Until I was seven I lived on a farm in Georgia, with horses, chickens and pigs. Then the family moved to Tbilisi, and I stayed there for the next fifteen years. I studied psychology on a full scholarship, then did my master's in Milan, also on a full scholarship, and I have lived in Milan ever since. I have been working since I was sixteen. Georgian, Italian and English are all in daily use, though my thoughts tend to come in English, because I have not worked in a fully Georgian environment since I was twenty.
Everything I did before recruitment had a person at the centre of it. At a psychotherapy institute I supervised the therapists rather than the patients, which meant watching how a session had gone and having something useful to say about it before the next one. Then I was a psychologist in a private school, and I still count that among the best periods of my working life. Later I went into product at a large European financial company, where the job was to hold a user's request and a business need in the same hand, and from there into talent acquisition, where I spent years.
I did not plan the direction, I noticed it. Looking at very different companies and at the people who had founded them, I kept coming back to the same thing: whatever else separated them, each one depended on the people it had managed to gather.
So I talk to a candidate human to human, and there is less technique in that than people assume. I always give honest feedback, including the kind nobody enjoys receiving. Everyone I speak to brings something of their own, and everyone can feel the moment you stop noticing it. Nothing needs to be sold here and nothing needs to be performed, because the moment you exaggerate the conversation is over even though it goes on. The fundamental part is the trust.
Right now I am running technology and digital transformation searches across Europe. What still catches me out is how far a client's written requirements can sit from what actually makes someone succeed in the role. A candidate can be flawless on paper and it comes to nothing because the motivation, the expectations or the timing are out of step, so I ask about those at the beginning of a search now instead of at the end. I had expected this profession to be about two sides. There are three: the agency, the client and the candidate all arrive with their own expectations, and the work is to keep bringing them into the same room. That is why the best advice I was ever given was about empathy. You have to stand in both pairs of shoes, and understand why this person would move at all and why this company would want them.
My LinkedIn gives no hint of it, but between sixteen and twenty I was serious about art. I read every day, the classics, Russian through to German, and in cinema I lived inside the French New Wave of the sixties.
«People remember me because I don't just see what something is; I see what it could become.»