Managing Director, Penna

Julie is one of the most experienced recruiters in local government. Julie began her career in local government and over the last 30 years has worked in the private sector supporting the public sector to find, excite and secure talent, and in particular develop the organisations top team. Julie has supported clients across the UK with their most senior roles across all professional areas and has recruited more Chief Executives than any other recruiter. She regularly supports top team design and development, manages appraisals and coaches a number of senior leaders in local government. Through Penna she invests her and the company’s time in supporting talent development and encouraging private sector transition to the public sector. She developed and leads the Aspirant Chief Executive programme for local government now in its 3rdyear.

Julie is a national commentator on leadership in public sector and was a member of the Guardian Public Service Advisory Board for two years. Julie is regularly called upon by the sector to work on high profile, complex assignments where market intelligence, rigour and high standards of probity are required. She is incredibly well networked, and looks forward to sharing her leadership lockdown learning from both her Penna MD perspective but predominantly from the conversations and engagement she has had with her CEX network.

Alexis joined Penna in 2014 after spending seven years at Capita Resourcing and Reed Professional Services. Here she worked on large-scale resourcing strategies and digital projects for the Office for National Statistics, Barclays Retail, the BBC and others. At Penna, Alexis combined her passion and career to shape her dream job, bringing diversity and inclusion expertise to our clients as the businesses’ D&I Lead. She’s also leading Penna on their own D&I journey.

Alexis oversees the entire recruitment and employee lifecycle for Penna’s attraction, selection, assessment work and retention; ensuring it promotes the highest standards of diversity and inclusion. She offers client support in all things D&I to set clear responsibilities for strategy and programme development, challenging organisations to change and grow. Her approach is to stop focusing on culture ‘fit’ and start focusing on culture ‘add’, eradicating unhealthy monocultures in workplaces.

It’s this approach which has delivered award-winning results for clients - most recently ‘Best Digital Experience for Early Talent’ at the 2020 RAD awards. She’s passionate about all strands of diversity, and has mostly recently worked across the UK and USA to ensure actions are being taken to remove racial inequality in the workplace, in light of the recent height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Alexis’ D&I remit spans across strategic consultancy, audits and reviews, learning and development, analysis, knowledge sharing, equality impact assessments and enabling inclusive recruitment.