The best opportunities often seem to happen when you least expect them—and when you’re not even looking for them! That was the case for Alison MacConnachie when she was recruited to join Accurate back in 2012.

Alison hadn’t been looking for an opportunity. In fact, she had a one-year-old at the time. But her LinkedIn profile attracted attention and she was approached about considering a position with Accurate. She agreed to go through the interview process and found that she really liked everyone she interacted with. “Everyone was just super friendly, and it just felt very comfortable,” she says. So, she agreed to join the company as an account manager and the rest, as they say, is history.

Almost a decade later she’s still with the company but has moved through various roles and locations.

For a time, Alison even went to work for a competitor. It was an experience that drew her even closer to the people and culture at Accurate.

The Grass Isn’t Always Greener

Opportunities seem to follow Alison around. While working at Accurate, she says, “I just got a pretty ridiculous offer that I couldn’t say no to.” But she stayed in touch with her colleagues, her manager, and even Accurate’s CEO at the time and parted on good terms. They understood her decision and supported her choice although she acknowledges that she took some friendly ribbing about leaving the company while she was gone.

Ultimately, she decided that the culture at her new job just wasn’t quite right for her. She found that her colleagues didn’t have as much experience, there was a lot of micromanaging going on and the opportunity for work/life balance that she enjoys at Accurate just didn’t exist there.

“It just didn’t feel right. I was happy to come back,” she says.

Today Alison is a key account manager having moved through the account manager and strategic account manager positions with Accurate. Accurate’s focus on serving customer needs exceptionally well really resonates with her. She’s found the company to be a good cultural fit.

Working as One

Accurate’s culture is built on four core values pillars that unify the company with a common purpose, define where they’re headed, indicate what they’ll do to get there, what they believe in, and how they will behave with each other and their customers. They are:

• Take ownership: be accountable for your actions, your team, and the company.
• Be open: be open to new ideas.
• Stay curious: stay curious even as you move forward.
• Work as one: work together to create the best customer and workplace experience.

For Alison, the value that resonates the most is “work as one.” Most people, she says, are willing to just jump in and help with anything. “We’re always working as a team, whether we’re on a team together, on different teams, or just trying to march toward the same goal which is really giving the best experience to our customers.”

In her current role, Alison has a coaching style when it comes to managing accounts. It’s all about working together to bring in different ideas and determining what’s best for Accurate’s clients, she says.

Finding Support During Challenging Times

Alison also has a very personal reason for feeling so committed and loyal to Accurate. “I was diagnosed with breast cancer while I was employed at Accurate, and I just got so much support from people at work,” she shares. “Everybody was just so supportive of what I was going through from the top down,” she says. She doesn’t believe all companies would offer that same kind of support.

“They might have health and wellness perks, but a lot of the time they just don’t offer that kind of support—the kind that just lets you take a pause to address anything serious going on. The fact that Accurate does is huge,” she says.

A Team That Feels Like Family

Alison has worked at four different background screening companies, she says, but Accurate really stands out in personally and professionally meaningful ways. “I’ve had the pleasure of working with a variety of people throughout different companies, but the team at Accurate is truly the best,” she says—“whether it’s them supporting you personally or professionally, or just everybody jumping in together, or just going out to dinner and enjoying peoples’ company. That’s the main difference.”

She loves the role she’s in today and the opportunity to help members of her team find new ideas—“just brainstorming with people that are going through certain scenarios with their clients and trying to find ways to improve either processes or programs.”

Alison doesn’t know where her future might take her, but she’s fairly confident that she will be with Accurate in some capacity for a long, long time.