Happy 2nd Birthday Pear Tree!
We’ve made it through another year and Pear Tree is 2! Slap my wrists, but it’s also been a year since I last wrote for our blog. Not that I’d have had a chance to forget about writing this annual overview with the number of diary reminders I’ve had pinging at me! Joking aside, Maddie has successfully replaced my once sporadic updates about getting a business up and running while keeping small humans (kids) and big kids (husbands) alive, with content that is engaging, witty and probably a damn sight more interesting!
This last year was filled with exciting changes and epic milestones, and it was busy…very busy! The actual running of the business (HR, invoicing, payroll and all that fun stuff…yawn!) is done out of office hours, as our day job is spent actually doing recruitment. We’ve won new clients that any recruiter would give their right arm to work with and continued to strengthen relationships with our existing clients. In addition to permanent and contract recruitment, we also now offer temporary and temporary to permanent solutions for clients needing a more flexible workforce. Karley has had a fantastic year, bringing in two volume accounts and several ad hoc users to easily smash her annual target. As recruitment is a notoriously up and down industry to work in, we dangled her a carrot to help keep her motivated throughout. This was in the form of a shiny new Dyson Airwrap which she is now the proud owner of!
We have earned ourselves a reputation this year of being regional contact centre recruitment specialists; joining the South West Contact Centre Forum and attending the Colston Hall Jobs Fair to further increase our brand awareness to clients and candidates alike. That said, we didn’t want to lose sight of the bigger commercial picture and so welcomed Kate to the team in September. Kate brought with her years of agency and inhouse recruitment experience meaning she has been both sides of the fence and knows the quirks and challenges of each. In addition to being as manic in life as the rest of us (with her two boys and Irish dance school!), she has brought with her a positivity that is infectious and adds to the banter that any small team needs. Not to mention, she has taken the Pear Tree brand into the previously untouched world of marketing recruitment and is getting us known (and now used) by agencies, companies and departments alike.
All in, our business has grown by 94% this year! While we have to pinch ourselves, we all worked hard and played harder to achieve this…and every step has and continues to be documented on social media. We are now the most followed regional recruitment agency on Instagram with 1.5K followers and are easily in the Top 5 on Twitter with 2.5K followers – it just begs the question, where will we rank in another 12 months?!
We know that work gets in the way of life sometimes, but we’ve still made plenty of precious memories; from a first day of school and a last nativity play, to a fiercely competitive sports day and an assembly for every occasion (Harvest Festival, Mother’s Day, Christmas Sing-a-Long etc etc…etc). The difference is that we were there for all of them because we are passionate that we offer flexibility to allow this. While there is an option to work from home and make up hours as required, we all prefer to be in the office working together…so we wanted to make it somewhere really nice to be. Queue the upheaval of an office move (well we moved upstairs but surely that counts?) and a full refurbishment in the summer. There’s white paint, white furniture and white chairs (it’s the only place we can get away with such a colour!), high ceilings, exposed beams, lots of natural light and a few feminine touches (ahem…did someone say fairy lights?!). And we love it!
Possibly our proudest moment to date, was when we were recognised as finalists at the Business Leader Awards for Start-up Business of the Year. No, we didn’t win, but to lose to a company that had the backing of Dragons Den made us realise that we were in good company. It was also an excuse to get dolled up, drink too much and schmooze with the best of them! Perhaps a less glamorous affair, but another box ticked, was when we pushed ourselves to our physical limits as a team and completed Tough Mudder for Jessie May Trust. We raised them nearly £800 for our literal blood, sweat and tears, and will be supporting them again this year – through a slightly more sedate cake sale perhaps!
While we have even bigger plans for our third year, none of these would be possible without the loyal and hardworking team we now have behind us. As a thank you, we enjoyed a cheeky spa at The Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath last
week (with the few formalities of our AGM thrown in) and it wouldn’t be a birthday (not that we need such an excuse) without cake too…pics to follow no doubt!
You are all so good at what you do, and work incredibly well as a team. Stay like this ladies, xx