With over 20 years’ experience in recruitment, Lucy Waldron is a relatively new addition to the Anderson Wilde & Harris team. Having come on board in the middle of January as our in-house recruiter, Lucy’s ongoing task will be to continually seek out new talent, finding the right candidates to grow the team.
Lucy actually started life as a PA and her step into recruitment came when was asked to work in this capacity in a really lovely, quite boutique high street agency with about 10 staff. After listening to some of the agents, Lucy thought “I could actually do this job”. After speaking to the MD she joined the team as a Temps consultant, ultimately heading up Temps Desk.
Whilst there, she received some excellent training in contingent recruitment and the management team helped her achieve her Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) qualification.
Following a move to the permanent positions desk, she decided to take a break from recruitment. While she loved the candidates and is an excellent relationship builder, speaking to the same candidates every couple of years as they moved through their careers, the new business side of the role just did not appeal to her at all.
On the whole, the agency was not very salesy, which suited me really well, as I am actually quite introverted.” Lucy explains. “But that just meant that the sales nature of bringing in new business was not something I enjoyed.
As such, she felt it was right to take a break from recruitment in order to evaluate where wanted to go, initially planning to go back and do some PA work. However, Lucy ended up joining a C-level search recruiter as an office manager instead, where it was not long before they asked her to be a consultant. She admits to being nervous about this at the time as it was a very different role to high street contingent recruitment she was familiar with.
At the time, I wondered why they were asking me to become a consultant, as I did not fit their normal pattern of employee. They all had degrees or qualifications in the areas they were responsible for recruiting for, such as having a qualified accountant to recruit accountants. That wasn’t who I was at all!
But Lucy faced the challenge head on and eventually became a delivery consultant for management positions in various sales and marketing roles. At the time, because platforms like LinkedIn were not as widespread, there was a team of researchers all spending a lot of time on the phone, approaching and getting to know the right people.
Having spent a number of years learning some highly valuable skills, Lucy moved back to the home counties where she started a family. After the birth of her first child, Lucy joined a newly established search firm, which had been started by one of her past colleagues.
This was followed a few years later by her first role as an in-house recruiter for a local IT company. The firm had not had an in-house recruiter before, but having had some unfortunate interactions with agencies wanted to try something different. During her time there Lucy helped grow the team from 30 to 80 members of staff, and passed on some of her recruitment skills to the HR and management team members. Lucy ended up staying in that position for nearly five years, when she got to the stage of feeling like she had done everything she could do.
I wanted a new challenge, which AWH has certainly offered. What I love about AWH is that they are very flexible and forward thinking as a company, always looking at how they can move with the times. While everyone is very friendly and approachable, it is also immediately obvious that they are extremely responsible, taking their jobs seriously.
One of the things Lucy is looking forward to is building a solid network and relationships within the property sector. This will allow her to move to a more direct form of recruitment, sidestepping agencies to get the best possible candidates for AWH.
One of things that she already enjoys about the position is how much she is learning about property, such as what the different types of surveyors do and how it all works together within an established firm such as AWH. She feels she learns a lot from speaking to the all members of the team, as well as her involvement during the interview process, which is done alongside one of the Directors.
She explains:
As a recruiter, you don’t need to be able to do the job, but you do need to understand it.
For Lucy, it is always very important that people feel valued as a team. She believes in getting to know the people she works with, understanding who they are and what they are about, and where she can take them, giving them the tools to progress.
AWH is very nurturing, giving people some good opportunities and the support they need, being able to draw on the wealth of knowledge that the directors have accumulated throughout their careers. While it might sound like a cliché, AWH really does have a family feel and you know where you stand.
In addition to her two children, Lucy’s household contains three dachshunds, who often like to make their presence known during online meetings when she is working from home.
If you are a qualified surveyor or interested in starting a career in the property market, please take a look at the positions we are actively recruiting for by visiting our careers page.
If you believe you are a good fit for any of them, or would like to know more about the roles, Lucy would be delighted to hear from you. Please either send her an email at careers@awh.co.uk or call us on 0800 071 5517.