‘I fell into HR by mistake’

I wonder how Dawn has come to be where she is today, and she tells me that it wasn’t intentional. “I was working at a specialist recruitment agency as a PA, but my boss was always out and about and so by default I ended up dealing with a lot of the clients myself,” says Dawn. By now it was the late 80s and start of the 90s – the Berlin Wall had collapsed, and the Spice Girls were rising to fame. Without knowing it the young Dawn had morphed into a recruitment consultant, a placement, at Mercury Communications which at the time was part of the Cable and Wireless Group resulted in a phone call, “They asked me if I had ever thought about working in personnel and that’s how it began,” she recalls.

She spent the next six years with the business rotating through various jobs in both personnel and training. It was now 1995 and Dawn made her next move, this time to insurance and Norwich Union. She worked once more in a high-level Executive Assistant role playing a hand in HR, moving into the HR team after three months as a Personnel Officer and moving to cover maternity leave for the Personnel Manager. It was a period in which she officially ‘cut her HR teeth’. She was ready to apply for her first senior HR job and duly landed at TalkTalk in 1998 as HR Manager. Highlights included becoming HR Business Partner for the whole of the customer services division.

“Just as I was coming up for 14 years, they began to make changes and centralise the HR function at TalkTalk, so I had the option of other jobs in the organisation, but I felt it was time to try something new,” says Dawn. Three months ‘off’ ensued but the downtime became peppered with consulting.