Dual focus role responsible for recruitment into Aegon's Operations & Service teams, and for building Aegon's Early Careers offering.

I manage organisational change projects from inception to realisation in the organisational structure, supporting leaders throughout. This involves working with leaders to design changes that fulfil their objectives while ensuring these meet legal or employee relations requirements. I manage required governance and engagement with relevant Finance / Risk / HR partners, before briefing and negotiating with three union bodies. I plan announcements, creating comms and collateral, and ensuring all back office processes are primed to support impacted colleagues.I train senior leaders on how to manage change and deliver difficult conversations, supporting them through the change process and acting as an escalation point for any complex colleague queries. It’s my role to work with HR teams to ensure changes are accurately reflected on internal systems and to work with Resourcing to do as much as possible to retain and redeploy colleagues at risk of redundancy. Projects include:- Re-organised layers 2 & 3 (i.e. layers directly below the executive team) of the whole bank, with senior roles removed or reduced across most departments. Stakeholders included CEO and Exec team plus all of the Heads of HR and HRBPs.- “Triple” TUPE to outsource property management to three different third parties. Included negotiating a new approach which allowed to VM to apply redundancy criteria in some cases rather than forcing colleagues to transfer and be made redundant on day one at a new employer. - Closing down Virgin Money Giving, the bank’s non-profit fundraising venture. - Multiple projects merging separate teams from Virgin Money and CYBG into single teams, managing significant headcount reductions in most cases and often over multiple phases. - Operating model shift in Digital Solutions (175 heads) from traditional waterfall to fully Agile. Creation of Tribe / Squad reporting in HR systems and mass recruitment exercise to fully realise new structure.

HR Business Partner for Virgin Money's retail network, contact centres and security teams. HR lead for circa 750 FTE across four office locations and a UK wide retail network.Working collaboratively with senior stakeholders to implement people initiatives, while proactively spotting HR solutions to business problems, and relied upon as a sounding board and confidante. Took a leading role in performance management, organisational design, capability reviews, talent development, succession planning and provided constructive advice and challenge on people-related decisions. Took a prominent role in recruitment oversight and resource planning to ensure coverage of critical skills gaps, address key person dependencies and ensure projects are appropriately resourced. - Led a restructure of the retail network to remove ineffective management layers, simplify reporting structure, re-invest in front line resource and create career paths for talented colleagues. This included large scale organisational design, coordinating multiple settlement agreements with senior managers, regular engagement with UNITE, detailed comms plans and a large scale internal recruitment campaign- Led a project to address a long-standing issue with working hours in the retail network. Worked with resource planners to design a new working pattern, worked with Employee Relations to engage UNITE and was asked by the Distribution Director to present the plan to 120 managers at a conference- Lead on Virgin Money’s dual-focus gender pay gap recruitment strategy: increased senior female representation and increased entry-level male population, producing a 40% gender shift in hiring at entry-level- Devised a de-centralised recruitment model to decrease time to hire and increase applicant diversity in the retail network. Retail colleagues aligned by geography work in parallel with resourcing to develop local resourcing strategies and tap into demographics traditional approaches don’t

I managed Virgin Money's Resourcing function, leading a team of 10 Resourcing Partners, Consultants and Coordinators. My role focused on bank-wide resourcing strategy leading on channel development, employer brand, candidate experience, stakeholder engagement, supplier management, diverse hiring initiatives and insightful MI.My team recruited circa 800 vacancies annually across 5 office locations and 75 retail sites. I ensured they had the tools, training and knowledge of industry best practice to deliver a great experience for hiring managers and all candidates. I was owner of all third party supplier relationships. This included all agency partners on our PSL, executive search partners, technology providers (ATS and website) and recruitment channel providers.Achievements include:- Increased direct hiring to 86% and producing savings of over £2million per year- HR Network Awards Winner: Attraction & Resourcing- Personnel Today Awards Winner: Innovation in Recruitment- CIPD People Management Awards Winner: Best Recruitment & Talent Management Initiative- Overhauled employer brand and advertising strategy by creating the first set of advert copy guidelines and developing the “Virgin Money Story” for proactive recruitment- Led an end-to-end review of the candidate experience using mystery shopping data and process mapping. Defined our “candidates as customers” approach that simultaneously streamlined the recruitment process and increased candidate touchpoints.- Managed an annual budget of circa £1million which included all spend on our ATS, our careers website, third party advertising channels, contract resource, LinkedIn Recruiter and external promotional materials. - Created a totally new MI dashboard providing analysis of our applicant demographics and the dropoff rates of those demographics during our selection process, highlighting where we may have issues with unconscious bias.

Managing a small team, I lead recruitment delivery for nine of Virgin Money's thirteen business divisions. I focused on mid-level and senior recruitment across the whole UK.Business areas included Risk, Compliance, Analytics, Audit, Finance, Treasury, Business Intelligence / Strategy, HR and Legal in addition to commercial teams across Mortgages, Savings, Investments, Pensions and Insurance.Achievements include:- Developed a direct recruitment strategy across multiple business areas, reducing agency usage to less than 10% and producing savings of £1.1million in 2014.- Awarded Virgin Money's "EBO Star" (i.e. employee of the month) in 2013 for work on LinkedIn to reduce recruitment costs and promote employer brand.

Recruited as part of a new resourcing function tasked with "building a bank". Recruited entry up to mid-level roles across all business areas with a particular focus on IT, Stores, Lounges and leading resourcing for Contact Centres. Created and delivered innovative, on-brand recruitment solutions and volume campaigns to meet business needs.Awarded “Brand Ambassador” in 2012 for improvements made to Virgin Money’s social media recruitment presence

Delivery focused role recruiting IT, Project Management & Business Transformation professionals for a portfolio of clients in the UK Banking and Finance sectors.

Sourcing and placing qualified accountants and senior finance professionals into permanent positions across the globe.

Permanent and contract recruitment for the Scottish technical marketplace including electronics, optronics, manufacturing, oil & gas and supply chain sectors.

Contract recruitment for Public Sector organisations in Edinburgh & Lothians