So, what do you do? We’ve all been there, trying to describe our work in one pithy line that doesn’t sound drop dead boring or over the top. For the record, mine is ‘I make HR simple so people know they’re doing the right thing by their people and for their bottom line.’ What’s not there is career coach or recruiter, although this isn’t completely accurate. When I think HR in all its multifaceted glory, career coaching and recruiting definitely play a role. That said, I don’t define my work as either career coaching or recruitment.

While there is overlap between my day-to-day working life and that of a career coach or a recruiter, I see my role as more influencing or advising. While I love to roll up my sleeves and look under the hood of a business’ HR function, I come into a workplace at a strategic level with a broader goal of helping people create profitable organisations where people flourish. I don’t see what I do as transactional HR BUT if there’s a recruitment need, or if I’m coaching a leader about their next steps to meet their goals, I’m able to make magic happen from deep listening and those challenging, provocative (in all the good ways) conversations that happen through the delivery of my services and programs.

Rather than providing ‘career coaching’ as a stand-alone service, my focus is getting the processes and tools in place to support successful recruitment endeavours, while ensuring, of course, the secret sauce of attracting and retaining staff is in place. As I’m working with someone to build or reinforce these processes and tools, there’s inevitably conversations around talent identification, succession planning and leadership development. Like career coaches, I love fostering growth in others, in fact this is at the heart of my business value of growth. However, rather than a career coach who nuts out a plan of attack against a candidate’s goals, skills and strengths, my approach is based on designing programs that support growth across the board. An example is performance planning and coaching (aka performance management in the old days) which includes strategies such as career pathways, ways to assess and allocate training and development to help people achieve their dreams and creating programs where accountability is built into the very marrow. I heard a colleague once say that the only person responsible for carving a career by design is the individual, it’s no longer the responsibility of a company, that those days are gone. I agree ( to an extent) which is why it’s important to provide a way for people to be able to design their own career, take action and put in the work. I’ve written before about a study out of Google that indicated that 67% of people leaving an organisation reported their manager doing nothing to retain them – what an incredible waste of talent that could have possibly been put to wonderful use in another area of the business more aligned to their goals, passion and purpose.

So no, at these networking events when I’m asked what I do, I never go for a career coach or recruiter label. My work is so much broader than this, and deeper at the same time, and I absolutely love it, almost as much as I love a good coffee! Shall we have a coffee and a chat about how I could be of support?

Hit this link and we’ll organise it!