People sometimes ask me how I ended up in global talent solutions connecting UK businesses with Africa and India. Looking back, my path reads less like a straight line and more like a series of rooms, each one leading naturally into the next, each one opening onto further ground to grow into.
What I’ve come to appreciate is that every one of those rooms had different coloured walls. Different textures, different light, different things to notice if you were paying attention. I’m grateful for every one of them, because that’s exactly what shaped the person I am today. I’m still someone who looks around wherever I stand, quietly absorbing whatever colour is in the room.
Even back when I was choosing what to study, I was drawn less to a single subject than to the space between people, institutions and cultures — how trust, meaning and negotiation move across difference. That pull towards international relations, and towards working across borders and worldviews, has stayed remarkably consistent, even as the settings around it kept changing entirely.
The Room Where Precision Mattered More Than Anything
The first room I remember clearly was during Croatia’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, where I worked as a liaison officer — an opportunity that grew naturally out of my studies in Diplomacy and International Relations. It was a high-stakes, fast-moving environment, the kind where a misread signal or a missed detail doesn’t just cause friction, it has consequences that ripple across institutions and countries.
What I took from that room wasn’t a specific skill so much as a standard. I learned what it actually looks like when discretion, precision, and cross-institutional coordination are non-negotiable, not aspirational. I learned to stay calm inside complexity, because the complexity wasn’t going anywhere, my job was to work within it, not to wish it away.
That standard has never left me. It’s the same one I now apply to a cross-border hiring mandate where three time zones, multiple labour frameworks, and a launch date that isn’t moving all need to be held in the same conversation.
That room gave way to one further south, awash in warmer light and a busier kind of energy.
The Room That Shaped How I See the World
Teleperformance came next, managing client relations for Mercedes-Benz across Southeast European markets. But if I’m honest, what shaped me most in that chapter wasn’t the client work itself. It was living and working in Athens as a young person, during years that were still forming who I was becoming.
Being immersed in a genuinely international environment at that age gave me an early, visceral sense of the bigger picture, how needs, offers and demand move across a global system, and how people across different markets can experience what looks, on paper, like the same opportunity in entirely different ways. It’s the kind of understanding that’s hard to teach and easy to absorb, if you’re lucky enough to be somewhere that lets you.
That’s where I first learned to read a market, not just operate inside one. I still lean on that instinct every time I help a client understand supply and demand in a talent pool they’ve never worked in before.
From there, the walls changed again, this time to something closer to open water.
The Room Where Strategy Became Real
A management trainee placement within Tankerska Plovidba came next, one of Croatia’s leading maritime groups, followed by a structured rotational programme spanning human resources and passenger shipping operations. It gave me something I don’t think you can get any other way: a front-row seat to how executive decisions actually translate into organisational outcomes, in an industry that is genuinely global and genuinely unforgiving of delay.
Tankerska Plovidba is the kind of organisation that changes the people who pass through it. Not loudly, and not by accident. It’s built into how deliberately the company structures its people’s development. You leave having become someone more capable than the person who walked in, and I say that with genuine admiration for how intentionally that company invests in the people who work there.
Shipping doesn’t wait for anyone to feel ready. A decision gets made, and the consequences arrive whether or not the organisation is prepared for them. Watching senior leaders navigate that, and understanding what separates a decision made with confidence from one made out of hesitation, shaped how I think about commercial strategy to this day.
I think about that a lot when I’m advising a UK client on whether to move now or wait for more certainty. Certainty rarely arrives on schedule. The businesses that move well are usually the ones that decided how to move, not when to feel completely ready.
The Global Room: Where Global Talent Solutions Across Africa Came Into Focus
Global, because for the first time, the walls held every colour I’d collected in the rooms before it, and colours I hadn’t even encountered yet.
Arriving in Africa, when I joined Dananda, felt exactly like that: walking into a space so rich with different colours that I simply had to stop and take them all in before I could do anything else. I’m still standing there, in a sense, still absorbing.
I was welcomed with a warmth, an openness in sharing knowledge of the market, and a calibre of professionalism that reshaped how I think about what a strong partnership actually looks like.
What this team has built speaks for itself: deep, embedded delivery capability across South Africa, an established presence in Kenya driving our expansion across East Africa, and a dedicated team sourcing talent across India’s vast professional landscape.
That’s the team I now stand alongside: people who will step past the edge of their own comfort for a client, who show up exactly when they’re needed, who don’t run from the weight of responsibility this work carries, and who meet every problem with a solution rather than an excuse. Simply and objectively, this is a team of professionals in every sense of the word, and it is an honour to call myself one of them.
Distance, I can say with certainty, is never felt as anything more than miles. The way this team communicates and operates closes that gap entirely, and I say that from my own shoes, sitting in Europe, working daily with colleagues across Africa and India. I can say, just as confidently, that no client working with this team would ever need to ask themselves that question either.
Taking into account the success this team has already built, global talent solutions across Africa and India feel like the foundation that Europe is the natural next step of.
When a client works alongside people like this, the outcome isn’t just hoped for. It’s an objectively successful collaboration, for any client, in any market.
If you’re a UK business weighing your next move into Africa, India or Europe, or simply curious about what genuine, on-the-ground partnership actually looks like in practice, I would welcome the conversation. This is, without question, the part of my work I find most meaningful: connecting real ambition with the calibre of people and expertise capable of carrying it through. You’re welcome to connect with me directly on LinkedIn, or reach out to the Dananda Global Talent team. We would be glad to hear from you, and gladder still to show you what this team can do.
Helena Murk
Head of UK Business Development
helenam@dananda.net | europe@dananda.net
What colour is the room you’re standing in right now, and where might it lead?
