Ravelston Clark

20/03/2019

** Backend Developer - Python / Django | Growing start-up | Brixton, London | £40-50k**

Looking to hire asap - apply now at http://bit.ly/django-rideto

This exciting start-up was recently ranked as one of the UK's hottest new start-ups and is looking for a talented and ambitious Backend Developer to join their team.

You'll be able to take on a large amount of responsibility from day 1, playing an important role in the backend and full stack development of their current and new product range, progressing quickly in an autonomous and challenging role. Making a big impact in the business and helping us to solve real-world problems by making it safer and easier for more people to get on 2 wheels.

Working closely with the Founder and current engineering team, you'll have design, strategic and technical input on everything they build. You'll have a massive opportunity to grow with a rapidly scaling business with no limit.

They have the founding team, two rounds of investment and 40% month on month growth. They're looking for more talented, ambitious people to join their journey,

Their stack - you’ll need at least 18 months’ experience working with:

Django
Python

The rest of their stack – experience with any of them will be a bonus!

React
Redux
Stripe
Heroku
GitLab
AWS
Sentry

Benefits:
Share options
Flexible working
Bright and airy office in the centre of bustling Brixton
London team nights out, events and the usual start-up fun
Free motorcycle training to learn to ride!

*Love of motorcycles is not a requirement but may grow as a result* (It happened to them!)

Backend Developer vacancy - growing start-up. Brixton. £40-50k Looking to hire asap - apply now at http://bit.ly/django-rideto

08/03/2019

** New role **

Solicitor - Agricultural Property
Spalding | Nottingham | Peterborough | Alconbury
£40-65k

Key information
• Growing firm with plenty of scope for development
• Willing to support relocation costs
• Four office locations and the potential for some home-working
• Qualified solicitor with at least 2 years’ PQE. Commercial experience essential.

The detail
The firm is commercial practice with a strong focus on agriculture and rural estates, the food sector and commercial property. They have ambitious plans for growth and to realise them, they need the right people.

Many of their 26 partners trained with them. They aim to continue to grow organically, while bringing in additional expertise where needed to meet strategic goals.

As the successful candidate, you will join other agricultural law specialists who are regarded as being among the best in their field. You will have empathy with the challenges faced by farm businesses and estates as they try to grow their businesses.

This is an exciting opportunity to be involved in interesting and good quality work as a member of a growing team which looks outwards and thrives on delivering a great job for clients.

Day to day you will:
• manage client/matter files under supervision, and ensure full compliance
• provide expert legal advice to a range of clients including the negotiation and drafting of documentation
• carry out in an effective, efficient and timely manner the various stages of legal proceedings with the aim of protecting the interests of the client
• meet agreed KPIs and exhibit a commercial approach to financial management
• help develop new business from existing clients and other professionals

Key Skills and Experience
You will be a qualified solicitor with at least two years’ PQE and preferably five years’ plus, and should:

• understand the agricultural sector and an appreciation of the specific needs of this client group
• have an appreciation of property law and co-ownership issues
• have an interest in the more technical aspects of agricultural law – CAP schemes, shooting leases, etc
• have experience of building relationships with both new and existing clients and professionals, as well as a natural ability to promote marketing and business development initiatives in a dynamic way

Your benefits

The firm really looks after their employees and has an extensive benefits package, some examples include
• Pension
• 5% of salary bonus
• 50% off gym membership
• Every other week a qualified reflexologist & masseuse visits the main office
• A dry-cleaning service visits the main office

The main office is based in an area perfect for maintaining a work life balance and supporting growing families, with plenty of high-quality schooling nearby.

If you are interested in finding out more about the role and to receive the full role profile and benefits details, please apply with your most up to date CV.

http://bit.ly/legal-rs

08/03/2019

** Urgent new role **

Legal Counsel (full or part time)
Pudsey | £50-60k

The company is a leading provider of business-to-business vehicle rental. They are an innovative technology led business and have solid growth plans.

This brand-new role is an outstanding opportunity to give the new Legal Counsel plenty of scope to make their mark.

