Hazel Sullivan
HR Director, International HR, Corporate HR-Ireland (EU)
So with the help of our intrepid intern, Emma O’ Meara, we set about trying to understand who were the other HR professionals in Cork Airport Business Park. Emma, the true millennial that she is, got on LinkedIn and other social networks and set about trying to find our HR neighbours. She also leveraged her own network, and forced us to leverage ours, so that we could get a full understanding of the entire group.
Once we had a solid list Emma set about contacting everyone to see if they would have an interest in getting together to share ideas and develop the network. This culminated in a very exciting inaugural Cork Airport Business Park HR networking event on 22nd August 2017. We were delighted that nearly 20 delegates joined us on what was possibly the worst day of the entire summer! We were so glad they decided to leave their offices and make the journey, on foot mostly, to our offices.
We were joined on the day by the general managers of both McKesson Ireland, Rory Lankford, and NorthStar Healthcare, Colm Moynihan, to give us an overview of the businesses here in Cork. Then our good friend Gina London shared with us a great presentation about the ‘Communication Gap’. Gina moderated our discussion around the future of the group, how we might like to communicate and continue the conversation. We talked about the topics that are of interest to us as a collective group and people offered to share best practice.
It was wonderful to welcome back Caroline Holohan who previously held a HR role at McKesson and I was delighted when Danielle Hegarty of Poppulo offered to work with me to see how we can move the group forward and plan for other future events. We also agreed to create a closed LinkedIn group where we can share ideas, talk about key topics in HR for the region and continue the conversation!!
It was a great event and we are looking forward to the next one.
Hazel Sullivan
