First in our Meet the Team series is Jigsaw Staffing's Managing Director - Paul Pledge.
Tell us a bit about yourself!
I’m originally from the UK and emigrated to Tauranga in 2012. I’m the Managing Director and also one of the owners of Jigsaw Staffing.
I have been in recruitment for the past 20 years in both the UK and New Zealand local markets as well as running a specialist international recruitment business.
I started my recruitment career as a perm recruiter for a high street recruitment agency in Scunthorpe in the UK and quickly developed a great reputation in the area for my skill at finding candidates for complex technical and engineering roles.
I really enjoy going to clients’ sites and learning how their businesses work and what they do. I’m a naturally inquisitive person and I am obsessed with watching random videos on YouTube about the way things work. Last night alone I watched a documentary about the evolution of pitstops in formula one, a video on how the Tabasco factory makes 700,000 bottles of hot sauce per day and a behind the scenes tour of a company that handmakes $250 scissors.
My next role in recruitment was as a Business Development Manager for a national recruitment agency that specialised in the supply of staff to the food, manufacturing, supply chain and FMCG sectors, I was promoted to Branch Manager and dealt with high volume contract placements.
When I moved to New Zealand I started at Tradestaff running their busy Tauranga Office, supplying blue collar staff to the Trades and Industrial Sector.
After a year I was promoted to Area Manager for Tradestaff and moved up to the North Shore in Auckland.
Whilst in Auckland I was instrumental in starting a business called Tradestaff Global from scratch.
Tradestaff Global was a specialist recruitment agency that supplies Kiwis to remote projects around the world. Under my leadership we grew the business and supplied staff into 18 different countries as well as Antarctica. I left as General Manager of Tradestaff Global to start up Jigsaw Staffing after almost 13 years with The Tradestaff Group. Incidentally Tradestaff are my business partners in Jigsaw Staffing.
What’s your career highlights?
I’ve worked on some fascinating projects in my time in recruitment, some of the most interesting were.
· Supplying a large volume of construction staff to work on the upgrade of McMurdo base in Antarctica. McMurdo is the US Antarctic Program’s flagship facility in Antarctica.
· Supplying staff to put solar power on the outlying islands of Tuvalu and The Cook Islands in the South Pacific. Some of these islands relied solely on diesel generators and it wasn’t practical to run the generators all of the time, so by installing solar power and battery storage systems it completely changed the lives of the local population.
· I used to be on the executive committee of both the NZ Pacific Business Council and also the NZ Papua New Guinea Business Council. Due to my understanding of the Pacific Region I was asked multiple times to represent the New Zealand Private Sector at Private Sector Dialogue Meetings at the Pacific Island Forum Leaders meeting and at the Forum Economic Ministers meetings. This involved flying on a New Zealand Defence Force plane to various countries and having meetings with Prime Ministers and Presidents of countries about the challenges that businesses faced when operating in the Pacific.
Why do you work in recruitment?
I love the variety, one minute you’re at a concrete plant learning about slump testing, the next minute you’re having a tour around a food factory seeing how ready meals are made.
I also like knowing we’ve contributed to helping our clients and candidates achieve their goals.
What do you do in your spare time?
I’m a keen fisherman, I enjoy taking the boat out either off the coast of Tauranga or to the Lakes to catch some trout. I also have a fully kitted out quad bike that I use to drone fish from Papamoa beach.
I enjoy watching sports and grabbing a beer with friends and I play social football (badly) on a Wednesday night in Tauranga.
I also collect whisky and have over 200 bottles in my collection.
