About Us - Consultant Profiles
Our consultants' broader business experience and connections in the marketplace means we can help you build a strong, successful organisation. Learn more about our key personnel...
Margo McLay | Zoe Marti | Paul Edwards
Margo McLay
Director
When you first meet Margo McLay you won’t feel like it is the superficial ‘first meeting’. She’s been described by many of her clients as being down to earth, warm and friendly yet with a wicked sense of humour. Ask around and Margo is as well known and respected in the recruitment industry as she is for her eclectic individual corporate fashionista style.
Margo is a qualified registered nurse, has a B. Commerce (Marketing) and is a member of the CEO Institute, the Society of Business Communicators and Recruitment and Consulting Services Association. Executive People are members of NPA, The Worldwide Recruiting Network.
Although Margo fell into the recruitment world, it’s been a decision that she’s never looked back on. Margo McLay is a rare phenomenon in the arcane world of recruitment: she's a straight talker, blissfully free of jargon – and she doesn't believe in pretension. With dramatic changes to the recruitment industry from mergers, takeovers, online recruitment and in-house executive search, Margo has stuck to her knitting by living by her own philosophy of taking a personal approach to recruitment.
In fact, she believes her unconventional career path should serve as a lesson to others also embarking on a job or career change that there is no surefire path to getting where you want to go.
In Margo’s world, succeeding today is all about knowing yourself, what you know, who you know and who knows you.
For Margo, being yourself will help her to place you in the type of job that is a ‘perfect fit’ between you and your employer – professionally, personally and culturally. “Just be your gorgeous self” is Margo’s mantra! It’s a philosophy that she believes is simply a sensible way of attracting and retaining the right person for the right job.
She named her company Executive Recruitment and it’s clear that the ambition – corporate job search, placement and support – is at the heart of her business. But it took Margo a few decades of living life before she realized that she was best suited to helping others find their next challenging role and supporting them in the transition between jobs.
The 1970s was no place for an entrepreneurial woman in the world of executive recruitment. Raised on a pig farm in Yetman (a small, pretty village by the Macintyre River in north-western NSW, about 30 km south of the Queensland border and 701 km north of Sydney), Margo graduated from boarding school with a less than perfect grade and was immediately ensconced to general nursing training at the Princess Alexandra Hospital.
She worked as a registered nurse in far north Queensland on Thursday Island and Cairns before a brief stint at the Mater Hospital, and then embarked on the ubiquitous Australian back packer holiday adventure visiting India, Ireland and culminating in a six-month Combi van trip around Europe.
Upon her return from overseas Margo enrolled herself into an expensive private secretarial course only to graduate with mediocre skills which were put to use across a number of jobs including Today Tonight, a dodgy property development firm, as a flight attendant on Christopher Skase’s private jet and selling expensive floral frocks in a posh CBD store.
Margo also worked as a radio sales consultant selling air space in the 1990’s (and was scouted as the ‘face’ of the “4KQ is my station” campaign). She held other jobs as a trainer and lecturer to student nannies, as a medical representative, as a training and consultancy sales representative with the Australian Institute of Management – even authoring a book about her home town - all while continuing to sell those floral frocks.
But while Margo’s working life was full of action, she also knew what it was like to be alone. She found herself divorced with two young children she needed to support on a single income. Margo completed a Commerce (Marketing) degree at university while continuing to juggle various jobs. The pivotal point was being invited to establish the health recruiting arm of Bond Recruitment in 2000, and later embarking on self employment with Gibson Recruiting before establishing Executive People in June 2006.
Fast forward to today and hanging boldly in Margo’s boardroom is a series of contemporary art pieces she commissioned to a local emerging artist. The scene depicts a sprawling Brisbane CBD scene, a bustling hive of activity in peak hour, and a prominent leg in fishnet stockings adorns the foreground. It’s a metaphor for Margo’s vision of “just being yourself” in the fast-paced corporate business world.
Margo says she feels happiest when she is providing real value to clients and when she is helping somebody with their career. She also believes her stint as a nurse in a ‘carer’s profession’ has given her the drive to help others; her role as a mother the ‘manager’ capability, and her “chequered career” equips her with a special insight into the challenges that people face when trying to balance satisfying work and personal lives.
“I also wanted to offer a better value and more personal, relationship-based service – a smaller recruitment boutique (to leverage my knowledge of floral frocks),” she says.
“My attitude to life is always; better to regret what you have done than what you haven’t done. To this end, I can look back on my life so far – on the madcap trips, my youthful exploits, and I have the belief that I can do (almost) anything.”
When she's not out scouting new artwork to adorn her boardroom wall, Margo is focused on raising her two teenage daughters and learning more about the world and psychology of Generation Y. She has also taken to short marathon races and treking ancient volcanic mountains.
And you can thank this ‘self-confessed glamour girl’ for the demise of beige lipstick and power suits in the office.
