Acorn winners 2017: Holly Dixon

Human resources manager, the London Edition

Nominated by Mike Crow, acting director of HR, London Edition

Proudest moment "Winning the HR Team of the Year Award at the 2016 Hotel Cateys."

Greatest inspiration "Jon Dawson, director of HR at Mandarin Oriental, who I worked with at Edition between 2013 and 2016. He challenges the status quo, pushes boundaries and is passionate about what he does."

Ambition

Holly Dixon’s career has been on an upward trajectory since graduating from Sheffield Hallam University with a first-class honours degree in international hotel management.

Recognition has come thick and fast, including winning the Young Guns Hospitality Student of the Year Award and becoming part of the Hospitality Guild Young Hall of Fame in 2013. In the same year, Dixon joined the pre-opening team for the London Edition as part of the rooms operations graduate programme and over the next few years she moved seamlessly upwards, becoming human resources manager in March this year.

Thanks to her input, engagement scores are 76% against a company benchmark of 70%, the average time to fill a vacancy is 14 days against a company benchmark of 25, and the quality of hire score is 95% against 70%.

Each year, Dixon mentors a new intake of graduates. The employee development and training culture is clearly strong, as some 197 employees have transferred or been promoted internally since the opening of the hotel. Among several recent recruitment initiatives, Dixon worked with the human resources co-ordinator to introduce a hotel friend referral scheme, resulting in 37 referrals in 2016.

To stay at the sharp end of HR, Dixon started studying for CIPD level 5 in human resources management in 2016 and regularly attends industry events on employment law and mediation.