My birthday post is a little late this year.  Normally I get there on time but this year it caught me by surprise, distracted by work, life and my lack of interest in euro 2012.   Last year (Click here to read again) I kept it simple with an interview.  It proved to be one of my top 5 blog posts of the year with several thousand visits.  This year has been tougher.  Tougher to find the time to write, tougher to find the words when I do.

I am a traveller again and have been for 14 months.  I know other people do it, but as my friend Paul said the other day “Mate, I don’t know how you do it?”.  Typically it’s only two nights away a week, every week with another night getting back home.  The novelty has gone.

So as I look back over the last 12 months I think about what I have learned.  In recruitment terms I have got scale again and appreciate that getting it right for a 1000+ hires in 28 countries is tough work.   My teams in that time have been driven to work harder and smarter, hopefully with some compassion by me, hopefully they have gained as much from me as I have from them.  In the 12 months team mates have joined and left, had babies, been critically ill and yet come in again every morning to recruit again.  Our jobs are not life and death, we are not surgeons, rocket scientists or soldiers.  But we do impact on peoples lives, every day.  Giving people the hope and excitement that a new job can bring, helping people achieve their career goals, the job they always wanted or a step in the right direction.  We bring sadness and disappointment to the people we don’t hire, they person that isn’t quite this or that this time, maybe next though?

I have learnt you cannot do it on your own.  That the team need freedom to find their own way, freedomto make big mistakes confident you’ve got their back and won’t beat them too hard when they do.  I have learnt that my next role will have director in it, but it won’t necessarily be my company and with that power and the empire will come responsibility, accountability and the need to be more consistent.  Where that director role comes from will be the interesting part for this year maybe, or the year after.  For what I have finally learnt is that I am in it for the long haul, that the actions I took last birthday have taken this long to come to true fruition, that planning for the future isn’t wasted time.

So this year, another rollercoaster I am sure, but I’m ready to go.