On Tuesday 7th June we held our first ask the HR expert breakfast drop-in of the year for members. We had a range of members from innovative start-ups & hi-tech larger companies to lone workers & charities who all had one to one sessions with our experts.
Our experts were:
Hanna Smith - HR Director at Madgex
Since joining the company in 2007, Hanna has helped transform Madgex in to one of Brighton’s (and the UK’s) most exciting employers. Madgex recently placed 52nd on The Sunday Times Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work for 2014. In addition to this, previous awards include an Investors in People Silver Award, Simply Health Healthy Workplace Award and finalists in Sussex Business Awards and Brighton and Hove Business Awards.
Fiona Martin - Head of Employment Law and co founder of Martin Searle Solicitors
Specialties: Employment law, employment discrimination law, settlement agreement advice, equality and diversity, bringing and defending claims in the Employment Tribunal, best-practice human resources, employment law training, redundancy legal advice.
Both founding members of our HR Digital Media Group which supports owners and those responsible for HR in Sussex based Digital Media Companies.
& myself, Kelly Dibbert Jobs and Talent Manager here at Wired Sussex.
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As many of you couldn't attend on the day I wanted to highlight some of the areas and questions that we covered:
- How to attract good employees
- Reward/employment offering
- The whole employment relationship – how to create and manage a good working culture – what do people expect “these days”
- Flexible working and why it’s easy to manage
- Referrals to share option expert, commercial law advice about tax savings for charities and to a media/defamation lawyer/IP Law
- Advice on auto enrollment pension requirements and referral to The People’s Pension
- Advice about updating contracts and a handbook
- Signposting to ACAS legal support website
- Writing a contract for a new hire with tight post restrictive covenants
- Reclaiming costs of training staff who might leave before two years of service via a training policy
- Shared Parental Leave and recouping payments for SPL and Maternity pay
- Creating your own "culture" with staff involvement via away days, to help retain talent
- How to write the best job description to attract the right talent
- Information about the Digital Catapult Centre Brighton opportunities
- Info about joining the HR Digital Media Group which meets every two months, for more peer to peer support
If you couldn't make it to the event, then don't despair, we'll be holding a Recruitment & Retention round table on the Thursday 22nd October 9-11am here at the Fusebox. More info to come. Hope to see you there.
In the mean time if you need any advice about recruitment please give me a call on 01273 692888 or email kelly@wiredsussex.com and we can grab a coffee anytime.