For the past two weeks, I have been working for CPL Jobs Prague. Cpl Jobs is a division of CPL Resources, a global recruitment, staffing, and outsourcing-services company with 36 offices worldwide. While Cpl Resources operates predominantly in Ireland, as Ireland’s largest recruitment agency, Cpl jobs is one of 10 individual companies organized under Cpl Resources Plc. that operates both within and outside of Ireland, providing a specialized knowledge in recruitment and other HR solutions across a number of sectors. While my branch primarily focuses on industries including human resources, sales and marketing, administration and office support, multilingual and customer support, IT and telecommunication, and accounting and finance, as a recruiting intern for the company I primarily have worked with placements in the latter industry thus far.

In the time I have been working here, I have been surprised by how relaxed the workplace culture is. I was anticipating a very hierarchical team structure and formal work setting, as I read was typical in the Czech Republic. Instead, work largely has, or at least tries to create, the image of a “family feel”. Although there is a definite divide between personal and work life and my co-workers do not discuss more personal issues typically (at least not in English), workplace practices reflect a desire to attain closeness at the workplace. For instance, when potential candidates for the company come for an interview, the entire office will greet them and candidates are encouraged to ask everyone questions about themselves and the company. We will also have a small get together in the beginning of the day for birthdays or for someone’s first day of work. This was an interesting scene for me as everyone was kissing and hugging each other, and I did not know how I should behave given that I had only known these girls for less than 2 weeks. Though the language barrier has sometimes left me feeling outside of the Cpl “family”, it is obvious that it is something that they try to emphasize in their business practices, even if the girls at the company tend to keep to themselves outside of these processes.

Despite this family feel, for the most part everyone works independently other than occasionally sharing certain candidates with each other that may be a good fit for a job they are placing. This has been a struggle for me, as I have never had experience with the tasks I am doing at work prior to this. I was expecting a more structured method of learning and clear instruction on how to contact potential candidates; however, I have been left largely to do as I please. Although this freedom is nice, at times I feel as though I could be performing better if given more instruction. This lack of structure is certainly an adjustment, but it has helped me to learn how to ask the right questions and has led to a few scenarios where I have had to learn from my mistakes. Though the workplace culture of Cpl is different from what I have experienced in the past, I do feel as though I have learned a lot during the time I have been here, and they are always open to let me explore a variety of different backgrounds and are open to hearing suggestions I have for new recruiting and marketing practices. It is certainly a culture that cares about its clients and candidates, and I am glad to be a part of that.