Where Are They Now? Graduate Stories - Perle Esmail

I came here as an international student, after a recommendation from my brother who also studied at Salford. He studied business management and was impressed by the course so told me to have a look at the business courses Salford offer. He told me that it was a great university and that I should research the courses.

I had an interest in psychology but also looking into psychology in the workplace. I basically knew that I wanted to do something related to people and helping people at work, my brother said that maybe I should start with a general course and that Human Resource Management might be of interest to me, so that's what I did. Once I started the course I realised that yeah, this is definitely something I want to do. Dealing with people in the workplace and supporting them turned into a passion of mine.

Salford is a lovely university for international students. I had to do an international foundation year which made me feel more at home, I didn't feel lost whatsoever because I had the relevant support. I think from an international student perspective, it's one of the best universities. You don't really feel alone or feel that cultural shock because you’re surrounded by people from different backgrounds and you've got the relevant support. Whenever you feel like you don't understand anything, there's always someone there to help you. There’s also a big emphasis on career services at Salford. I attended workshops to help me with CV writing and employability skills, so that helped me a lot.

Whilst at university I joined the Enactus Society which works towards creating and maintaining social enterprise projects, utilising business principles and various forms of funding. This helped me to meet different people and work on many projects as well as expand my knowledge and progress my communication skills. It also helped me open myself up and it’s great for your CV.

Working in Recruitment

I’m a talent sourcer at TalkTalk, which is basically a fancy name for recruitment. I work as part of the talent acquisition team started in November 2021, So far, it's been great.

It's been quite easy to fit in because it’s a small team. Everyone in the talent acquisition team is very cool. There's eight of us now and they're all lovely. I love the culture and the people. The workload sometimes gets a lot but we're getting there and I think the workload is one of the things that's sort of helping me to grow and learn in a practical manner. It's been great.

The job is searching for and recruiting internal and external candidates. So, it's all about searching through different job sites such as Indeed and LinkedIn as well as our internal recruitment site. Different hiring managers will come to us, tell us what they’re looking for and we match them to candidates we have in our database. it's really about communicating with different stakeholders, I would say because you've got the applicants on one side and you've got different hiring managers on the other. I'm part of the direct consumer and business to business unit, which is one of the biggest business units. It's always busy and we always have new roles to work on.

The company uses a hybrid approach to work. We go to the office maximum twice a week, I really, really enjoy this because my previous job was remote so I didn't meet my colleagues. This role is good because you can engage with different people.

Now What?

I love being part of a company that allows me to develop and grow into new roles, rather than just moving from one company to another. I have an interest in going into different areas of HR. At the moment, I can see myself doing talent acquisition for the next couple of years or so, but then I would like to move into another area. I was very interested in employee wellbeing first. So that might be something I would consider in the future and my degree would allow me to do.