Hi everyone,

It’s Saturday night and I’m ready to write my weekly update – even if I have a feeling my work week will not finish today. Why? Because I am in the process of hiring people for many positions. This time, the process feels slower and some specific requirements have me discarding many candidates too.

The available positions as of this morning were:

• A video editor – a dedicated person who would help us manage our new content which keeps expanding as we’re launching many new businesses these days.
• A web app designer who has coding experience and knows how to use website builders.
• A digital marketer with a good SEO background.
• A social media manager who would manage our many social pages and possibly run some ads.
• 2-3 content writers who have to be Native English speakers.
• A PR manager who would be working on getting Pearl Lemon media features in digital and print press.
• A B2B outreach/sales person who would mostly do cold calling to find potential leads.

Luckily, Akhila (our new marketing executive who is also involved in HR) has been posting some job ads too. She’s focused on new hiring platforms which should give us more exposure. We’re aiming at hiring a person from Australia and/or the Philippines and have people working in different timezones from the rest of the team. Despite this new strategy, it seems we are receiving fewer applications and I suppose the main reason is the beginning of the academic year in most countries.

However, from Monday we will have two people on trial: one as a web app designer and the other one as a video editor. I’m excited to see how they’ll go!

Meanwhile, I’ll continue with the recruitment process tomorrow too. I’ve recently optimized my approach and made it more automated to hopefully speed things up.

Since my role is HR Success Manager, I often focus on each team member’s progress and well being. In particular, I have been investigating on how each partner feels about their workload. I wanted to discover if anyone didn’t feel motivated or didn’t enjoy their tasks for any reason. It turned out most people were fine while some could have avoided some tasks. As a consequence, I discussed the situations and shared some advice as well as redistributed some activities. I hope this will help and I will definitely circle back with them in 1-2 weeks.

One of the advantages of being a large team is that high chances are that someone else wants to do what you really don’t like or don’t feel like doing. That’s also why I appreciated having Isabela on trial this week: she immediately showed her willingness to learn and get involved with many aspects of Pearl Lemon.

As mentioned last week, all campaigns about Kemistri were paused. Therefore I only had a few messages to reply to but still managed to book one call with my colleague Francesco (our Marketing Director for Kemisti Italy).

The big news about this week is that I am going to be involved with our super new business. It will possibly be launched next week – less than a month after it all started!

The company’s name is Plant Sumo and it’s a food delivery service of vegan and plant-based meals. Crazy things are happening behind the scenes and it seems promising!

To summarize what I did in this field:

• I did some research about Plant Sumo’s competitors in Italy.
• I signed up Plant Sumo on the main platforms where people can leave reviews and find out about us.
• I signed up the business as a restaurant partner of Deliveroo and Ubereats.

Other tasks I took care of during the week were about administration and content optimization but I won’t go into much detail. Besides this, I was often in contact with some team members like Kaushal (designer) and Noah (writer) who helped me define things to hire new people.

Next week’s goal is to find a better balance and working schedule. I knew during the summer I would have had an unstable agenda and now it’s time to find a better routine.

On another note, a few days ago I finally received my graduation papers!

It’s incredible to think in two weeks time marks one year since I graduated. This brought many good memories about my university life which I miss sometimes. Especially because schools opened last Monday in Italy and university courses will start soon too. In these delicate times, I hope things will go for the best considering the ongoing global pandemic.

I hope you are all staying safe!

Ciao,

Federica