From joining Recruit UK as a trainee eight years ago to managing regions, overseeing operations and now working closely with clients across the UK, Angharad has built up an incredible understanding of both the Financial Planning market and the people within it. In this edition of Getting to Know the Team, we talk about the career that wasn’t supposed to last, why she ultimately chose to return to the recruitment desk, and how years of experience have shaped the advice she gives candidates and clients today.
When Angharad joined Recruit UK eight years ago, a long-term career in recruitment wasn’t exactly the plan.
Born and raised in Cardiff, she moved to Bristol for university before heading off travelling. When she eventually returned, she had one fairly immediate priority: she owed her partner some money and needed to start earning again!
Fortunately, she already knew someone at Recruit UK. Our Director, Tom, helped her secure an interview and, between you, me and the wall, Angharad saw it as a short-term solution while she got her finances back in order.
What she hadn’t anticipated was how well recruitment would suit her. Having previously worked in events, Angharad had always enjoyed working with people, and once she realised recruitment could offer a genuine
career with plenty of different directions to
take, the temporary job became something
much more permanent.
Angharad joined as a Trainee Consultant before
quickly progressing to Regional Consultant
and then Regional Manager for the South West. From there, her remit expanded to cover the whole of the South before she eventually became Operations Manager for Recruit UK, giving her oversight across the entire business.
It’s quite a journey from someone who only intended to stick around for a little while.
Years of knowing the market
That progression has given Angharad an unusually broad view of the Financial Planning recruitment market. She knows the South West particularly well, having spent years building relationships with firms and professionals across the region, but her later roles expanded that knowledge nationally.
Today, as a Principal Consultant and Account Manager, she’s working with businesses across the UK, often at a much more senior level than she was when she first started.
Having spent time in both recruitment and operations has also given her a good understanding of what is happening on both sides of the table. She knows what candidates are looking for, but she’s equally comfortable sitting down with senior decision-makers and talking honestly about what they may need to change to attract them.
Whether that’s salary, benefits, progression structures or simply how an opportunity is being positioned, Angharad isn’t afraid to give her opinion.
For Angharad, that’s a big part of what being an experienced recruitment consultant should look like. Finding someone for a vacancy is one thing, but understanding the market well enough to advise a business on how they’re going to find that person is where she feels she can really add value.
“I want clients to feel like they can ask my advice, not just ask me for a CV.”
Getting back to what she loves
After having her little boy, Angharad took some time to reassess what she wanted from her career and realised that, despite progressing into senior management and operations, what she really missed was recruitment itself.
She still has a close relationship with the wider business and is regularly pulled into conversations with the Directors, but moving back into a hands-on Principal Consultant and Account Manager role has allowed her to spend more time doing the part of the job she enjoys most: working directly with her clients and candidates.
It also gives her the flexibility she values as a mum, something she says Recruit UK has always been willing to work with her on.
“The business has always worked with me rather than against me. Particularly since becoming a mum, that flexibility has been really important.”
Her years in Financial Planning recruitment have also given her perspective. She’s seen the market change, watched businesses grow and followed candidates through several stages of their careers.
Some of the people Angharad originally placed into trainee positions are now working at senior level, and being able to look back at where those careers started still gives her the same buzz it did years ago.
“No two days are the same. Sometimes you can work on a role for ages, but when you finally find the right person and get that offer accepted, that feeling is still there. I love being the person who finds them.”
When you really get to know a client
One of the relationships Angharad is particularly proud of actually started through LinkedIn.
She’d invested a lot of time into building her network and sharing her knowledge of the market when a company approached her directly. They liked what she was doing, asked her to sign terms with them and trusted her to start helping build their team. That was three years ago!
Since then, the relationship has grown to the point where Recruit UK has been responsible for around 90% of the people who have joined that particular team, with the remaining hires coming through direct applications.
For Angharad, there’s something incredibly satisfying about that. It isn’t the result of filling one vacancy successfully; it’s what happens when you spend years getting to know a business properly.
She understands the personalities already within the team, the culture the company is trying to protect and the characteristics that tend to make someone successful there. It means that when they need to recruit, she’s not starting again from a job description and trying to work out what they mean by “the right fit”. She already knows.
“It’s great when you get to that point with a client because you know exactly what they’re looking for. You understand the team, you understand the business and they trust you to find the right person.”
That depth of understanding is something Angharad has built throughout her career, and it’s a big part of what makes working with her feel reassuring. With years spent recruiting exclusively within Financial Planning, alongside experience managing the South West, the wider South and eventually operations across Recruit UK, there isn’t much of the market she hasn’t encountered.
She knows when to challenge a brief, when to offer a different perspective and when a candidate who might not look obvious on paper is worth having a conversation with.
Most importantly, she genuinely cares about getting it right.
As Angharad puts it, Recruit UK would always rather see the right candidate end up with the right business than keep hold of someone simply because there isn’t an immediate commercial benefit in introducing them elsewhere.
That probably tells you quite a lot about how she approaches recruitment herself.
Eight years after walking through the door for what was supposed to be a short-term job, Angharad has become one of the most experienced members of the Recruit UK team. She’s built teams, managed regions, helped run operations and developed relationships with Financial Planning businesses across the country, before ultimately choosing to come back to the part of the job she enjoys most.
So, whether you’re a Financial Planning professional wondering what your next move could look like, or a business trying to work out how to attract the right people, you’re in very experienced hands.
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