The legal team has been brought in-house and your team will expand over time. The business is growing but still retains an inclusive SME feel.

You will work closely with the Finance Director and Head of Business Support Services to lead the provision of legal services across the group.

Areas falling under the remit of the Legal Counsel include:

- Leading the provision of legal advice across the Group
- Negotiating, drafting and reviewing client contracts and tender submissions
- Standardising, negotiating and drafting supplier agreements, in conjunction with the supply chain team
- Managing claims and disputes and reviewing and advising on insurance arrangements
- Advising on debt collection and recovery
- Potential to expand remit and take over Company Secretary duties

What is on offer for you?

- Flexible working between 8am-6pm.
- Full and part-time hours are possible for this role. For part-time, 25 hours or more will be considered.
- Bonus potential up to 10%
- Childcare vouchers and employee discount scheme, and lot’s more!

Legal Counsel experience

They need someone who can quickly understand what needs to be done to build the legal provision, where the gaps are and implement a robust plan to ensure full legal coverage.

You will need

- Commercial law or contract law experience in a UK commercial environment
- UK recognised GDL, Bachelor of Law or LLB – 5+ years PQE
- Experience providing corporate legal support to multiple business areas
- In-house experience

It would be an absolute bonus if you also had:

- Vehicle rental / transport industry experience
- Varied compliance experience including exposure to: GDPR, health and safety and ISO certifications

This is a rare opportunity to shape a legal team from the beginning in a growing company. The opportunity for personal development is phenomenal.

If you are interested, please apply with your most recent CV for immediate consideration.

http://bit.ly/legal-rs

06/03/2019

** Account Executive - Chester - £17,500, rising to £18,000 **

This new role is linked to the company's challenging growth plans. They are market leaders in their field and are looking to get even better!

In this role, you will be:

* welcoming owners / new clients to the service
* setting up all new holiday properties on the portal,
* ensuring they are well presented
* completing Health and Safety sign off for each new property
* supporting each new owner and monitoring pricing and booking pace through their early journey with the service, then handing over to the BAU team.

To be successful in this role it would be great if you had experience in:
* customer service / account management
* quality assurance
* planning and prioritising your own workload.

Benefits:
* Salary will rise to £18,000 after 6 months
*33 days’ holiday (including bank holidays)
* An additional day off during the week of your Birthday
* Annual bonus scheme
* Staff pension
* Private medical
* Death in service payment
* Subsidised park and ride passes
* Enhanced Maternity and Paternity pay
* Long service awards - cash payments and increases in holiday allowances
* Staff discount on cottage holidays
* Free worldwide travel insurance (including family members)
* Wellness extras, including free annual flu jabs, reflexology sessions and free fruit supplied in the office

http://bit.ly/2TiArP6

14/01/2019

Coming soon: a new job board for flexible and work-from-home roles.

LAUNCHING SOON

wfh-jobs.com: the specialist job board for professional flexible and home based jobs.

No franchises, no MLM schemes only real career opportunities with businesses that understand the benefits of building a talented, flexible workforce.

To be notified when the platform launches and to find out more about what wfh-jobs.com can do for you, sign up below.

Jobseekers: http://bit.ly/candidate-wfh

Employers / Agencies: http://bit.ly/employer-wfh

16/07/2018

Looking for leadership inspiration?

My favourite leadership lessons can be observed, analysed and learned in 131 hours.

All fine lessons, taken from Star Trek, mainly The Next Generation (the finest of them all…) and explained in the two articles listed below.

In no particular order, they are:
1. Speak to people in the language they understand
2. When you are overwhelmed, ask for help
3. Value ethical actions over expedient ones
4. Challenge your team to help them grow
5. Don’t play it safe – seize the opportunities in front of you
6. Don’t stay in the shadows of your predecessors, even if it is tempting
7. Trust, but hold people accountable
8. Stay open to options but don’t apologise for making a call.

https://lifehacker.com/everything-i-know-about-leadership-i-learned-from-star-1786393695
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/13/five-leadership-lessons-from-jean-luc-picard/

It’s Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, and while I could wax rhapsodic about the impact the show had on me, one thing that persists, even now, every day, is how I learned how to be a good leader by watching Starfleet captains. Sometimes they were exceptional. Other times they really weren’t. I alw...

