Melissa Campbell, has now worked there for 20 years. She looks back on her time at Situations below.
The Old Days
“So much has changed in the world since I started work for Situations. My first role at the agency was Temp Controller, where I had to write out manually in a ledger all of the temps out on assignment each week. As you can imagine, I quickly inputted that information onto Excel to make my role much easier!
“At that time, we were also submitting CV’s to our client companies by post, which took a long time. The consultants would sit around the desk together and decide which organisations, from our paper client list, that we would send that particular CV to. How times have changed!”
The Current Situation
Nowadays it’s all about emailing CV’s or using online recruitment portals, digital candidate screening, video and phone candidate interviews, and video client meetings. We do also meet people in person, now that we’re allowed to again, however video meetings are much more prevalent than they used to be.
Challenges
Melissa explains that, during her time at Situations, she worked through 2 major challenges: the first being the “Credit Crunch” in 2009, when there were plenty of candidates available but hardly any vacancies to fill due to organisations’ recruitment freezes, and the second being the Covid 19 pandemic where, for a short period initially, both candidates and vacancies reduced significantly. She states that the difference with Covid 19 was that no-one in the world knew how long it might last or what might happen to their business in the process. Melissa stated that shutting their doors to work from home in the first lockdown in March 2020 was very upsetting and worrying, as everything was so unknown. Thankfully their IT systems were already cloud-based, so it was literally a case of the staff picking up their laptops, going home to work and keeping in touch. Then Guernsey recovered so quickly from that first wave and life went back to normal much faster than expected, with plenty of candidates and vacancies arising again. So, when the second lockdown hit in early 2021, people had dealt with this before and knew they could again; it was much more business as usual. Organisations had learnt from the first wave and were used to working from home and having video meetings. Melissa explained that, fortunately, Situations didn’t see any reduction in business in 2021 even with the lockdown and, in fact, it turned out to be Situations’ best financial year ever.
Manager & Owner
Melissa became a Director of Situations in 2002 just 6 months after joining the agency, with a view to succession planning by the former MD and Founder, Pat Lynch. A few years later Melissa became a minor Shareholder and has not looked back since. She is now the major shareholder of the company, alongside Jenny Mitchell who ran the business with her for many years until mid-2021. Having just taken on 2 additional staff, Situations now has a team of 10 people including 6 consultants. Melissa adds
“We’ve also moved offices this year to bigger premises, so it’s a very exciting time and we have a great future ahead.”
People Focus
Whether it is clients, candidates or staff, people are at the forefront of the Situations business model. Melissa explains:
“Because our consultants don’t work on commission (they’re salaried), we provide a very different service to the other Guernsey recruitment agencies. We really care and support our candidates. All of our consultants are REC qualified and have a total of 50+ years’ recruitment experience. We focus on getting to know both the candidates and clients very well to make the best job match possible for both sides, not just any placement. We all spend so much of our waking hours at work, we know how important it is that your job makes you feel happy, fulfilled and rewarded, and that companies have the best staff in place to run their businesses. That’s what we are here to achieve for our clients and candidates.”
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