Blog

One month ago I moved from the policy side of human resources to the resourcing side and this blog will be about my first impressions of resourcing at o2 and how this will help me reach the Olympics. Strange connection maybe?
Well, so far I’ve spent time at the Resourcing Contact Centre (RCC) where screening and telephone interviews take place for customer services and retail roles. My first impression was the responsibility this stage of recruiting has to make the culture that we, at o2, are so proud of. This centre recruits people who are often customers’ first point of call and is the way that we relate to the public day to day.  A great customer experience can make someone an o2 fan and a bad one can be detrimental to our reputation - which is why the RCC have such a responsibility to keep high standards for every day they’re screening and interviewing.
Over the next month the RCC services will be moving to be part of the European People Services (EPS) in Dublin which will cover resourcing at a European level. So as well as learning about the role of a resourcing advisor in the RCC, I’ve also been helping with training materials for the EPS, giving me a chance to see the old world of resourcing and gain an understanding of the new.
So not only am I learning about high volume resourcing, but I’ve also been able to appreciate the task of moving a very important service, with lots of processes, over to another country to a very real deadline. This is a tough job physically and emotionally but it seems to be going fantastically well. As a newbie I see this being down to inspirationally robust teamwork based on o2’s open, bold, trusted and clear values. Regular calls, looking out for each others workload, and setting clear deadlines are some examples.
As an athlete I’m also aware of a very real deadline coming up. Although I’ve four major competitions to go before final qualification for the Olympics, stress, anxiety and not-enough-time syndrome is on the brink of hitting. Therefore, it’s valuable for me to look towards my resourcing colleagues as role models. I need to use my team mates, coaches, sports psychologist, friends, family and everyone else involved in my journey, to help me reach my deadline feeling 100% prepared but also 100% sane for whatever the end result is.

 Hannah

Following on from our blog update yesterday, please find some pictures of our networking event that took place last week. We have some crowd shots and also a picture of our fantastic speakers who were Abi Bracken - Head of HR Operations UK, Simon Devonshire - GM Small and Medium Business and Fiona Davidson - Resourcing Manager UK.

The event was a great success with over 100 people turning up to find out more about working at Telefónica.  I am sure it won’t be our last one so watch this space to find out about more events in the near future. 

Lyndsey

The thing is, when all the wine had been drunk, and the last duck roll and cocktail sausage had been eaten we could look around and realise everything had gone really well, and all the stress had been for nothing.

If you invite them, they will come.

OK, maybe I didn’t have someone whispering that to me, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Way back last summer we decided to do an event at our main HQ in Slough, get people in who may be interested in joining the Telefónica family, ask our current fantastic employees to think of some friends they know who would be perfect to join us and then we can tell them about us. Explore Telefónica sounded like a good name. Simple . . .

Yeah, it wasn’t that simple.

Of the things that didn’t go to plan I will mention only a few things, meetings being arranged for different countries so we had no speakers, name badge holders never arriving, our air ship wanting to escape, lights shutting off unexpectedly.

But you know what, we sorted all of those things out with the minimum of fuss, even the lights were easy to sort out.

I have to say the event itself was great, we had over 100 people come along, all wanting to know more about us and all finding out that we aren’t just a mobile phone company, we are a full on digital company on a journey that means we want to make what we do the best around, to give our customers the best possible experience and to continue to be at the forefront of new products and customer satisfaction.

I am sorry if you didn’t get the chance to come to our event, but from the reaction of those that did it won’t be our last one, I hope to see you at the next one.

Harry