An invaluable opportunity from Harvest Recruitment

Invaluable.

This word defines my time at Harvest Recruitment and Harvest Human Resources.  From the learning, to the exposure to numerous business situations, the people and the mentoring;  the only way to sum up my first ever job in a cooperate space is ‘invaluable’.
So, the nature of this blog is not so much around advice but more of a huge thank you for being the foundation for my (hopefully) bight career and my home away from home for the last 18 months.

My time at Harvest began after I decided to defer my business degree and gain a role and experience in the Human Resources sector. I remember walking into my interview with Harvest’s Director, Maree void of any real business knowledge, yet full of hopeful confidence.  Maree clearly saw something in me the day of that interview, (we now refer to this identification as ‘The Harvest Personality’) and gave me the opportunity to join her team. The opportunities that followed were plentiful. In my first few weeks I was recruiting a team of thirty for a start-up manufacture in Geelong, mimicking what I’d seen Maree do and pulling the rest of the assignment together with a positive attitude and a smile. This example is the very essence of why Harvest and Maree are so brilliant at what they bring to the market. I was able to seamlessly coordinate a recruitment process with such little experience because I had been given the opportunity to shadow an expert. I was able to identify the ‘right cultural fit’ because that is what Harvest emphasizes when providing a recruitment service to a client and most importantly, I was allowed the opportunity to plunge into the deep end with gentle guidance from Maree along the way and really find my feet in the fast paced and often hectic world  that is recruitment.

Another aspect of my role that was granted to me and is also such a competitive opportunity to find for today’s job seekers was event management. I was put in charge of all of Harvest’s events from our breakfast briefings to our small business presentations and the book launch of Maree’s book ‘Body Snatchers – Unlocking the Secrets of the Recruitment Industry’, which is still a career highlight for me to this day. I was given access to presentations by the event industries best so I could really grasp the concept of running a seamless event and put these learnings into motion at Harvest and wherever else my career would take me.  Many of my friends would love to have the means of breaking into the event management space and envy this component of my position. Only at Harvest, would someone be offered that prospect of adding to their skill set because Maree is truly dedicated to nurturing her teams’ career development. From this opportunity I was given, stems a realm of precious knowledge that I will have under my belt forever and for that I am endlessly grateful.

I must admit, to be put in a position where I have constant dialogue with senior managers from large entities was incredibly daunting at first but reflecting back on it, I am thrilled this was part of my role. I now have the confidence to ‘chat’ to technical specialists, directors, general managers and a wide range of other personnel without battering an eyelid and I have this confidence because Maree had confidence in me. I will take this skill with me not only into my future business experiences but into all of my experiences that are yet to come.

So to Maree and to Harvest, thank you! Thank you for the mentoring, thank you for the nurturing, thank you for having proud Mother Duck moments when I ‘kick butt’, thank you for showing me how to engage in integrious business and  thank you for giving me an invaluable launch pad into the next chapter of my career!

Written by Associate Consultant, Louise McGuinness on her last day at Harvest as she embarks on the next stage of her career path.