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COLIN COTTELL SPOKE WITH THE GLOBAL HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR AT FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE PROVIDER REGUS ABOUTTHE OVERHAUL OF THE COMPANY'S RECRUITMENT STRUCTURE
Imagine an organisation that goes from having 50 or 60 recruiters to more than 2,000 within the space of just over a year. It seems an unlikely scenario. But for Charlotte Harris, global HR director at flexible workplace provider Regus, it is very real.
The exponential growth in the number of recruiters at Regus was just one element in a two-year period of change that saw a dramatic and fundamental overhaul of the company's 'field recruitment' - meaning recruitment of customer service staff working in Regus's network of centres, rather than senior executives. "I don't think we anticipated the level of change that this would cause, but that is Regus's way - we did it so quickly that a lot of people didn't get a chance to catch their breath," says Harris, speaking to Recruiter at the company's modernistic Bruton Street business centre in London's Mayfair.
Regus is a company in a hurry. In the last couple of years it has opened in roughly 450 new locations around the world, bringing the number of employees to more than 10,000 in 105 countries. The firm expects to hire 3,000 new staff this year. And it is clearly a company in which Harris believes she and her team have a vital role to play. "The work that I do now is really enabling that growth, and that is rewarding... you can really influence and change what is happening. I am hooked on Regus - simple as that," she says.
Harris is clearly in her element at Regus as she enthuses about the company and recruitment's pivotal role in it But the picture she paints of Regus's recruitment going back just a couple of years is a very different one. "It was slow, it was impractical, and disjointed between HR and the field. The field was saying 'I can't grow my business because HR aren't recruiting people fast enough'," she says.
The company's separate recruitment teams in each of Regus's geographies - the Americas, the UK, EMEA [Europe, Middle East & Africa] and Asia Pacific - "were quite heavy in terms of manpower, admin and...