Meet Rachael Fennessey, Chief People Officer at Melo and recruitment and hiring star

Recruiting the right team and unlocking their potential is a key step to success in any financial planning business. That’s why Melo makes it a core part of the way we help firms to thrive.

Rachael Fennessey is Chief People Officer and Managing Director of Recruitment at Melo. With 23 years of experience, Rachael has collaborated with hundreds of business owners and leaders on recruitment strategies and project management.

So, this month, Victoria Hicks sat down with Rachael to find out more about her story, and how recruitment can be the key to a company’s success.

Can you tell the readers a bit about your career history and your role at Melo?

My career has been a beautiful journey. I started by recruiting trainee financial advisers for the bancassurance industry, before successfully running the national recruitment for all advisers for two of the big four banks. I also built a financial services recruitment firm to deliver on these projects.

From this success, I saw the opportunity that I could create and decided to go it alone. Initially, this was as a sole trader, earning a great income and supporting a great lifestyle while my children were little. I then took on another national corporate account to enable the next phase of my business growth journey as we worked to be their main supplier of all of their financial advisers.

I grew the Aspire brand and created a business that did well and had a strong brand and fab team doing good things in the profession. I wanted to offer more and embarked on a journey to get my coaching qualifications. This was so that I could help business leaders on their journey on a much deeper level than supporting their recruitment needs.

Through work I have done with key people I ignited a real thirst for making a positive impact at both micro and macro levels, and I knew there was way more I could achieve.

Then, in stepped Vicki at Melo with a loose vision of what could be offered to improve the profession and what she wanted to create. So, over the following months, we came together as a team of business owners, carved out all the amazing stuff we were going to create between us, and Melo was born!

My role at Melo is currently Managing Director of Recruitment and Chief People Officer. I can be found:

• Helping business owners and leaders understand their hiring strategy
• Working with the recruitment team to go to market to find the top talent
• Working with C Suite and senior leaders on their careers
• Supporting businesses on finding the top C suite talent
• Running leadership coaching sessions and workshops
• Working on our people proposition both internally and to extend out to the external marketplace.

Essentially, you’ll find me working on anything that involves people. Engaging hearts and minds and making things more beautiful for business owners will always light me up.

What inspired your passion for developing talent and your commitment to creating a better environment through your role as Chief People Officer?

I have noticed over the years I seem to understand and feel things about people before they understand them themselves. My emotional acumen and empathy have been a massive part of the results that I have continually achieved in business.

My difference has always been because I have understood people. I understand that everyone has their own model of the world, their own filtering systems, and their own perspectives. Working with business leaders on how to speak to and treat people in the right way to get the right outcome has always been a natural skill of mine.

This naturally feeds exceptional results on recruitment and retention because it is working at a much deeper level than assessing just high-level skills and expertise.

Throughout my own life, I have developed a passion for personal development and that, in turn, has led me to be passionate about helping others realise their true potential.

This filters across businesses as, once you have activated the leadership team to their true potential, they can take that into their business. Impacting the top level creates a ripple effect that has a far wider reach and it’s when lasting change happens.

I am here on this planet to create change, inspire action, and ignite the energy and visions in people that help them transform themselves and their businesses. Through what we are doing at Melo I have an amazing opportunity to positively affect financial planning businesses on many, many levels. This will leave a wonderful legacy of positive change and that is super inspiring.

Can you share a pivotal moment in your career where you realised the impact an effective people-first culture can have on an organisation?

I was hired by the managing director of a start-up company to create, grow and establish a financial services recruitment division.

That MD did a brilliant job of hiring a sterling group of would-be leaders and an exceptional admin lady who grew into being the operations director. He spotted great talent, provided us with the dream of an amazing opportunity, and kept us engaged throughout.

In doing so, that leadership team all built successful divisions around him. We were paid well, we were given lots of fab training, we felt looked after, and we felt we were growing. As a result, working 80-hour weeks was never an issue!

I saw first-hand how the right people treated in the right way will give their all to you and your business. I was that person, and it was a brilliant lesson early in my career in effective leadership that focuses on people.

How do you approach the challenge of aligning a company’s business goals with a mission to foster a positive and inclusive workplace culture?

The goals must be in place to ensure that a business knows where it is going. The mission is the “How to get there?” and “How are we doing it?”.

The values that support that mission are fundamental to ensuring that everyone is engaged in that journey and knows where they are going and how to show up.

The inclusive part is key to keeping people on the journey, respecting how people have different needs, and ensuring your business can allow for that so that you never miss out on key talent.

The creation of an inclusive workplace culture is fundamental to the successful growth of your business. Attracting people from a wide range of demographics and backgrounds can ensure you are constantly in a progress state.

What is the most difficult decision you’ve had to make in pursuit of creating a better workplace?

This has to be in deciding to get rid of high performers to protect the culture and ethos of the business. It is such a hard decision to make, especially for a small business, but essential for a business to do.

How does prioritising employee wellbeing and development contribute to a company’s success and to making a positive impact on the profession?

When you prioritise employee wellbeing and development you safeguard against losing people you have invested time, money and energy into.

When you achieve exceptional employee welfare you increase productivity, reduce sickness, reduce staff turnover and increase service levels. A happy side-effect is that you create a great place to work where people genuinely love coming to work. Humans are naturally reciprocal. You look after your employees and they will naturally want to look after your business.

Why would anyone look outside if they felt looked after, that their needs were being met, and that they were growing and evolving? It is the same as any relationship. Tick those boxes and everyone is happy investing time and energy into the ongoing success of that relationship.

How do you work with growing businesses to help them recruit train and retain an effective leadership team?

We start by running our impactful “leadership team workshops” and looking at the existing leadership team to ensure that they are working effectively together. We then take these insights to roll out into their business.

We look at what gaps they need to fill in their hiring strategies and how they effectively communicate both internally and externally to ensure they achieve their business objectives.

By supporting the leadership team to understand one another on a deeper level and how to communicate with one another, we help them create much more impact in all that they do, their projects, their objectives, and their day-to-day running of the business.

Our core value is collaboration is key in all of our recruitment partnerships where we are advising, guiding and supporting a business along their journey.

We work with our clients to ensure that they make the right hires in the right roles so that people are not walking away 18 months into their roles. We encourage openness in the hiring process so that all parties understand exactly what is expected and there are no nasty surprises.

Looking ahead, how do you envision the role of Chief People Officer evolving, especially in the context of creating more equitable and socially responsible organisations?

The launch of Melo Foundation in collaboration with the Biodiversity project is a massive part of this journey. It will help us to make a huge positive effect on the environment and we will be supporting our clients to do the same.

In our ongoing work with businesses, we will be building on how we can support the firms we work with to create their own inclusive workplaces. This can ensure that they are maximising the talent and potential that is coming to the workforce, in particular from Gen Z but also across the workplace throughout the generations.

I will be working with specialists in the Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Belonging space to ensure we can roll out best practices across all of the firms we work with. As a profession, we are way behind where we need to be, and this provides a huge opportunity for Melo to make enormous change.

The stats show diverse and inclusive teams make a significant impact on profitability. We’re striving to help firms build more balanced leadership teams running more balanced businesses with more balanced employees able to truly serve the real world in which we live.