27/06/2018

What makes a successful project manager?

The title “Project Manager” covers a huge range of responsibilties. Sometimes it describes a role doing little more than running a spreadsheet to track tasks. At other times, it’s the job title for someone who will be managing millions, even billions of pounds, and a huge project team, to deliver a major infrastructure project.

Only as good as their last project?

But for project managers at every level, project management can be a tough world in which they’re only as good as their last project. For contract PMs, the initial contract is very often six months, even though the project is expected to run for longer. At the end of that time, the client can end the contract if they don’t feel the manager is performing.

Hit the ground running

The ability to hit the ground running is vital. Projects are notorious for their uneven workflows and one of the pinch points is mobilising the project, when a great deal needs to be done at the same time. Recruiting a team, aligning them around the project goals, writing the initial documents and risk assessments, holding the kick-off meeting, getting to grips with the business, preparing the plan and budgets and getting everything approved - it’s hectic. And it’s during these activities that the organisation is forming an impression of the manager and deciding whether to stick with them over the life of the project.

It’s not unknown in very rigorous project management environments, such as the oil industry, for an audit team to arrive and start an investigation because the project hasn’t started and ramped up quickly enough but has been spending money - not a good start for a project manager, the client has perhaps lost faith in them already.

Hover above the detail but swoop in when necessary

What distinguishes the successful project managers from the rest? The difference is often in the approach to detail. One successful project manager was described as being a bit like an eagle - hovering over the project, taking in the whole picture, but able to swoop down and pick out a detail if required. This is very different from most management roles, in which delegation patterns are pretty fixed, and the manager doesn’t need the ability to switch focus in this way.

Resilient and a good negotiator

Projects never run smoothly. If they did, they wouldn’t need project managers. So a key skill for the project manager is resilience when things aren’t going right, together with the courage to tell senior management the truth if delays or overspends are likely. (Taking for granted the fact that a competent PM has enough grasp on the spending and schedule to spot this early on).

Getting extra resources, whether it’s budget, time or people, is where the negotiating skills come in. If the PM has been straightforward with the organisation, reporting regularly, it’s much easier to explain to senior management why extra resources are needed. On IT projects it can be very difficult to assess how much of a system has been built successfully, and management has to trust the PM to tell the truth.

Smart PMs know the value of a project office

A PM who really knows how to run a project realises that their job is to manage, motivate and communicate, not to collect information or process it. That’s the job of the project administrator or PMO. Cost collection and calculation alone can be incredibly time-consuming, particularly where a project is working across multiple currencies, and using accrual accounting, while being billed by contractors and others.

Successful PMs at this level know the value of a PMO, know what they want it to do, and appreciate the business intelligence it provides, because they need that information to run a project that delivers on time and to budget.

http://bit.ly/successful-projectmanager

21/06/2018

What does a culture manager do?

There are some job titles that span an enormous range of responsibilities, and consequently can are advertised at wildly differing salaries. Project manager is one of these - it can mean someone in charge of organising an office move, or someone heading up a billion pound infrastructure project.

Culture manager is a slightly similar title. It’s often bound up with other activities, but sometimes these are quite junior and sometimes they are very senior with a salary to match. So what exactly is a culture manager expected to do?

Cultural change - vagueness may be a bad sign

Very often, the job description is specifically asking the successful candidate to lead the way in transforming the organisational culture. Which begs the obvious question - to what? Clearly, the organisation feels that its culture isn’t where it should be. But the key line of enquiry is, what has brought about that conclusion? And in what way would it like to change it?

A typical job description recently posted said that the culture manager should change the culture, particularly around inclusion and engagement. Right. More of it? Less of it? And where are we starting from? A lot of companies have realised that they fall short in some or all of these areas, but they have no idea as to where they are going with any inclusiveness agenda.

Let’s say you’re city bankers - are you OK with a male employee coming to work in a dress because they’re more comfortable meeting their clients dressed like that? If you’re not, and you just hired someone to make you more inclusive, you need to decide what your expectations are.

