By our Managing Director Maureen O’Neill
In 2009 after having spent almost 20 years in the recruitment sector working in Scotland and the middle east in various industries such as media, electronics, IT, sales, accountancy and banking to name a few I ended up working with my current group Compello staffing. Since 2006 I had headed up a variety of sectors for them as general manager which including Banking and Health and Social Care. As the divisions grew I was continually juggling different hats and was finding it harder to do justice to all areas and knew that the time was coming that I really had to decide where I saw my future.
On one particular day I had two back to back client meetings. Those meetings could not have been more different if you had made them up.
The first was with the chairman of a leading bank where I was signing a huge contract for our company to exclusively supply very senior banking staff for the next year. I had taken one of our senior consultants along and we were served tea by a butler wearing white gloves from a silver tray. The client was lovely and 30 minutes later I was back in my office dropping of the consultant and picking up our nurse manager to go to my next meeting.
The next meeting was at a care home where we supplied temporary staff and we were there to do a service check. Whilst waiting for the home manager I could see one of the residents looking a little upset in the lounge, so I asked him what was wrong. Turns out he had dropped his false teeth and could not find them. I quickly got to my knees and searched around, I found them, rinsed them and gave him them back. You thought I had given him the crown jewels he was so overjoyed, he then went onto tell us his life story of how he had been a priest since he was a young man, where he grew up in Ireland and about his family. The home manager came over but we still sat with the resident. We were made a cup of tea by one of the lovely care staff and stayed for about an hour.
The first meeting was very nice and successful, but it was the second meeting that had my heart. On the way back to my office I had made my decision of what I wanted to do. I thought about it all night and the very next day I phoned our Chairman John Hailstone and said I don’t want to run all these different divisions anymore and I want to focus on health and social care and build a company around that.
My request was quickly supported and within two months we had carried out a buy out of the division and the new companies The Social Care Community Partnership and then The Nursing Partnership were formed
That was December 2009 and since then my passion for this sector has never diminished. I love what I do. I love working in this sector to make changes, to improve services, to challenge government and above all I love working with my incredible colleagues and agency staff that are the backbone of our company.
Come Join us on our journey
