Director and founder of a Newcastle-based talent consultancy aims to turn the external recruitment industry on its head.
Sam Wall, recruitment director of SEAO Talent Partners, set up her business in late 2018 following a 15-year career in recruitment, both in-house and in consultancies, and a passion to further support her two young girls.
Here, Sam speaks about her career history, her motivation to launch her own consultancy and the story of SEAO Talent Partners.
“After spending over ten years in recruitment consultancies and then five years internally for a national £1.35b business – leading one of the largest recruitment teams in the North East – it was truly time.
“Alongside my career, I was very fortunate and blessed to also have a family, set up a home and support two beautiful little girls now 10 and seven.
“My family life gave me even more ambition as being a positive role model, along with providing for them and giving them all the experiences they deserve, has been such a motivation and has moved me nicely from one thing to the next.”
After a well-deserved Christmas break, the mother of two reflected on the success of the start of her new venture and looked to the future of SEAO Talent Partners and what 2019 is set to bring.
“The feeling of nostalgia over the Christmas break is exactly how SEAO was ‘born’. One of the very first conversations with my investors, Solutions Recruitment, was around what would make us different.
“I thought long and hard – it would need to be something unique, memorable, real – otherwise I would be best placed to stay where I was. After all, I was happy there and I had some fabulous mentors and my role pushed me daily.
“However, I knew there was so much more to providing a recruitment solution than the traditional, and still very much needed, method. I kept my in-house hat on and asked myself ‘what support would I like from an external recruitment partner?’”
The answer to this inspired the company name:
S – Strategy
E – End to end integrated and fully client branded recruitment
A – Assessment centres
O – Outplacement support
“We knew this was different – we would be a business’ in-house recruitment team, turning the recruitment offering on its head. The attracting, sourcing and placement of well selected and assessed talent would be the outcome of support. It would be the creation of the process, the candidate journey, the link to engagement, building a company culture, linking people to business objectives and creating the employer value proposition, or EVP, which businesses needed – and we would be best placed to provide it.”
Creating a team of experienced in-house, internal recruitment professionals was Sam’s aim and she set the ball rolling straight away, employing three likeminded women looking to better the industry, themselves and their families.
“The next focus had to be our culture. People buy people and an engaged workforce is an effective workforce, so I threw myself into creating values which would drive us as individuals, as well as support the growth of the business.
“It was important to me that these values could incorporate our families and loved ones, could be owned and embraced by the people coming on the SEAO journey with us and that my little girls could identify with and feel associated.
“The values also needed to allow us to be seen by our clients and candidates as individuals with morals, beliefs, experience and ambition and I believe we have achieved just that.”
SEAO’s four company values are:
Lead the way
Partner with passion
Inspire brilliance
Be unique.
SEAO launched its new website on Wednesday 2 January and is set to host an official launch event at the end of the month.
To find out more about SEAO Talent Partners, visit www.seao.co.uk.