Dervila McGarry: ‘The Onus Today Is On Businesses To Be Flexible – Especially For Millennials’
There is no blueprint for a successful marketing campaign. What works for one campaign might not gain any traction for another.
The challenge for marketers is to study, analyse and understand why something worked and try to replicate that success with new trends, technologies and creatives.
It’s a skill that Dervila McGarry has refined through years of working with high profile brands. Having enjoyed huge success earlier in her career, when she applied strategies from her FMCG background to the aviation world after joining Aer Lingus, she is now Head of Marketing for United Drug and Lloyds Pharmacy.
She appeared on the Alternatives podcast, Live Your Best Life, to discuss how flexible recruitment provides diverse candidates, highly skilled professionals and most importantly, the assurance that you’re going to get the right person for the job.
“In my role as Head of Marketing, I’m very busy with strategy and other areas – so for me to dedicate time to project manage a project is very challenging. So recently, we looked to Alternatives to bring us somebody who had project management skills but had that digital marketing background which is what the project focused on,” says Dervila.
“We got the support when we needed to get set up, without having to take on a full-time employee unnecessarily”
Dervila’s familiarity with Alternatives began almost nine years ago when she herself was a flexible candidate. Though she was running a successful marketing consultancy at the time, the opportunity emerged to join the team at Aer Lingus for a maternity cover contract.
“I was all about career enhancement and developing my expertise. Getting into the airline sector just seemed like an excellent opportunity,” says Dervila.
The right move?
Accepting the role was made easier by the fact it was a short-term placement.
“It gives you the opportunity to decide for yourself: ‘is this the right move?’ It gives you an opportunity to understand if this is the right direction that you want to go to. It also gives you the opportunity to experience a different sector. Getting that breadth of experience will definitely stand to you in later life” she says.
Flexible recruitment is looking like an increasingly favourable option for the younger generation, which Dervila believes works in favour of hiring companies.
“Someone who is young brings energy, they bring freshness and especially when you’re trying to reinvigorate a brand and appeal to a younger cohort. They bring that fresh perspective” she says – adding that flexible recruitment must be considered as a tool for attraction, retention and growth.
“The onus is on the businesses today to be flexible, especially for the millennials.”
New approaches
Dervila now looks to flexible recruitment to help grow her team and uses learnings from her experience as a candidate to help ensure success – by fostering an environment, for permanent and interim hires alike, where new approaches and creative ideas are harnessed rather than sidelines.
And she believes that the key to achieving this is simple.
“It’s all about having trust and openness and letting people speak,” she says.
Dervila is a guest on Episode 2 of Live Your Best Life, a podcast by Alternatives that takes a deep-dive into the world of flexible working.
