Our Story | Recrion

Introducing Recrion's Founder, Katherine Wiid

Katherine provides people managers with skills, self-awareness and a sounding board to become confident recruiters and motivators of teams. Katherine’s extensive recruitment and behavioural experience ensures that her clients are in sync with how people’s minds work. She describes herself as a catalyst to support both candidates and companies to find the best in each other so that both parties excel.

One of her earliest clients was a start-up called Nildram, a small ISP provider with big ambitions! Working with each line manager 1-2-1 to understand what a ‘Nildram’ person looked like enabled them to grow rapidly, attract technical candidates from much larger competitors like Freeserve, and sell to PIPEX Communications (now TalkTalk).

Early Career

Following her degree in Humanities at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, Katherine embarked on a career involving people. By the time she started her first recruitment business aged 27, she had gained a broad skillset working as a Recruitment Consultant, Marketing Executive in a legal firm and Public Relations Officer for local government. Katherine and her husband moved to the UK in 1995 where she returned to recruitment in an Executive Search role.

As a headhunter, she was intrigued by candidates who were not actively job searching and then went on to make a career move once she approached them. Her fascination with the psychology behind our work-based decision making and behaviours led to her studying with world-renowned Behavioural expert, Shelle Rose Charvet to become one of just 550 practitioners in the world to master a psycho-linguistic tool, the Language and Behavioural (LAB) Profile.

Real Life Experiences - as a coach and mentor

Katherine experienced (as a Founder) the incredible all-consuming growth of Recrion since its inception in 2001, followed by near bust in the recession of 2008. She has re-invented herself time and time again by adopting the strategies she recommends to others. Her key to success? Being curious, open to new ideas, constantly learning, collaborating and sharing her knowledge to help others.

After more than 20 years in business, her career continues to grow and surprise even her! The lessons of putting all her eggs in one basket before the 2008 economic crash has led to an intentionally distributed approach to her work. Now, Katherine wears a few business hats…

Founder & Director of Recrion, providing recruitment and retention coaching and mentoring

Director of Career Ambitions, offering career management coaching to employees and career professionals

Independent Lay Member on selection panels for the Judicial Appointments Commission

International speaker on career management, recruiting and retention

What underpins all these roles? Transferable skills, listening, asking the right questions, being non-judgemental and genuinely committed to empowering others. Katherine encourages her clients to acknowledge individuality and the richness that a diverse can team to bring an organisation – it is this respect that is integral to all aspects of her coaching and mentoring.

I approached Katherine after I heard her speaking at an event. She helped me craft a job description by asking insightful questions that helped me think clearly about what skills and motivations we needed and who would fit in, giving me confidence that our recruitment message was correctly targeted. I cannot recommend her work highly enough.

Katherine is a pleasure to work with. Without using words, Katherine’s approach disrupts a train of thought and makes you very aware of your unconscious assumptions. This causes you to validate or ignore them, which is extremely useful when making an important hiring decision. Her knowledge and experience of the full recruitment process and people’s motivations make her input extremely valuable when embarking on a recruitment process.

Katherine was our guest speaker at the book launch for Build Your Dream Team and delivered a relevant, professionally delivered talk on just how powerful words are in recruitment adverts and job descriptions. She encouraged the audience to question their assumptions about what motivates candidates and showed them how to adapt the words they use to attract and retain employees. They really enjoyed it and the feedback was excellent. I would recommend Katherine as a speaker and expert on unconscious motivational patterns at work.

Get in touch!

If you want to build confidence in your ability to recruit and retain successfully, let’s have a conversation and explore how we can help you get there. Just email below or call us on +44 (0)1223 659988.