Spotlight on Chris Stark: Divisional Manager at Ambition

We sat down and put the spotlight on Chris Stark - Divisional Manager of Insolvency & Restructuring at Ambition, to gather his valuable advice and reflections on his journey in the world of recruitment. Chris shares his insights on taking your time, embracing challenges, and the crucial role that hard work plays in recruitment.

Watch the full video as we dive into Chris's thoughts on Ambition, the company that has supported his growth, and his experience working all the way up to Management!

What is your advice for starting in recruitment?

'It would be to take your time when interviewing. Don't just take the first offer that you get. I remember interviewing in lots of different places. I was rejected at a few to be fair. But yeah, even when I received an offer elsewhere, it was a case of waiting for the firm that felt was right for me and fit with I guess my values and what I wanted to gain in my career, and then just throw yourself into it.

I don't think, I did well at the start because I wasn't like a natural recruiter, I was far from it. I think it was just because I was willing to, give everything a go, make a fool myself enough times to work out what worked for me. Yeah, and same with probably any career.

Hard work. That's the thing that probably separates everybody that that does well is that they all work hard consistently every day. It's not what they have one amazing day and then one awful day so they're good five days a week, you know, fifty two weeks a year. So that's that's probably the one thing that you need to be able to do to do well in this job.'

How has Ambition supported you to achieve your goals?

'pretty lucky, ambition, I think that I've always felt like I've been pushed out of my comfort zone. So I started as a junior and my boss was very good at getting me from being a junior to being a consultant quite quickly, and I always feel like I've had opportunities to sort of take my career in any direction. When the choices to do management came up. I wasn't necessarily jumping up to do it straight away.

But my boss told me to do it and said that I'd be good and and to give it a go. Also, with the knowledge that if I didn't, if I just decided I didn't want to do I can always go back to doing a more, you know, billing focused role. So, yeah, I've I've always had lots of options available to me.'

How would you describe the culture at Ambition?

​'Pretty cliche, but everyone is really, really nice here. I think I was always very wary but I was interviewing for four roles in recruitment about the very stereotypical idea of what recruitment companies would be - sort of really laddy and really loud and boisterous, which, you know, I can beat it from time to time, but, it wasn't the kind of environment I wanted to work in.

It is one of the reasons why I ended choosing to work for Ambition as I thought it wasn't like that and it has been everything I thought it would be.

It's been really, really friendly. Everyone gets on with each other, yeah, it's generally just a nice place to work, to be honest. Everyone's very supportive of each other. It's not a case of everyone's trying to climb over each other to make money.

​If you could do any job, and money, wasn't an object, what would you do?

'​I'd probably try and to avoid doing work at all, but if if I had to do a job and and when he was the object, I mean, I love to have played professional sport. That's worrying what I always do growing up, but assuming I probably wouldn't be good enough to do that.

I always like running my own bar or, having my own brew would be pretty cool or even like a vineyard, but Again, that probably says more about me than anything else, doesn't it? I'm obsessed with either playing sport or or boozing'

What were you doing before working in recruitment?​

​So I graduated university in twenty fourteen in sports science,​ and I spent few years working with the professional sports fair doing, sports analysis, which was a lot of fun, I made a lot of really good memories, met some really cool people, but it ultimately wasn't for me, it was lot of hard work, even harder than recruitment, I think, actually. So I decided to stop doing that moved back home with my mum and worked in airport security, which is way more boring than it sounds.

That'd be my advice for anyone. Don't don't get into airport security. It's boring. And then, a friend of a friend suggested recruitment to me and said, I think you could be quite good at it. I had never really thought about recruitment. I don't think I'd really even heard of recruitment, I think, at that point. I just did some goofing around it and thought, why not?

Let's just give it a go. Started applying for jobs. Yeah. And then let's say, I think that was four or five years ago and now I'm here!'

​Click here to see more about Chris Stark and his live job roles!