2024 Year in Review with Mathew Kind
The nights are long and cold, the decorations are up, carols are in the air – yes, it’s once again the time of year when we like to step back and take a look at what Kind Consultancy have achieved over the last 12 months. It’s been a real whirlwind year for us and it feels like Christmas has come around even faster than usual.
Team Update
2024 has been a big year in terms of team growth. In spring, James Hardy joined us after a decade of working within Financial Services, and he’s now harnessing that knowledge as he focusses on front end sales and operations roles within Banking. This winter, Francesca Hopkins and Kiran Keshwala entered the Kind office on the Governance, Risk and Compliance side. All three have had really strong starts and it feels like they’ve quickly become integral members of the team.
We have also had two promotions – Shai Cassidy has become a Managing Consultant and is currently leading her first team where she’s doing fantastic work with high volume projects with complex requirements for major clients. Catherine Tieley is in the final stages of completing her own management training and we’re excited to see the next chapter in her career unfold.
Learning & Development
It was a big year for partnerships with Kind, with a focus on learning and development. We’re now partnered with the Great Chatwell Academy of Learning to provide Financial Crime training to our candidates. GCAL are well established in the GRC education space and their certifications are awarded in association with the University of Gloucester. It’s really good to find new ways to deliver on our mission of enhancing the careers of Financial Services professionals in ways that are not possible through traditional recruitment firms, and helping specialists to sharpen their skills and grow their knowledge feels like a really important new part of that.
Internally, we’ve been working with Stew Wilson and Retain Train Recruit on building our team’s core recruitment skills. His coaching is already showing great results, and unlocking potential within our already excellent consultants as they continue to tackle bigger and more ambitious projects than ever before, we are looking forward to continuing this partnership into 2025.
Kind Agile Solutions
All of that of course is only possible when we are delivering on our mission of providing exceptional talent to the Banking and Financial Services world, and this has been a very successful year for Kind Consultancy. We’ve made 135 placements so far this Financial year, and signed 30 brand new clients. It’s been an especially busy year for Kind Agile Solutions, our interim service working exclusively with a pre-screened set of contractors we believe to be the very best in their respective specialist Financial Services niches. As well as supplying some of the biggest names in the sector with specialised contract talent, we’ve also worked on some of our biggest ever volume projects, and we take equal pride in making sure the people we’re connecting to new opportunities at all levels are going to be gamechangers for their new employers.
Corporate Responsibility
Through our ongoing work with the Future Forest Commission, those 135 placements have allowed us to plant 135 trees, helping to restore and improve the environment here in the UK, ensuring a sustainable future. Giving back is important to us here at Kind and that’s why we’ve also recently had our second annual drive for both food and toy donations through the Lichfield Food Bank and other local Staffordshire charities and we definitely plan to continue our charitable efforts next year.
Looking Ahead and Wrapping Up
2025 is shaping up to be unique for us in many ways. For the first time in the history of the business we’re moving to a new Customer Relationship Management platform to accommodate for our ongoing expansion – don’t worry, there will be no impact on our customers, with a smooth transition to the new system enabling us to work more efficiently and effectively while continuing to deliver the personal customer service we pride ourselves on.
We’ve also got a major announcement about a new Kind Consultancy offering which we’re not quite ready to unveil, but which we think will mark a major new chapter in our history. Keep following Kind Consultancy on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram to get all of our news as soon as it happens – as well as subscribing to the LinkedIn Newsletter for our team’s industry analysis, plus hints and tips for both candidates and hiring managers. We moved to releasing our best, most in-depth articles through the Newsletter this year and we hope you’re all finding those valuable and thought-provoking.
The next one of those newsletters will be with you sometime in January 2025. The team at Kind Consultancy will be working through to the afternoon of December 23rd, and then we’re out of office until January 2nd. We’re looking forward to picking up with you all then.
In the mean time – Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all reading this. Thank you to our clients and candidates for an enormously successful 2024, we really could not have done it without you, and a personal thank you from me to the whole Kind Consultancy team.
Have a great break, and see you in the new year as we keep moving forward and going beyond. After all these years, it really does feel like we’re just getting started.
Mathew Kind
