Year One: The Diary of a First Year Recruiter


 

Sure, I spent 4 years at a top consulting firm in the country. Sure, it provided useful experience. However, no training could prepare me for how challenging this job has been.

First things first, making a placement isn’t easy. Recruiting is one of the only professions where you could do everything right and still be wrong.

  • Perfect job history? CHECK!
  • Perfect education? CHECK!
  • Perfect location? CHECK!

Yet the candidate is not good on the phone or he or she rambles in interviews. Perhaps the candidate simply doesn’t show up to the interview or winds up deciding against pursuing the opportunity. There is no training that can prepare a new recruiter to prepare themselves for closing a candidate at a number, getting an offer at that number, and then having the candidate not accept the position. The reason the candidate gives is irrelevant–it’s always heart breaking. Once again…you’ve done everything right, but you still lost.

When you begin the job, you won’t really understand what the difference is between a quality job order and a job order where a placement will never come to fruition. When you’re early in your recruiting career, ANY job order is like gold. You want to baby it and cherish it, perhaps even spend every second working it–Eddie Murphy once said if someone is starving, and you give them a cracker, they are going to think it’s the most delicious thing they’ve ever ate. After getting interest from a candidate and submitting a candidate data sheet and resume, you may never hear back from the hiring manager.

Meanwhile, 3 weeks of so-called  “productivity” have passed and you have nothing to show for it. So now what do you do? Go back to those other job orders you had and see if any viable candidates have surfaced through our various other search methods.

On the flip side, having legitimate job orders (i.e., high probability to fill, strong candidate pool, responsive client) is extremely rewarding. In this job, you may only get to celebrate on placements, yet there are plenty of emotional (and sometimes physical) rewards throughout the day.

For example:

  • The joy of FINALLY getting that awesome candidate on the phone and finding out they are interested in your role.
  • The euphoric feeling of finding the candidate who WANTS to relocate to a remote and rural area and has worked in a similar industry as your client’s.

These types of small rewards are great and, when they begin to snowball, this career becomes fun. I actually enjoy feeling overwhelmed by:  Did I put that interview in? Did I respond to that email? Did he respond to my email? If you are busy, chances are you’re doing something right. The goal is to maintain the snowball, continue to build, and never become complacent and/or settle because, just when you do, you find yourself scraping the job boards for EHS Managers with chemicals experience in an impossible geography.

About the Author

Michael-DesEnfantsMike DesEnfants has over 5 years of consulting and recruiting experience.  Prior to joining hireneXus, Mike was with one of the world’s largest human capital consulting firms.  He graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a Bachelor’s degree in Print Journalism.