Talent Spotlight: Russell’s Journey at Meet Life Sciences

Russell Smith is the Director of our European Permanent Division. He supports leading Biotech and Pharma businesses while managing a dedicated group of recruiters. 

Having been at Meet for over ten years, he definitely feels like part of the furniture – and he’s hit a whole range of milestones. From the sales desk to managing consultants to launching an office in Berlin, Russell’s journey is a great example of where dedication can land you when you are part of a supportive yet high performance environment.   

Russell’s background 

Russell is originally from Sussex, England and – like so many of us – never had a clear idea of what he wanted his career to look like. After going through school and studying history and economics at university, he started hearing about recruitment from various people.  

Having been on a ski season where he was working in hospitality, Russell thought that developing those people skills by working in recruitment could be a promising next step. 

One of the first companies he interviewed with was Meet, which at the time was solely London-based and only made up of about 25 people. At this time, they had hugely ambitious plans for growth, which was one of the key factors appealing to Russell as he was starting his career. That and his liking for our co-founders and the rest of the leadership team, of course! 

His role at Meet Life Sciences 

Russell is currently head of our European permanent 360 team – but as you can imagine, his role has massively evolved since first joining Meet back in 2014. 

The first five years of his time here, Russell was focused on his individual billing as a sales consultant. He then decided to make the move into leadership and began managing a small team.  

‘At that point, I’d always been covering or working within the DACH region, so I then had the opportunity to launch the Berlin office. Myself and three others moved out there and set that up in September 2019’.  

Once he’d moved to Berlin to set up the new office, he continued managing it for four and a half years before eventually moving back to the UK. He’s since been back for just over a year, where the team he’s been managing has doubled in size. 

New skills and initial challenges 

Looking back on his early career, Russell said that one of the most important skills he learnt was ‘really understanding how to develop rapport and also understanding someone’s needs and perspective before trying to find a solution’.   

Once he had achieved this, he found that he could be very successful on the sales floor. 

Progressing into a managerial role was perhaps one of his tougher challenges. He had to adapt from focusing on his own performance to supporting members of a team and helping them through both their professional and personal challenges.  

‘Things became a lot more challenging because, even though I’m pretty resilient, straightforward and pragmatic, I’m not particularly emotional. It was a big learning curve in terms of supporting people through their challenges and coaching them’.  

More recently, Russell has decided to keep some of his client involvement in addition to managing his team, which requires ‘incredible discipline’ when it comes to his time management. Working in both is a challenge, but he’s happy to keep at it because of how much he enjoys both sides. 

Greatest achievements  

When asked about his greatest achievement, Russell replied that ‘launching the Berlin office was the big one’. 

But he also highlighted that, a couple of years after the launch, seeing his team grow to ten members and watching them move forward in their careers was an achievement that left him the most fulfilled.  

Overall, his own billings and promotions are something to be proud of – but nothing has been as rewarding as watching his team develop and achieve promotion after promotion.  

Life Sciences  

Russell has grown to appreciate the field of Life Sciences during his time here.  

Over the years he’s mostly worked in clinical development (and more recently) medical affairs. He’s also had exposure to several other verticals through the management of his team.  

His favorite thing about the industry is speaking with people who are incredibly passionate about their work, whether that’s people looking for their next role or hiring managers building out a team. 

‘Typically, there are physicians, doctors or people with a really high level of scientific understanding. They’re very closely tied to their research area – so talking with them and placing them in their next role is particularly rewarding. You can see how much it means to them’.  

Advice and aspirations 

We asked Russell why he’s chosen to stay at Meet for so long and he replied that he had stayed for ‘the culture and environment’. 

According to him, Meet ‘strikes a really good balance between creating a high performing, ambitious environment with a lot of very successful people, without going overboard and creating a pressure cooker’. 

Within sales, an element of pressure is natural – but Meet strikes that balance between the two. ‘If you’re driven and want to be successful, you can achieve some amazing things here. It’s a great environment to be in. On top of that, the industry provides the opportunity to work with really passionate and interesting people from really unique, innovative companies.’ 

When asked about his plans for the future, Russell said that he hadn’t been able to achieve some of his goals in the past six months due to a very turbulent market. That being said, he can now see that his team is starting to build momentum again. ‘I can now see for the first time in a long time; we’ve got a huge opportunity now to get back on the track we were on’. 

And finally, Russell’s has huge plans and aspirations for the next couple of years to make sure his team is the most successful, globally. 

Stay tuned for the next installment of our Talent Spotlight series. We’ll be interviewing people from all across the company and we're looking forward to sharing their exciting stories and journeys! 

And if you’re interested in joining the Meet team, please do reach out if you’d like to apply for any job vacancies or upcoming academies.