Internships, jobs, careers, consultancy/interim posts with:-

Harris Watson Holdings
&
Waterlinks Investments

The companies you might work for
(skip to the jobs listing and come back if you like)

John Harris & Sue Watson rescue unloved and unwanted companies. A better word might be resurrect, as there is no propping up of lost causes. John and Sue look to see if there is a product, a market and a commercial future before they step in. Often they are buying small or medium sized companies out of conglomerates in which they no longer fit. In the last months or years of ‘not fitting’ the company can often lack attention and investment of both money and people. Then it’s a question of finding the company’s commercial core, trimming out the non-essential activities, and picking the right people to take it into the future.

Sometimes it doesn’t work and the company has to be liquidated or a buyer found who values it for different reasons. Sometimes it works so well that explosive growth becomes the problem. Fifteen years on, Harris Watson (HW) and Waterlinks Investments (WI) own fifteen companies employing 1500 staff. The split between HW (Engineering) and WI (Retail Textiles) is largely cosmetic. It stopped buyers of the engineering products worrying about purchases being wrapped in ruffles, and for the buyers of textiles, that garments would be covered in greasy fingerprints. Or something along those lines. We tend to refer to the whole Group as Harris Watson Holdings

If there’s anything that ties all the companies together, other than John and Sue’s conviction of their commercial future, it’s design. Both engineering and textile design, predominantly of British origin, it has resulted in product, brand or market leadership despite the relatively small size of the companies.

Have a look at the websites; in some cases a make-over is long overdue (see Job Vacancies!): Viyella – first textile company in the world to patent its product; or Hoffman Engineering – global leaders in the technology of the conditions of low light.

If you want a pre-packaged career with a blue-chip who will teach you how to do it – stop reading now. If you’re hunting for a job where you’ll be at the heart of making things happen, under conditions ranging from survival to growing like gangbusters, learning from the mistakes you make as you try to do things that haven’t been done before – we should talk. Because another thing that ties the companies together is a need for bright brains.

And you’d better be happy with travel: inside the UK where our locations run from the Scottish Borders down through the Lake District, the Midlands, London, Bath and all the way to Dorset; and outside the UK where we have plants or sales outlets in the US, Germany and China, with plans for more. And, of course, customers everywhere.

www.harriswatson.co.uk | www.waterlinksinvestments.co.uk

Read Me Before Applying

At the bottom of the page you’ll find links to the descriptions of the vacancies we have and the application forms we’d like you to fill in, but first - a few important comments common to all of these:

Are you a contender?

We think most recruitment processes take far too long. So we undertake to let you know if you are a contender (or not) within 7 days of receiving your Application Form via this website.

Degrees and other qualifications

We’re not hung up on degrees etc but they are one way of proving you know your stuff. So, if you haven’t got a degree in IT you’ll need to show us the computer you built or the software you wrote or … And if you haven’t got a qualification in Art & Design you will have a portfolio, or photos of the interior design work that people have asked you to do, or, for whatever you’re telling us you can handle … a compelling track record.

Application Forms

We don’t think too highly of that great recruitment institution, the CV. It’s not easy to make a cv speak to all the things that you are, or could be. Instead, we rely on having a different application form for each job. The form is designed to allow you to talk about your ‘fit’ with the particular requirements of the job (and the description of the job is our best attempt to give you a feel for what that fit might be like).

The Perfect CV

One of the reasons that CVs don’t count for much with us is that tradition says they should be perfect: nobody ever worked for a rubbish company or a boss they couldn’t get on with - it’s always perfect – and unrealistic. We want people who’ve made mistakes (and preferably learned from them) and we want people to be able to talk about it.

Rescue for you

So (following from The Perfect CV) if your career with us takes a tumble or gets stuck, we’ll do our best to help you move on, whether within the Group or without. And we have someone centrally whose job it is to do this.

Development & Training

We believe that you’ll learn most ‘on the job’ – given the right challenges, boss and colleagues. On top of that we try to get a selection of our best people together for a few days each year, for a development experience and to share what’s going on across the Group. This is in addition to any training arranged for you by your local management.

Intelligence and other tests

We want to make sure that you have the best chance of fitting, both the job and the culture of the company. So later in the process, we may invite you to take some relevant tests.

The Small Print

We are of course an Equal Opportunities employer; we are looking for talent, not types.

Current Job Positions

Engineering and Design in Harris Watson Holdings

Companies run by engineers to do real engineering.
Problems to solve and results to see.
Whole products to assemble and test, not just parts to supply to someone else.

… imagine the following scenes:

Deep in the desert huge sand dunes sculpt the skyline. Suddenly the crest of one of them explodes to reveal a battle tank, airborne at speed, poised to crash down the steep slope. How can the tank take this punishment? And, never mind the tank, how about the men inside?

