Hayward Hawk turns 5 today!
We have come a long way from this day in 2016 when our euphoric ‘high-fiving’ over LinkedIn job title changes took precedence to any actual Recruitment. We had set out to create a fresh, modern face in the local Recruitment scene and 5 years on we hope we’ve done that, albeit with a fair bit of work to do! Our first day was drawing to a close when a legal letter was hand delivered to us at 4.50pm demanding a response by the end of the day…
What not a lot of people know is we worked late into the night that first day. We gathered ourselves and had a meeting, as we waited for our legal counsel to call us back. We had our first beers as Hayward Hawk, and we started to talk about what lay ahead and what we would like to achieve in our first 5 years. We digressed from Business predictions after our first beer and the discussion went something like this:-
- As good as their beer is, there is something funny about that Brewdog lot, bet they are nasty to work for.
- With the talent that England have coming through, they should win a major trophy within the next 4 (or 5) years. Maybe football is coming home?
- This whole Brexit idea will be interesting when it comes around, wonder how they will work out the borders and customs issues. We figured out those clever people in politics will have a watertight plan for that!
- Who will take over in the White House after Obama? It must be Hillary’s time now?
- Will we live through a major pandemic in our lifetimes? Surely not one that would lock us in our houses for a year+, heaven forbid one that would close our pubs…
Eventually we remembered we were waiting on a call back from the legal team. When they called and said do not worry about the letter, in 5 years time you’ll not even remember about this, we packed up our stuff and went home. They were right, we only remembered that fun day as we got together to write this and it certainly seems like we had a pretty good grasp on what would happen in the future.
Of course, we didn’t know everything (In fact some people might claim we don’t know much). We didn’t realise how incredible a team we would have 5 years on and how they fuel our journey in directions we didn’t expect….but love! We didn’t know that in 5 years NI would still be a huge focus for us but 40% of our business would be coming from the UK and even the US. We didn’t know that we’d lose people when we did, or how we did (A famous quote from one of our employee’s Xmas dinner speech is “We’ve made some friends along the way, and we’ve lost some too”). We DID realise how helpful James Caan and the team at Recruitment Entrepreneur would be, just not quite how much! Also, Football hasn’t come home just yet, but we think it might.
As we write this blog, we have just finished a webinar driven by the Hawks talking about diversity and inclusion. We were taken aback by the effort put in by everyone to create such a great event and help educate others in our community about the issues that are out there. We didn’t predict we’d run a pride event in our first meeting, but I think we will be involved in a lot more!
We hope everyone who has been a part of the last 5 years can raise a toast to Hayward Hawk. We can’t wait for the next 25 years, but we’ll focus on the next 5 first.
Stephen & Richard
