PARTNER TESTIMONIALS

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About Akhila's Experience!

Hello all, 

I’m Akhila – an HR and Marketing Executive at Pearl Lemon Group. Here I’m writing about my experience at Pearl Lemon Group, all the way from…

The Beginning 

I completed my final year bachelor’s examinations in Bachelors of Business Administration back in May 2020 before the pandemic. At the time, I had a plan to pursue a masters abroad, but the pandemic didn’t allow me to go ahead! 

So, around mid-August, I started looking for a job/placement to get experience. But this pandemic made many professionals jobless and to get a work for a job seeker was extremely hard.

Then it was the last week of August; the days when India’s coronavirus (COVID-19) active cases hit 2,338,035! The cured/discharged numbers were at 57,542 and deaths in India hit a spike as the cases rose. 

It was also the time of the Ganesh Chaturti festival. Historically, the festival has been celebrated since the time of King Shivaji. It was during India’s freedom struggle that Lokmanya Tilak changed Ganesh Chaturthi from a private celebration to a grand public festival. People from all castes of the society can come together, pray and be united.

To get back to my point – I’m a person who is very interested in meeting new people all around, and my friend, who was my classmate in my Bachelor’s, had already started working with Pearl Lemon Group a few months previously. They suggested that I apply for the Pearl Lemon Group work placement programme.

To be honest, that was the first time I heard about Pearl Lemon Group. I looked at the testimonials of previous team members – it was very Impressive! The Pearl Lemon Group work placement program seemed different from other companies.  

There was the opportunity to work with different people across the globe which made me very enthusiastic and excited to work with a diverse team. I had a strong belief that Pearl Lemon Group would give me an awesome experience with around-the-clock support. 😀

The First Week

On August 28th, 2020, I started my 7-day trial at Pearl Lemon Group. In my first week, Tenny – the Head of Research – assigned me my tasks. Firstly, I got Introduced to Deepak – Pearl Lemon’s Founder and Federica – the HR Success Manager who interviewed me for the role. 

They were very friendly and empathetic. I was pretty excited about the tasks, and I started learning new things during my first week. Let me share with you a few of them.

The first one was extracting leads from Clutch and the ratings and reviews of leading business being posted there. It was an interesting task, and I got a chance to explore many different companies and their services. 

One of my other tasks was to become aware of Google SEO and I got to know that similar algorithms work even for Youtube. So, I started learning several YouTube SEO basics.

These factors included grammar tricks in writing titles, the importance of hashtags, and using different keyword tools from Tubics tutorials. At the end of the first week, I had my first meeting with the Pearl Lemon Group team. It lasted for 1hour!

I was a bit nervous at the beginning but the atmosphere in the meeting made me flexible and collaborative.  

First, there were icebreakers, followed by a week’s summarisation. The team all seemed very collaborative and productive.

 

First Month

Nowadays, my day starts with tea and…probably ends with a cup of tea. 😆

Placed next to me are my laptop and daily tasks which I start to organise. The whole experience has made me feel more professional, and I love it! Early on, I was added to the official internal Pearl Lemon Group Team. I started communicating with everyone and was set up with a work email and my caricature – one of my best pictures with a classy look! 

I got to learn two new tools in my first week to keep track of my work. One of them was Trello. With this tool, I could write down my list of tasks and organise them according to my flexibility. 

The other was Clockify. This helped me to track my worked hours and the amount of time I spend on a particular task. Basically, I was ready to hit the ground running with the role I had applied for. 

The marketing and HR role also suited me since they were my majors. Still, I had only had a few partnership experiences before this one.

As I am very interested in HR, I got an opportunity to work on a few HR tasks that also increased my productivity and energy at the same time! The new things I learned in these weeks included posting job ads on job sites. 

Hand-in-hand with this, I was working on other tasks like directory listings. This was where I identified new websites that were yet to be registered by Pearl lemon Group, and went on ‘product hunts’ (where all the SaaS/New software gets listed) for alternatives. 

I was even getting familiar with Omnireach, which is a lead generation tool. It is a tool that can be used to message thousands of prospects to book sales calls with them. (I was even extracting leads for Omnireach this week.

I’d say that I learned a lot in my initial days at Pearl Lemon Group, including methods of working that I hadn’t even learned in all the time before graduating!

Second Month

From there, the days just flew by. Now it’s been two months since I joined Pearl Lemon Group. I have started my second month by recording a testimonial of my experience at Pearl Lemon Group since I joined. 

At this time, I am much more involved in the Human Resources side of the company which is very enjoyable. As such, I have also started my HR training which includes recruitment, managing the applicants on trial, sharing and distributing the tasks, etc. 

It took 20 days for me to complete the training! I believe anything you learn from scratch will give you a better idea of it and a clear understanding. Alongside this, I have also worked on YouTube SEO  for the Deepak Shukla Channel. It’s great – every video I watch before optimising gives me even more energy and motivation. 

Check them out yourself! I’m sure you’ll like them. Here’s the link to the Deepak Shukla channel. On there, I’ve been optimising at least five videos per day, and I’ve also learned directory listing for all the Pearl Lemon Group websites which was a pretty new task for me. 

Especially when considering I had the aim of getting at least five links per day (which is very hard)! 😅

Just a few more of the HR tasks that I’ve worked on are: 

  • Checking emails and applications daily 2 – 3x
  • Using Mailshake to send emails to applicants  
  • End-to-end hiring process
  • Posting job advertisements 
  • Sharing necessary training materials to the team
  • Sharing and distributing tasks to the team
  • Doing performance review calls
  • One-to-one questions to team members when necessary to know their workload, interests etc.

 

Third Month 

And then there were the days of  US presidential elections 2020. I am very interested in US politics and was curious to know who would move into the Whitehouse for the next four years. 

I was anticipating Joe Biden of the Democratic party (and Ex-Vice President of the USA) would reach the Whitehouse, and my prediction was true! Haha. He won with 290 electoral votes, and it was shaping up to be a historic win for the Democrats. 

Whilst all this was going on, I was involved in hiring, interviewing, and looking to fill vacant positions in our team. Most of this month was spent in my cousin’s home to celebrate Diwali (the festival of lights) with lots of lights (and love).

At the same time, I learned how to transcribe the videos and provided transcriptions of our PlantSumo podcast videos with guests from different vegan backgrounds. It was very interesting listening to the interviews with different people from all around the world. 

I even had the idea of converting to veganism…but I quickly dropped that! Apart from HR, I have performed daily process tasks which took a bit of time for me to learn and get used to. I’ve also researched tasks this month which has brought me ideas for my other tasks too.

Overall, my time with Pearl Lemon Group has been fantastic. I feel like it’s a blessing to have worked with the team. Pearl Lemon Group gave me an opportunity to get experience in different fields whilst being surrounded by supportive colleagues. 

Everyone has helped me a lot in learning new things. The skills I have learned at Pearl Lemon Group are definitely valuable and will be useful in my future. I would highly recommend the work placement programme at Pearl Lemon Group – you will definitely enjoy it and learn new things irrespective of your previous experiences.

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