Careers are daunting no matter what you do. Particularly when facing change!

Charles Hoskins sat down with Amelia Watkins, Head of Talent at Geomiq, a digital manufacturing start-up where AI meets Design Engineering. Amelia is smashing her career! She came from a background in agency recruitment, upskilled herself with the right qualifications to take on an internal role, and rose to a ‘Head of’ position having established solid Recruitment and HR policy.

For those in (all forms) of recruitment, this is one not to miss; they covered, tackling that change from agency to internal, the importance of role models and useful tools to ensure D&I is embedded in your talent acquisition strategy.

Hi Amelia, thank you for being involved with Women Rock. Could you tell us a bit about you and your role at Geomiq?

Originally from the countryside, I grew up on a farm and moved to London after university after studying Exercise, Health and Nutrition. I got into recruitment following several internships during my final year of university,  knowing I wanted to have the potential to make the commission, whether that be recruitment, sales or working in finance. I went into life science recruitment and grew my career further from there, working in a few agencies and also within Executive Search. A year before I joined Geomiq as their first internal talent/people hire I knew I wanted to develop my career away from agency and completed APM Project Management Qualifications to develop my skills which helped me to get this role here at Geomiq. Over the last 2 years I have developed their recruitment process, talent development process as well as human resources function and now have an additional 2 people within the People Team. 

Geomiq is a digital manufacturing marketplace that connects mechanical engineers or design engineers with manufacturers. We were founded in 2017 and have since reached Series A investment in August 2022 and over doubled in size since, including opening a quality hub in Porto, Portugal to enable us to work with more European manufacturers as well as help with product distribution post-Brexit. We are continuing to grow, moving from a startup to scale up, and look to head towards Series B funding in the next 6-12 months. 

Head of Talent at a startup is no easy job. What’s been the hardest part?

I would say getting the company to understand that people are what makes a company grow and develop further and for that to happen you need a strong and developed people strategy. This would include demonstrating the importance of an ATS system, or a clear career pathway and developing processes. Within startups, you need to stay fast-paced but in order to grow you have to start implementing processes so it’s finding the right balance between the two.

We previously spoke about role models. How have they helped your success in this role?

I grew up with several family members who were growing their businesses around me so that demonstrated to me the importance of hard work, resilience and never giving up in order to get where you want to be. Working in a startup or even a VC backed company means you're constantly on your toes and striving to develop, automate and grow so you have to work fast-paced which can be tiring as you’re facing constant changes; but watching family members do the same from a young age as helped me and reminded me that if you keep pushing and learning you can also deliver success. 

As an ex-agency recruiter, how did that start to set you up for success in Talent? Any advice for people looking to make the move?

Working in agency recruitment taught me how to be resilient and how to not take things personally when things don’t go your way or to plan. With agency recruitment you are relying on people making decisions that align with your vision for you to hit a target and be successful, people are unpredictable and can make a sudden change in decision at the last minute so you have to always be prepared for that and understand some things are out of your control so you need to focus on what you can control. 

For people interested in moving into an internal talent or people role, I would say, make sure you are moving for the right reasons as it is a big change. I moved because I wanted to help a business develop but more importantly, I wanted to see and help to develop the people I placed in these roles. So, when looking for a new role, find a company that aligns with what you’re looking for as a career and once you find that you’ll enjoy the internal talent role more.

When it comes to D&I, any shout-out to tools/decisions you’ve made that have been a big help?

The first thing I did to help D&I here at Geomiq was find the right ATS system. I went for Teamtailor as it allows Geomiq to blind CVs and also evaluate candidates in an unbiased and equal manner. I would recommend this tool to anyone in an internal talent role. We also, here at Geomiq, offer a certain number of Skilled Worker Visas for certain level roles per year which brings us talent from all over the world, I think it’s a great way to develop an inclusive and diverse workforce. Here at Geomiq we are still looking to develop our D&I further as we are working in a heavily male-dominated environment, both in tech and engineering, so we are always looking for new ways to help us here. 

We are building a Spotify playlist for everyone on the blog, so what’s your current guilty pleasure to add?

I do like to listen to guilty pleasures while on my morning runs and at the moment it still seems to be Austin by Dasha.

Interviewed by Charles Hoskins