It’s a New Year, and that means a new batch of colleagues are ready to give us a full rundown of their careers and roles within Inchcape. You can find all of last year’s 'Inchcape Introduces' interviews in the News section of our blog.
The first interviewee of 2020 is our lovely Resourcing Manager, Michelle Thomas.
How long have you worked for Inchcape, Michelle?
I joined Inchcape in September 2017, so I’ve been here just over 2 years.
Talk us through your career journey and explain how you arrived in your current position.
My career started out in the travel industry many years ago. I worked hard and progressed to a management role at quite an early age. This was a great period of my life because I was able to sell dream holidays and get to see some of the world too!
My next step was moving into a management role within contact centres, and this is where I found my passion for HR and Recruitment. I started out as what we called a ‘Recruitment Champion’, which involved supporting the Recruitment Team in Assessment Centres. Within a short period of time, I moved into the central resourcing team full time, supporting managers with all of their recruitment needs. I was fortunate enough to progress and was later promoted to Resourcing Manager, which helped me develop not only my recruiting skills, but also my managerial skills as the role required me to manage remotely across the UK.
Due to redundancy, I worked a short time within a recruitment agency. Although this was not the right side of recruitment for me, it did give me invaluable experience of another side of recruitment and helped me immensely with my sourcing techniques.
I then combined my passion for travel and recruitment and moved back into the travel industry. I lead a team of outsourced recruiters to manage the in-house recruitment function for a well-known travel brand at the time, and this helped me to develop my knowledge of commercial recruitment. During this period, I also embarked on my HR Master’s Degree, which was very challenging as I had to complete this whilst simultaneously working full-time and managing a young family!
This leads me to where I am now at Inchcape, and I’m very proud to work for such a huge, successful business.
Describe your role and what it involves.
I am part of a fantastic HR Shared Services team who are responsible for the whole employee lifecycle in terms of administration. I am responsible for a team of specialised recruiters who support both the retail and retail support network, including Finance Centres and Contact Centres, with all of their permanent and temporary recruitment needs. As you can imagine, with a company this size, the nature of the job is fast-paced. I also look after the HR admin team who are vital in the support of the administration side of things.
My main focus is to ensure that we are delivering an efficient, cost-effective service to the business and finding the best talent out there to help us achieve our vision of becoming the world’s most trusted automotive retailer.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
I love to talk! I enjoy speaking to a variety of different people, whether they be colleagues, external partners or candidates. I like to see candidates that I have sourced and placed excel in their roles and become valued colleagues.
What’s the secret to being a great Resourcing Manager?
Determination. There are times when you will come across a role that you think you’ll never fill, and quite often you need to dig deep and look for different ways to source candidates, which means not always relying on the old school methods.
To run a successful team, I think you need to have trust in all of the members. I have a fantastic, highly experienced team that I know deliver on every opportunity, which certainly makes my role easier!
What advice would you give to someone who is interested in a career with Inchcape?
Be yourself. Of course, experience is always important, but here at Inchcape, we value the fact that everyone is different and we embrace individuality. We assess candidates not only on competencies, but also on behaviours because we recognise that the success of our business relies on the service that we provide, which is achieved through our people. If you are not from the automotive industry, don’t be afraid to apply - we welcome applications from all industries!
What would you say is the best thing about working in the automotive industry?
I like that it's fast-paced and ever-changing industry because it means that no day is the same. I like to be constantly kept on my toes.
Lastly, Michelle, if you could have any car in the world, what would it be?
I would love to own my very own Porsche 911. Normally I’m not a red car fan, but if I had this car, I would have to have it in that famous Porsche Red!