Hi, I'm Nancy

Understanding people, putting them in the right place, and watching them thrive at work. That's what gets me up every morning.

I'm not the kind of HR consultant who one day decided to "do something with people". I started out in IT. But somewhere along the way, something shifted, and that's exactly why TalentTester exists today.

In 1996 I graduated in IT from Karel de Grote University College in Antwerp. Straight after that I moved to Poole, in the south of England, to join Barclays International. I was 22. Far from home. And I had a huge amount of drive for it.

Two years later I came back. Together with my partner at the time, I founded my first company: Orqua, an IT staffing firm. I set up the ATS system myself (programmed from scratch) and on top of that I took care of recruitment and the financial side.

And at a certain point, something shifted. I noticed that the conversations with candidates gave me far more energy than debugging my own code. Who those people were, what they wanted, where they thrived. That fascinated me.

I did enjoy programming, and I was good at it. But in PACS terms: my blue colour is almost absent. So when something didn't work right away, I could lose myself endlessly chasing a bug. My red wants results, my yellow wants to work with people. Something that doesn't work, I can't let it go until the result is what it should be. And that often cost me a lot of energy. But once the result was there, I was on top of the world. Code is logical. People aren't. And I quickly realised that my real passion was in understanding people.

In 2006, Orqua was sold to the Centric Group. At that point we had a company of 350 IT'ers. In 2010 I simply started over, this time with AsecrIT, again in IT staffing. That company I sold in 2015 to Brainbridge in Antwerp. By then we were at 150 IT'ers. Same pattern every time, really: build something up, put people in the right place, and move on.

I still remember clearly when we got to source all the business project managers for Argenta. That was a real challenge, but I absolutely loved it. Argenta was my account back then. It was always a puzzle, a lot of screening to get the right people in place, but it's what gave me the most satisfaction.

Over the years I've built up a few solid convictions.

• Personality isn't a label, it's a starting point. I like working with the PACS 4-colour test (the Jung model which we developed further here at TalentTester), the Big Five, leadership tests, and a few others. Not to box people in. I can't stand that. But to help people understand why they do what they do. And why their colleague tackles that same problem in a completely different way.

• Teams determine the outcome, not job titles. I've seen it too often. A "perfect profile" stalling in a team. A "weaker profile" thriving somewhere else. Team dynamics aren't luck. You can understand them, and you can shape them.

• Technology should serve people. An assessment has to be fast, accessible and reliable. But the interpretation, the nuance, the conversation afterwards, that remains human work. A tool without context is a tool that actually teaches you nothing.

• No woolly HR-speak. If I don't know something, I say so. If a test doesn't fit your question, I'll point you to someone else or to a different instrument. Everyone wins that way.