Hi everyone!
My name is Zoe and I am one of Personio’s new community champions, which means I am hoping to post regular articles around my experiences within the Personio platform and HR in general. Before I start doing that, I thought it would be best to give the community a background on myself, my route into HR and my experience.
Whilst it may seem a bit far back to go, I’ll start with a 10-year-old Zoe who told her entire family she was going to be a lawyer when she grew up, and whilst most of them laughed, the dream stuck. Fast forward 8 years to 2018 and I am in my first year of university studying law and loving it. As we all know, things change and for me they did.
Life Takes a Turn
In February 2019, I got back to my accommodation following a lecture and had a nap (like most university students do), however when I woke up, I had awful chest pains.
After about an hour, I called 111, and not long after I was sat in my local A&E being triaged by a nurse. After taking my pulse, she seemed concerned and left the room.
The next thing I know I am in a hospital bed having lots of blood drawn and an ECG. All signs were pointing to a heart attack, whilst my bloods ultimately showed this wasn’t the case, something was wrong with my heart, so I was discharged with an urgent cardiac referral. In the 2 weeks between my cardiology appointment and the event I felt awful, having no energy, feeling dizzy and generally unwell.
Once I had seen the cardiologist, that was all quickly explained. The mystery cardiac event had triggered a life-changing condition called PoTS and whilst I won’t go too into detail, PoTS effects every automatic function in the body but mainly your heart rate and blood pressure, so any time I am not lying flat, my heart rate is through the roof (130+ bpm), this comes with a whole bunch of unpleasant symptoms.
Finding my way
Not knowing what to do or how badly the condition would affect me, I continued my Law degree. When I finished my studies in 2021, it was clear that due to my condition, becoming a lawyer was off the table for me. This was for a number of reasons, but they all come back to my PoTs having such a big impact on my life.
I was lost and unsure where to go but knew I needed to adapt and find a path that I was still passionate about but also worked for me and my health. Luckily, the McDonald’s I had been working at during university offered me an Admin and Recruitment role which was essentially doing most of the HR related jobs for the restaurant.
After 18 months of learning everything I could and enjoying the dynamic role I had, I decided I wanted to have a career in HR and started applying for roles, which led to me landing my current role of People Coordinator at Node4. Node4 already had Personio. However, they had acquired 3 other entities over the last 2 years and they were now ready to merge those entities, which would require 1 single HR system that suited all of them.
Recognition and Growth
Having only been with the company around 2 months when the project to create a Group Personio was started, I was very lucky that our HR business partner on the project recognized a talent in systems that I had and asked to have me on the implementation team. The team of 3 of us then set out to implement a Personio system which could accommodate the needs and processes of 4 entities, over 1000 employees, with complete and accurate data and a Go-Live date less than 4 months away.
This was a challenge which really helped me develop and establish myself within my new team. Through the implementation, I was able to learn the minute details of the processes for each of the entities, which helped my day-to-day responsibilities.
Now, I am considered the expert within the company and have been nicknamed by my colleagues as ‘Personio Genius’.
My favorite part of the system is the automations, so you’ll find me talking a lot about those. I love a workflow and have built the onboarding, offboarding and absence workflows for our system. I also had one of my workflows featured in a Personio workshop on automations shortly after they launched the feature. I’m also looking forward to sharing my thoughts on other areas such as how I manage my workload, accessing the HR career path and all things Personio.