Growth Doesn’t Happen by Accident
What drives you? When the going gets tough, how do you pull through?
Now, being 6’5 tall is not the growth I’m talking about.
I used to think success meant ticking the traditional boxes. Good job. House. Stability. But I’ve realised it’s more than that. It’s about who you’re surrounded by and the environment you grow in.
Now I’ve settled into my role as a Recruitment Consultant at PiC, I can honestly say I’ve found my place, surrounded by the best people.
Always Pushing and Growing
I guess I’ve got my parents to thank for the drive and determination I have. They fled Kosovo in the 90s during the war and arrived in the UK without knowing how to speak English at all. And that’s brave, especially when you don’t even know how to ask where the bus stop is.
This reality of growing up in the UK set my default mindset to growth and development. And I wouldn’t have changed any of it for the world.
With nothing in life being guaranteed, you start to realise that hard work isn’t optional, so you have to make your own opportunities. And I firmly believe this still.
My parents took a big risk to create opportunity. My responsibility is to build on it and slowly but surely repay them for the troubles they went through to create a better life for the family.
I saw this online not too long ago, ‘After a certain age, your parents slowly become your children. They ask simple questions, repeat stories, and depend on your patience the way you once depended on theirs. Very few understand this role reversal. What looks like innocence or inconvenience is really time coming full circle. Don’t correct them harshly. Don’t rush them. Care for them the way they once protected you. This is not a burden. It is repayment, quietly wrapped as love.’
Understanding People
Before working at PiC, I was an estate agent. This is where I learnt to read people and understand what it was they wanted.
Being in an estate agents is hard graft. There’s no such thing as a quiet week in estate agency. It’s long hours, extremely competitive, and you’ve got lots of targets to achieve with high expectations all round. For someone like me who’s driven, this is incredibly valuable.
In this world, it was an opportunity to sharpen my communications skills and truly understand how to get to the heart of what someone really wants. One of the quickest lessons I came across with buyers and sellers was understanding that what someone says isn’t always what they mean. Like how “just browsing” rarely means just browsing.
A lot of this world is about understanding motivations and managing expectations. In this highly competitive environment, you have to handle pressure and find ways of building trust quickly; something that’s always been second nature to me.
For me, I’m good at understanding what someone’s goals are and finding ways to help them move towards them.
But I also realised something else.
While I thrive in performance-driven environments, I don’t in purely cutthroat ones. Culture matters to me just as much as the team I’m working with.
Why Recruitment Clicked
I’ve heard the age-old phrase that nobody chooses recruitment as a career – they always fall into it. I guess the same could be said about me.
When I moved to PiC, everything seemed to align. With a smaller team, I instantly gelled with the culture and the collaborative atmosphere they’d developed. I remember sitting in my first team meeting thinking, “This feels different”.
If we talk about lessons learnt, I quickly realised that recruitment is all about impact. That’s when it stopped being a job and started feeling like something I could build a career around.
For starters, you have to understand a client’s challenges, help candidates step into roles that elevate their careers and create a positive experience for both sides. This was where my estate agent skillset perfectly aligned.
Forging positive relationships? That’s something that can draw anyone in.
A Place to Grow
You know when you’re changing career and something seems to feel different? I got that straight away with PiC.
In a smaller team, you know everyone and you understand what they stand for. There’s nowhere to hide and you can see clarity in where the business is heading. That’s important to me. After all, there’s just two of us in the InsurTech team.
After experiencing highly competitive environments, I wanted somewhere that felt more collaborative. Somewhere that was ambitious, but aligned. At PiC, performance is expected, but so is integrity, and when you surround yourself with people who genuinely care about doing things properly, your own standards rise naturally.
Building Relationships is What I Do Best
As a naturally social person, I get energy from being around people. This could be in meetings, at the gym or travelling somewhere new.
In recruitment, this energy translates into tangible benefits. You start to ask better questions and listen more closely to what clients or candidates are saying, helping people feel understood, which leads to an ability to build rapport quickly.
I could be guiding a candidate through a big international move for a Guidewire project in France or helping a client secure a German-speaking PolicyCenter Architect they’ve been struggling to find.
Either way, I take it seriously. Like when I walked into Spurs as a steward, despite being an Arsenal fan. Let’s just say it was character building. I kept it professional… but internally, it was a test of loyalty.
But I don’t pretend to know everything. Asking the right questions also helps drive me to become better at what I do.
Building a Reputation from the Ground Up
My personal goals have always been quite traditional. I want the house, the family, the stable and successful life that comes with it, but I’m aware that this motivation is born from creating your own opportunities for success.
Sure, buying property in London today can feel unobtainable at times, but this couldn’t be more motivating. I want to make it happen, so this drive pushes me professionally. It keeps me focused. It reminds me why I work hard.
PiC has been going for over 40 years now and I intend to solidify my presence here in the team. With an international network of clients and candidates, I’m excited to really get stuck into the day-to-day problems of our clients.
Global projects are evolving, and so is the technology behind them, so the demand for the right expertise has never been higher. It just sounds like the perfect environment to grow and develop.
If anything, my goal is simple. I want to build a reputation as someone who takes relationships seriously, asks the right questions and delivers quality. Of course the whole team genuinely cares about getting things right, and I’m no different. It’s probably why it felt like the perfect fit for me.
But keep an eye on me. I don’t sit still for long. I like progress and I like pushing myself. And if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s this: growth doesn’t happen by accident. You choose it.