SUSANNE POPP TALKS ABOUT HER PROJECT CAREER AT HR FACTORY
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work at HR factory GmbH? Susanne shares insights into her project career. This includes the responsibilities, the challenges she overcame and the lessons she learned during her 2.5 years at HR factory in Munich.
How it all began
I joined HR factory, then still based in Ismaning near Munich, in the area of seminar organization. Together with my colleague Sebastian, I was responsible for organizing and, in part, moderating events at an automotive company in Munich. After the end of the project, I decided to join a large medium-sized company in the medical technology sector as a recruiting coordinator as a follow-up project. This may seem like a break for some. However, it was important for me to go back to the basics in HR from my previous focus on personnel development. After learning recruiting and how to create a successful candidate experience from scratch, I was gradually given more and more tasks until I was ultimately responsible for end-to-end vacancies in Customer Service and Finance.
During this time, I also took over the supervision of the student employees of another client, a real IT giant, via HR factory. Thanks to the flexible schedule, the possibility to work partly from home and, above all, the support of my four colleagues from the project team, I managed to reconcile both projects. During a quieter period, I was also able to support another colleague in a small consulting project on the topic of seminar management. In three days of workshops, we first discussed the status quo of our client and then developed recommendations for action based on our practical experience. It was overwhelming to see how helpful our glasses from practice were for our customer and a nice learning for myself that you can already contribute to optimizing the processes of a company with little professional experience.
After the project career
Some time has passed since then. We moved the company to Riem, our team keeps growing and I have now had the task of recruiting for HR factory (for our team) for one and a half years. Through my project experience, I can report from practice and know what is important in the project business à la HR factory. Interviewing HR experts is sometimes curious, but definitely always exciting. I am incredibly happy about the appreciation of being able to take on this responsible task and to be able to go on a daily search for new team colleagues as a talent ambassador. I work closely with my colleagues from Sales on new inquiries and projects, and thus experience first-hand how many opportunities and variations there are to “do” HR at our company. In my role, I am able to work not only with candidates but also with colleagues to define and support their career paths by taking on new projects.
What I learned for myself
To be honest, three years ago I would never have thought that recruiting would be the HR area in which I would feel most at home. Here, I’ve had the opportunity to try things out and become more generalist. For me, it’s not a matter of course to take on a wide variety of tasks within a short period of time and to get to know different companies, organizational structures and industries. And yes, recruiting is my favorite! I probably would never have found out without HR factory….