Our Wigan recruitment team are celebrating a milestone achievement, as Divisional Manager Debbie Power marked 20 years working at NRL in October.
Originally joining the business as a Senior Consultant managing Wigan vacancies as part of a small specialist engineering recruitment team, Debbie’s career has grown alongside the branch – with her now responsible for managing the busy team of consultants and compliance experts.
We catch up with Debbie, to discuss how those 20 years have flown by.
Does it feel like 20 years since you first joined NRL?
Absolutely not! I really cannot believe how quickly those years have flown by, and to be commencing my 20th year of employment is terrific.
The Wigan recruitment team have moved 3 times since you joined as the team has grown, and you’ve also seen a lot of growth across the business. Has it been rewarding to see and be a part of these developments?
Without a doubt. If I look back at where we have come from as a branch it really makes me chuckle to actually appreciate our humble beginnings. Our database was an MS–DOS system, where we had to manually ‘skill’ every CV that came into the office, add them onto the system and file them in our filing cabinets that ran all the way around the office. The biggest buzz was when we heard the fax machine – the way we received all our vacancies, oh the joys!
To see the growth of the branch from a headcount of 3 to where it is now is impressive and to have been part of this journey from the very early days is quite amazing. We’ve been through some great times and some testing times – but have always come out stronger. I’ve made some lifelong friends that you don’t find often, and I still love my job. I still get the same buzz from recruitment I did all those years ago.
The Wigan recruitment branch are currently looking for an apprentice to join the team. How did you first get into recruitment?
Whoever thinks about a career within recruitment?! I applied for a role I saw in the paper (back in the good old days where recruitment was done via tabloid – how old do I feel!). I went for an interview with Phil Jennings and Greg Compton and got the role. During my first week I was ringing Control Systems Engineers to work at BNFL (now Sellafield Ltd) at Risley and I’ve never looked back! It really does not feel like I started with NRL 20 years ago, which is a testament to the company that took that chance with me.
If you were to summarise a career in recruitment to a school leaver or graduate what 3 skills would you say are essential?
Number one is passion, you need to enjoy what recruitment is about and all it entails, it’s a great feeling to find someone a job and be instrumental in their career path.
You need tenacity. You get a lot of knock backs in recruitment, so you need to have the ability to pick yourself back up and try again to continually strive for the successes.
Lastly compassion. We are dealing with people at the end of the day and I think this in particular is reflective of NRL as a whole. We like to go that extra mile for our customers and clients; and that “thank you” you get when you know you have done a good job means everything.