One of my goals for the year of Create was to put creation and writing into my work life. I had started off at my job doing more writing in my sales and marketing role: working on website copy, posting blogs, helping with sales emails. Ultimately, I pulled myself out of that path and towards HR and internal communications — something I think I’ve proved well suited to over the past four years.
It’s funny, though, how things can come full circle. Still in my role as HR, these last few months I’ve been working on website copy, posting blogs, and helping with client emails.
I’ve been working on internal training programs this year to educate all our employees on How to Hire principles (being HR for a hiring software company is a nice alignment for me) with the ultimate goal of translating those learnings client-facing. That’s led to me contributing to the company blog, creating supplemental collateral, and working on How to Hire training videos for clients and prospects.
I’ve done a lot of creating in the strict realm of HR — building the hiring process, creating performance review plans, facilitating company culture. There’s been a lot of lift in the past years from nothing to now in our HR world and I’ve loved the challenge of it. Plus, there’s still a lot more to be done.
But I’m having so much fun flexing my creating muscle for training and content. When I started over five years ago I was writing about HR and hiring topics blind — based on internet research. It was that deep dive that got me interested in HR in the first place. Now I’m returning to it with more experience and prescriptive best practices that I’ve seen tested.
This fall I’ve been completely running our company blog, responsible for most of the weekly content. This isn’t a forever job — we just hired an amazing Content Marketing Manager who will take this over and be able to churn out more content with it as her main focus (turns out I’m still running our HR department).
There’s a lot of exciting possibilities for me to continue to contribute and expand my role, and honestly, I like being involved in multiple areas of the company and I like the tangible production of content creation.
(Can you tell? Not like I started a blog just to see that I could produce something every day.)
My main reflection here is how powerful my word of the year has been in this area. I’m not sure I would have taken some of these opportunities if I hadn’t consciously asked early in the year: What does Create look like at work this year? And then I wrote down ideas and put intention and work behind them.
That’s my version of an integrated life.
With Love,
Natalie