twenties actually drove her to accelerate her career as best she could. Within two years of her first HR Assistant role she had managed to get promoted to HR Advisor. And last year she won the NSAN Business Apprentice of the Year!

We had such a good time during this recording so I hope you all enjoy listening.

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This week's guest is Oliver Hill who is currently working as a HR Business Partner at Solent University in Southampton. Ollie was originally working in a kind of graduate management programme at Waitrose and then leveraged on the transferable skills he'd learned when he moved into HR.

Ollie talks about how he managed to make the transition from a HR Advisor to HR Business Partner and what it's actually like to work as a HRBP. He also speaks about moving to a bigger organisation because he knew there would be better opportunities for him to fulfil his own personal ambitions, and speaks passionately about working for an organisation that stood for something positive and helped people.

Ollie was an absolute pleasure to talk to so I hope you all enjoy listening.

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Today, my guest is Alison Rothwell. To say that Alison took a very scenic route to the world of HR would be an understatement. She spent the first 20 years of her career working in Forensics before a chance role doing admin in a hospice led her to get involved in HR. Since then she has worked in two standalone positions, setting up a HR function from scratch on both occasions.

She talks about what life was like as a standalone HR Manager, reporting into a Finance Director, and how to build relationships in an organisation where HR hadn't previously existed.

There are some great points raised during our conversation which would be helpful to anyone operating in HR so I hope you all enjoy listening to this one. 

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Can you imagine trying to be the HR function for multiple companies? Well my guest this week is Jenny Heyes and that's exactly what she does.

Jenny works for a legal firm in the North West as the Head of their outsourced HR service. This means that her and her team work with a wide variety of companies across the area, supporting them with a wide range of HR issues, from simple enquiries through to large scale people projects.

Prior to that Jenny had worked within a family business and stepped into the world of HR as that company grew and needed someone to focus on it. However, it wasn't a walk in the park as they didn't see the true value of HR to begin with.

She also explains how by being exposed to such a diverse range of issues in a multitude of organisations it has accelerated her own knowledge and development.

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