The engineers at Horstman Defence Systems supply some of the answers but the questions keep coming, posed by the defence industries of Singapore, South Korea, Jordan, the USA - and the good old MOD.

Second scene:

A high series saloon is taking a corner, tires squealing, rocking on the edge of losing it - with no one at the wheel. What's going on?”

What’s going on is being measured in detail by telemetry and the car is being driven dangerously by a robot. Robots can do this more happily than humans particularly if they are the latest wire-free generation being developed by Froude Hofmann.

And there’s no 'scene' for this one but it’s probably the biggest of the puzzles:

How do you blow up a suspected bomb, but leave it intact so that the bomber’s “signature” and the source of the materials can be identified?

It took the engineers at the Explosives Disposal division of ABP/AGI some time with wet towels wrapped round their heads to crack that one.

If you want real problems for you and your team to get your teeth into, and products you can see and be proud of, the companies in the Harris Watson group have more than their fair share. Why? Because, despite being small to medium sized they have global reputations, and clients to match, for their particular technologies.

How do you choose between them, the three above and others in the group? If you are a recent graduate, you may not have to. The group operates a scheme that allows you to move from company to company. In addition, there are opportunities to work for HQ on group-wide projects.

But if it comes to a choice:

Horstman Defence Systems is a tight family of sixty-five people whose home is the beautiful city of Bath. Their clients can see the future but need HDS to take them there.

Froude Hofmann is a bigger 200 strong operation located in the county of Worcestershire. Their clients are the aerospace and the automotive industry, in the throes of globalisation and needing to be shown the future of robotics, telemetry, and testing.

ABP/AGI is the biggest engineering company in the group and with the widest range of activities. If you want an emergency landing strip lit for an air ambulance or a robot to find a hidden bomb, call them. They are to be found in Poole in Dorset.

And Harris Watson HQ is on the Aston Science park in Birmingham.

www.harriswatson.co.uk and www.waterlinksinvestments.co.uk will take you to the websites of these and other companies in the Group.

Engineering at Horstman Defence Systems

HDS is a global leader in providing suspensions for military vehicles. For the last four years we've been pushing our reputation to an all time high. As a result HDS' 95 year history isn't going to be as exciting as our five year future (we will double our turnover to £25M+).

To resource this, we're looking for the following posts which will appear in full on this website within the next few days:

Strategic Purchasing Manager (posted)
Principal Engineer (posted)
Supplier Quality Engineer
Manufacturing Manager
Programme Manager
Test Management Engineer
Development Engineer
Production Engineer

Customer Service Manager Caught between Sales and Supply! (More)

Location

Selkirk in the Scottish Borders

Salary

£30 - 40,000

We need an experienced manager who knows that great customer service can actually generate sales. Reporting to the Sales Director (who is based in London) you'll lead a team of twelve looking after the 100 key accounts that produce 50% of our forecast £35 million sales, and the 2000 accounts that produce the rest. Beyond 'looking after' you will use your position to meet, and strengthen relationships with, customers and bring information back into the business to influence sales, supply and stockholding to better satisfy them.

Apply for position

Graduate Engineers (More)
Location: Bath, Birmingham, Nottingham, Poole, Worcester + travel - some overseas
Salary: £25,000; The Harris Watson/Waterlinks Investment Group of expanding SMEs (including Lyle & Scott) are looking for 12 graduate engineers for their 2009 intake. With a dozen companies averaging 100 on the payroll, we're big enough to give you variety of choice and security of future but they are small enough for you to matter from the start. We develop by developing you, the next generation of management. Engineers are enquiring minds, think in systems and structures, are great project managers, problem solvers, implementers - that's why we want you. (Oh, OK you'll do cutting edge engineering as well.) Engineering companies run by engineers doing world-class engineering for world markets.; Apply for position

Principal Engineer - Horstman Defence Systems (More)
Location: BATH + some overseas travel
Salary: £40- 50,000; HDS is a global leader in providing suspensions for military vehicles. For this job you will need a good first degree in mechanical engineering and the sort of brain that considered doing a second. Creativity is essential, linked to a desire to make your ideas with your own hands. You will have a couple of staff to help but your ability to invent solutions, design, assemble, test and redesign - will be central. It's likely you will have been doing this for some years, designing things that move. You may have picked up a couple of patents along the way and you may be shooting for Chartered Engineer. We will support this kind of personal development.; Apply for position

Strategic Purchasing Executive - Horstman Defence Systems (More)
Location: BATH
Salary: £50,000; HDS is a global leader in providing suspensions for military vehicles. For the last four years while we’ve been pushing our reputation to an all time high, our purchasing has not been keeping pace. We’ve tried a couple of ventures in Singapore and in Turkey and did all the right things but they didn’t deliver. We’ve held off on Poland because of this.; Apply for position

New Media Designers (More)