Getting to know the team

Leading up to the end of my first month at PartsTrader, a few of the team took some time out of their busy calendars to tell me a bit more about themselves and their time at PartsTrader.

With a lot of people choosing to remain at home until they had been fully vaccinated or the country had loosened the alert levels, my introduction to PartsTrader saw the office looking a little emptier than usual. A huge part of the reason I had joined PartsTrader was due to the great things I had heard regarding to the team and the culture, and I was keen to hear from people first hand their experiences. I also felt being out their talking to candidates i really wanted to be able to convey an accurate idea of what a day in the life of a PartsTrader employee looked like.

I had navigated the org charts to figure out peoples roles and where they fitted into the organization, but with the alert levels restricting the usual office gatherings, hadn’t gained to much insight beyond the obvious. I wasn’t that keen to sit down and interview people, all felt a bit too forced and like i wasn’t really going to get any honest input, so in the end opted to see who I could tempt out onto the waterfront with some ice cream (yes, shameless bribery).

It ended up going better than I could have hoped for, and I quickly learnt a lot more about the ins and outs of life in the office; including who I needed to hit up for a lesson on the coffee machine. This was quickly followed up by an invite to join the office’s indoor football team, little did they know they would regret that later on.

What I found really interesting was hearing about how they had come to be at PartsTrader. Whilst a few had recently joined through the Summer of Tech programme, others had been around for 7+ years. This of course struck me as unusual, given the tech industries tendency to have a relatively high turnover. To everyone else though it seems pretty normal, with them explaining it really is just an all round good place to work.

I came back to the office with a few more question than I headed out with, partially perhaps due to the intriguing ways different people seemed to like their ice cream, but found it really reassuring knowing I had joined a team that I had a genuine invested interest in.

Mychaela Browne

People Experience Advisor, PartsTrader