“I don’t believe that, and if that’s the way you treat your recruitment, then you’re doing people a huge disservice,” she asserts.

For Sly, the art of recruitment is something that successful companies, big and small, should take very seriously and must also take their time over.

 

And in an area such as IT where a talent war is constantly raging – whatever the parlous or peachy state of the wider economy – the key to getting it right is to really understand the company concerned and hire people that don’t just tick the technical boxes, but are a good cultural fit as well.

Although Sly always knew that she was good with people, at the outset of her career, she wasn’t sure what profession would best allow her to use her talent. So when she left university, she joined B&Q, attracted by its reputation for having a really good management training scheme.

 

But Sly realised pretty quickly that she was never going to be interested enough in the nuts and bolts of, ahem, nuts and bolts to run either the shop floor or a branch.

 

Rather than let her leave, however, the company found her another role that was much more up her street: organising new store openings, which included hiring staff.

 

Sly loved it, but eventually the weekend working and starter salary started to take their toll and she approached a recruitment consultant. Instead of finding her another position within a big firm, however, they offered her a job within their own agency.

 

And bingo – she had found her niche and spent the next 10 years working in consultancies that specialised in financial recruitment.

But Sly found that, rather than deal with a high volume of placements, what she liked best was working with just a few clients and really getting to know them well. “I quickly realised that I tended to work with a few clients deeply rather than lots of clients,” she remembers.

It was a strategy that paid off and Sly became one of the agency’s big billers as a result. “I was getting more insight and intimacy with clients than my colleagues because I was interested in them,” she explains.

After years of working for third party employers, however, Sly decided to break out on her own and start her own business. “I thought, why not do this for myself? And I did, but to be honest I found it really lonely,” she admits.

But more than that, even though she was successful and earning a good salary, it didn’t feel like she was on the right career path. “When you are a partner, you are never completely intimate or as involved so the consequences of your decisions are not as meaningful,” Sly explains.

Luckily, however, one of her clients in the shape of Dell approached her to work for it and she jumped at the chance. So in 1998, she made her first entry into the IT industry.

 

 

The PC manufacturer was growing incredibly quickly at the time, taking on 3,000 new hires a year into roles that were developing swiftly in scope. But because Dell didn’t have a dedicated recruitment team, all new hires were handled by HR.

 

Sly notes that “80% of their HR generalists’ time was spent on recruitment and 20% on the rest,” which was clearly not an effective balance. So she took on the dual role of managing executive staffing across Europe as well as managing UK recruitment.

From there, however, Sly moved to another high tech firm – web content management software provider, Vignette (which has since been bought by OpenText), and ended up standing in as interim HR director. “I took over the mantle when we needed a head of HR, but it’s not what I want to do,” she says.

A stint at HR software supplier, PeopleSoft (which is now owned by Oracle), followed, which like Dell, needed someone to set up and run its European recruitment operations.

 

“They were very serious about who they were and what they wanted to be and took real time to integrate people into the business,” she remembers, adding that this investment in people created a very loyal workforce.

 

But other big name firms likewise followed: Vodafone, Barclaycard and SAP were all on the list before Sly took on her current role at QlikTech.

Because she’d generally worked for companies that took their recruitment activities and investment in people seriously, however, she wanted to be sure that her potential new employer had the values and belief in its employees that it claimed.

 

 

“Evidence speaks volumes, talking counts for nothing,” Sly points out.

What helped convince her though was the level of effort that the supplier put into engaging its workforce. For example, every new recruit was sent on a five-day induction course to learn about its history, values and culture.

 

Every year, it also took its entire workforce somewhere – the last destination was Mexico – for five days to say thank you to them for collectively making the business a success.

 

But more than that, Sly could see that staff were offered a future and a good career path and that the organisation’s culture was “open and transparent and non-hierarchical”.

Despite her focus on recruitment, Sly has always worked closely with HR leadership teams, undertaken a number of HR activities, including talent management and leadership development, and taken on various general business responsibilities such as handling M&A activity and working in the sales operation.

 

“I don’t think you can be truly relevant to the business unless you have that perspective. You have to understand the business,” she says.

Nonetheless, despite the depth and breadth of her experience, it is still recruitment where Sly feels most at home.

And finally…

Who do you admire most and why?
There isn’t one particular person. I have been really fortunate to work with some phenomenal leaders and I’ve seen the power of great leadership and have learned from them.

What’s your most hated buzzword?
‘We can drive this forward’. Driving is for cars. Why can’t people say: “We can make this happen.”

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
‘Know what you don’t know.’ So that means being confident enough to ask about things that you don’t know.

How do you relax?
I cook and bake with my kids.