16 Sep The Five of Us: 25 Years of Friendship, Work and Kitchen Gossip!
Five work friends. Twenty-five years of friendship. Countless laughs, arguments, kitchen gossips and a lifetime of memories.
Sometimes I think about how lucky I was to start my working life when I did.
Twenty-five years ago, the five of us met at Hays Recruitment.
None of us knew it at the time, but we were about to become part of each other’s lives for the next quarter of a century.
We eventually all went our separate ways after around ten years at Hays. Careers changed, companies changed and life moved on.
Claire Harvey went on to become Regional MD at Reed. Annie Parry became a RPO Operational Excellence Director. Anna Jones became National Sales Director at Worknest. Jo Marsden went on to work for a local competitor. And I took the leap and set up my own recruitment business Rotheram Carrington Financial Recruitment & Search ten years ago.
But despite all those different paths, we never really lost each other.
I honestly don’t think a year has gone by when the five of us haven’t managed to see each other at least twice.
And Claire deserves a special mention because she didn’t just excel at recruitment she was also rather good at matchmaking. She introduced me to my husband!
So, technically, I can say recruitment changed my life in more ways than one.
The importance of the kitchen gossip
When I look back, it wasn’t just the jobs we were doing that created these friendships.
It was being together.
The long days. The pressure. The targets. The 8am starts and late finishes. The celebrations when things went brilliantly and the commiserations when they absolutely didn’t.
The arguments.
The cross words.
The laughing until your stomach hurt.
And, of course, the kitchen gossip.
Those completely unimportant conversations that, looking back, were actually incredibly important.
Because that was where relationships were built working in an office environment.
You got to know the person behind the job title. You knew who was having a bad day, who needed a coffee, who needed a rant and who needed telling to stop being dramatic!
Recruitment wasn’t always easy. In fact, it could be bloody hard work.
But one thing I will always say about our generation of recruiters is that we grafted.
Long days, big targets, plenty of rejection and an awful lot of phone calls.
And, inevitably, some people thrived and some didn’t. Those who didn’t graft usually didn’t last very long.
But amongst all the hard work, some of my best working days were spent with these girls.
Twenty-five years later…
We’re now all in the second half of our lives.
We’re still highly motivated. Still ambitious. Still doing our thing.
But perhaps we’re all looking for a slightly more zen way of working these days!
And that’s made me think about the current world of work.
I’m not anti-hybrid working. I work from home myself now, and I completely understand the benefits.
But I do wonder whether we’re losing something along the way.
Because friendships like ours weren’t created over Teams calls.
They weren’t created by sending a Slack message.
They certainly weren’t created by scheduling a 30-minute virtual coffee.
They were created by spending thousands of hours together.
By sitting next to each other. By going for lunch. By having a moan in the kitchen. By celebrating someone’s success. By laughing at something completely ridiculous. By occasionally falling out and then getting over it.
Those everyday interactions are where relationships happen.
And relationships matter.
The work friends who become friends for life
The five of us aren’t unique.
Over the years I’ve made so many brilliant friendships through work. People I no longer work with, but who I can still pick up the phone to for advice, support or simply a catch-up.
And equally, people who know they can call me.
Those relationships don’t just disappear because you leave the same company.
In fact, some of them have lasted longer than some of the companies!
When I look back at my career, I realise that some of the most valuable things I gained weren’t job titles, promotions or pay rises.
They were people.
People who taught me something.
People who challenged me.
People who made me laugh.
People who picked me up when things weren’t going well.
And people who, 25 years later, are still sitting around a table with me having exactly the same conversations we probably had in the Hays kitchen all those years ago.
Have we lost something?
Maybe I’m just nostalgic.
Maybe it’s because I’m now in a different stage of my career.
And yes, I absolutely appreciate the freedom of working from home.
But I do sometimes look at the new world of hybrid and fully remote working and wonder whether younger people are missing out on something we didn’t realise we had.
That messy, noisy, sometimes frustrating, often hilarious human interaction that happens when you put people together.
You don’t know which colleague will become a lifelong friend.
You don’t know who you’ll still be talking to 25 years later.
You don’t know that the person sitting opposite you might introduce you to your future husband!
You just turn up to work.
And somewhere between the graft, the gossip, the arguments and the laughter, you build a life.
I feel incredibly lucky that I got to experience that.
Twenty-five years on, the five of us are still here.
Still laughing.
Still putting the world to rights.
And, thankfully, still finding plenty to gossip about.
Here’s to the next 25 years, girls. ❤️
Picture Reference: This picture probably sums up the personalities of these girls perfectly! On a recent get-together, I left my jacket with them and, after a few vinos, they decided to get creative!! 😂 Needless to say, this was the result! ❤️