New Leeson Life

Contentious topic. Especially as people in this space get very excited on blogs and t'internet. I know I'm venturing into the lions den. Or at least the monkey enclosure.  But I need to talk about in-house recruitment. I have an issue with the way we're doing it. By 'we' I mean businesses, HR, people who are 'doing it'. I should caveat this entire post by saying that one of the teams I'm responsible for is an in-house recruitment team. A bloody brilliant in-house recruitment team as it happens. This blog is not about them. Further disclosure: this is also my own heritage. I'm not talking about any of the places I've worked before.  Having established that I am actually speaking with no live first-hand knowledge on this, I'll plough on... My main issue with in-house recruitment is the model of origin that a lot of businesses base it on. Namely, the recruitment agency model. While there are lots of similarities between agency re

This is the transcript of a talk I gave to Northampton School For Girls on International Women's Day. It was a 30 minute talk, so for that reason is longer than my usual posts! Before I began I asked each of them to write down the positive things that made them unique. Their core values, strengths, abilities, personality traits. (I also talked a bit about the business I work for. Because this is a personal blog I've taken that part out.) So. What am I going to talk to you about?  I was going to talk to you about International Women’s Day. I was going to talk about how today should have been my birthday, which would have made my feminist mother proud, except I came two days early instead. I could have talked about how that was a good metaphor for my impatience and the ways in which we can unwittingly confound our parents’ expectations. I was going to talk to you about all the things that my mother’s generation achieved for women, and all the things we still need t