2019: The Year in the Kind Office
As temperatures drop lower and lower and days get shorter and shorter, we want to take a look back over the last 12 months, and what we’ve achieved here at Kind Consultancy.
The start of the year saw a major change for the whole Kind Group as we moved into state of the art, newly opened offices in the very heart of Birmingham’s city centre. Bringing Kind Consultancy, Kind Wealth, Kind Commercial and Kind Financial Services together in a high-end office space with excellent meeting facilities has enabled the Group to collaborate and communicate better than ever, keeping the Consultancy team at the forefront of the Financial Services marketplace in a very direct way.
For Kind Consultancy, a big focus across 2019 was on continuing to expand our Interim and Contract work, and a key part of that has been the ongoing development and improvement of our Agile Bench offering. The Agile Bench is a carefully selected bank of top-tier, expert contractors covering a variety of specialist areas within the Governance, Risk and Compliance space. Across the year we’ve added new members to the bench, pre-screening them to ensure that when one of our clients has a time-sensitive, specialist requirement we can have a contractor on-site with them faster than anyone else.
The Kind Agile Solutions Bench is just one part of our Interim and Temporary strategy which has seen us having, in 2019, our biggest ever year for contract placements. We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved here, with hard work from the whole Kind Consultancy team seeing us supply contract resource to a wide variety of clients including installing full project teams for large Banks while continuing to work closely with niche, alternative Financial Services businesses and exciting new FinTech startups.
To keep up with all of those new placements, we added Amy Davies to the Kind Consultancy team this Autumn. A dedicated on-boarding and Screening specialist, Amy has been ensuring all of our contractors are fully compliant with all of our client’s documentation requirements.
A core part of our mission at Kind Consultancy is to go above and beyond what a standard recruitment agency offers candidates, and this winter we’ve been delivering career guidance in our Career Corner programme. Across the past few months, we’ve discussed and explained both the basics – techniques for interview excellence, how to make sure your CV makes it past the first glance – and areas that are much more rarely discussed – how should you handle a counter-offer? How do you know when it’s time to leave a job and if you’ve decided you need to, what’s the best way to resign? We’ve also been sharing these pieces with the International Compliance Association, who’ve shared them with their membership in their dedicated CareerZone.
As well as helping out our candidates and clients, we like to make time to give back to the city and society – this winter we’ve been part of Birmingham City Mission’s ToyLink. We’ve gathered toys, books, games and gifts in the office, donated both by members of the Kind staff and other businesses here in the city, and those have now been distributed to children across Birmingham who would otherwise not have had any presents to open this year.
December isn’t a quiet time for us – as I write this members of the team are hard at work on short-turnaround interim requests and more long-term Retained search projects – so while we may not be “winding down”, we are all looking forward to taking a well-earned break at the end of the month, before we return on January 2nd and begin another exciting year, and I hope all of our clients feel same.
Thank you to everyone who has made this such a successful year for us – the Kind Consultancy staff, our colleagues across the Kind Group, and all of our clients and candidates.
