Simon Halkyard

Responsible for managing the Head Office Talent Acquisition team and effective delivery of head office recruitment across Asda Home Office (Leeds), George Home Office (Lutterworth) and Britannia House (Morley). I lead the recruitment strategy and tactical recruitment across all home office functions. This includes specific focus on technology, data, finance, commercial and customer functions. I also lead the development and implementation of Asda’s talent brand, recruitment D&I and managing several key 3rd party relationships. My key focus is on supporting the modernisation of the TA function both in terms of the utilisation of new tools, tech and brand work, but also becoming a partnering first function. A function that fully partners stakeholders developing their capacity to support their recruitment / attraction / assessment and onboarding.

In my spare time outside of my day job, I am supporting businesses design recruitment tech that will benefit the resourcing industry

Senior Talent Acquisition Partner for Shop Direct, home of Very.co.uk, Littlewoods and Very Exclusive. I'm responsible managing a team of Talent Search Advisors who are focussed on creating a culture of hiring throughout Shop Direct. We are a progressive Talent team who possess a genuine passion and appetite to transform how we attract, engage and retain talent. My main focus is creating the strategy to make this happen and ensure it is implemented through effective business partnering. I have a firm belief that everyone within our business should be a recruiter, ambassador, people who can amplify and translate the messaging of who we are, what we do, why we do it and why it’s beneficial to have a career at Shop Direct. Throughout my time here I have been imbedded in a range of initiatives and strategies aimed at elevating us to becoming a world class organisation. Including: Employer Brand and EVP strategy CRM implementation Forecasting Talent pipelines strategy Video & mobile content initiatives Agile working methodologies Interview training Team personnel training and development Recruitment training for stakeholders and managers Assessing recruitment tech and making recommendations to the business Creating a culture of hiring across the business (everyone is a recruiter) Shop Direct has a very clear vision - to make good things easily accessible to more people. With £1.9bn in annual sales, 4000 employees we're proud to be the UK and Irelands leading multi-brand digital retailer, delivering 46 million products every year to 5 million active customers. More than 80% of our sales are online and our websites receive a whopping 800,000 visits every day.

Digital Recruitment company based in London and Leeds, Specialising in all things digital recruitment. Digital Minds is genuinely focussed on providing long term first class service levels to both digital candidates and our digital clients. We have established an excellent reputation throughout the digital industry, successfully recruiting and providing long term talent acquisition strategy for clients, both client side and agency side. We also support clients with, salary benchmarking, talent mapping and supporting talent retention initiatives.

Rilwood Associates is the largest single site northern based recruitment company in the UK, with over 100 consultants. I was brought on board to launch and develop a Marketing & Digital Division, recruiting and managing a team which at the time I moved on was up to 6 consultants all recruiting within the Digital industry. We developed excellent relationships with a number of well known brands including SKY, PUMA, MEDIACOM, MINDSHARE & PHILIPS. We generated in excess of £1,000,000 in turnover from a standing start with no clients and zero brand recognition. We successfully recruited across all areas of Digital but excelled at Paid Search, PPC, SEO, SEM, Display, Digital Planning & Buying, Social, Mobile, BD & Affiliate roles. I was also responsible for launching Rilwood in London.

Michael Page is a global recruitment company operating across numerous sectors, I was recruited into the Marketing Division of Michael Page operating out of their Leeds office. I joined the business when it was going through a transitional period and was struggling to maintain its market share. Alongside a new Director and other strong recruiters I was a key member of a team that quickly increased revenue and more importantly helped develop a reputation for delivering strong client and candidate customer service levels. Before leaving Michael Page I was promoted to a Team Leader position and was fully responsible for Financial Services Marketing, retail and digital roles throughout the Yorkshire region. Clients included. Nestle, Norwich Union, HSBC & HBOS.