The vagueness of some of the cultural aspirations expressed by companies may attract some can-do managers, who feel that they can really make a difference. But equally, it will deter many because they will suspect that they’ll soon become mired in the internal politics of an organisation that doesn’t have a realistic view of itself. So companies need to take a really honest look at where they want to go before they launch off into a cultural change exercise.

This all means that a large part of a culture manager’s job may be to understand where the organisation currently is and to figure out where it's trying to get to. This has to be expressed as a vision for the future, but assessed too in business terms. What might be the benefits to recruitment, workforce skills, productivity, innovation, staff fulfilment and wellbeing? Only then is it possible for the culture manager to produce a roadmap that will move the organisation along the path it has chosen.

The culture manager must then influence the key senior stakeholders to back this vision by providing the resources necessary to achieve it and by allowing the organisational change that will encourage it.

Job ads that are overly prescriptive and imply a regimented and strictly hierarchical culture, may actually be a warning sign. The culture manager needs freedom of movement if they are going to be successful in moving the organisation forward. The most forward-thinking organisations allow their culture managers a great deal of autonomy as to how they achieve their objectives and these organisations are undoubtedly the ones that are most likely to succeed in actually changing their culture.

http://bit.ly/2MJUcYS

20/06/2018

Why traditional performance management has had its day

Eighteen months ago, the global consultancy and management firm, Accenture, decided to do away with performance reviews and traditional performance management. The company has 330,000 employees, so this is not a trivial decision. But it’s a move that many companies and public organisations are considering. Performance management seems to be on the way out. Let’s look at why.

Objectives versus behaviours

The performance regime is based upon setting objectives for the employee to fulfil. There’s generally a monthly or quarterly reporting round and once a year the employee sits down with a line manager and goes through an appraisal, identifying how well they performed against the objectives. This creaky and bureaucratic method is simply not sufficiently agile for today’s world, in which change is constant. It doesn’t allow a company to react quickly enough to a business environment in continual flux.

In addition, objective setting and the use of metrics to measure results isn’t an appropriate way to create the kind of organisation that top business leaders want to see. After all, in the performance management regime, the employee who says they found a different way to do something, or didn’t do it at all because it didn’t add value, will be marked down. Yet these are the very behaviours that most forward-looking organisations want to encourage.

And there’s the difference. The previous view of an organisation was quasi-military, with people forced into rigid roles defined by objectives to be met. The new view is a more diverse and organic model, where culture is an important factor in producing behaviours that drive the success and growth of the organisation. The performance management regime is usually purely a tick box exercise. Not surprisingly, the brightest employees quickly learn how to game the system.

Selecting the right staff, then trusting them

The Accenture CEO has said that leadership is not about evaluation and measurement of employees. It is - and this is crucial - about selecting people with the right qualities and trusting them to get on with it. The annual performance review is replaced with ongoing, informal feedback and encouragement. He also emphasises that younger workers are happy to work hard but they want ownership of their work; an autonomy that allows them to prove themselves. Add to this the demand for a culture that allows them to be themselves at work, and it becomes clear that the performance management regime - which uses up a lot of management time - isn’t fit for purpose any longer.

The abandonment of performance management is also due to changes in the way work is organised. Instead of a hierarchy, where everyone has a strictly structured ranking, much work is now organised on an assignment or project basis. Employees with different skills are brought together in teams to carry out a particular job. Someone may be on several different teams, working on projects based in different parts of the organisation. It doesn’t make sense for a line manager they may have seen only intermittently during the year, to have a make or break appraisal with them once a year.

For senior staff with complex roles, it’s even less appropriate. The organisation’s interaction with its senior managers is also becoming more organic, with coaching and feedback as elements of a more personal and authentic relationship.

More and more companies are breaking away from the tyranny of performance management. This is often as part of a wider transformation of their culture, in order to equip them to face the unprecedented level of change they are encountering. Few people will mourn the passing of the annual appraisal.

http://bit.ly/2yrj58H