As part of our What Recruitment Means to Me; 500 words campaign Astrid Hall, who is Marketing Manager of Opus Recruitment Solutions, shares her thoughts on what recruitment means to her.
“Because I want to help people find jobs” are the words that echo from the mouths of budding recruitment Consultants as they sit in the chair of destiny awaiting their fate; will they pursue a career of opportunity selling, matchmaking and destiny endorsement?
About 99.9% say this in their interview because they think that’s what recruitment is as an trainee. This ideology that they have concocted from 10 minutes of Google search pre-interview is thwarted pretty early on and feeds a new existence; that recruitment is all about money. I don’t believe this is true either.
Yes, recruitment is a sales job so naturally it is well paid. You work hard, you get rewarded but I believe recruitment is much more than this. Recruitment takes a very particular skill – the ability to sell a person into a role that is extremely niche and can often be challenging to understand. I, myself, do marketing for recruitment, primarily in the IT space. This means a lot of getting my head around the technicalities of the market.
I set up events and find speakers for topics that I have to spend hours getting to the heart of, but the journey of discovery and knowledge-sharing is endlessly rewarding. I’m quickly building my innovation portfolio to the point of presenting my own roundtable!
This being said, the recruiters that are the most successful have a few very important things in common and they are what I really love about recruitment. They take time. They take time to understand their market, practically becoming qualified in it and, in some cases, they are. They get to know the candidates, their clients, they are networked and they actually give one!
Recruitment to me is about the people who do it well. The one’s who understand the difference between JavaScript and TypeScript. The one’s who attend the ‘MeetUps’, have drinks with their candidates. They want to talk to Joe Smith about last night’s football game and how his wife is getting on. They aren’t ‘sales people selling people’, they are people meeting with, engaging with and empathising with people.
“Because I want to help people find jobs”, many will speak these words on day one, but few will mean it by the time they retire their incredible efforts and recruitment career. But what I really love about this, is these people become successful in anything and everything they go onto pursue.
They are passionate about people and as a result they go on to become great leaders, thinkers or innovators. They start another recruitment business and breed better people out of that. If you bypass the stereotypes attached to the recruitment industry, then it actually does something pretty cool.
By doing a job where your top priority is the happiness and job satisfaction of another human beings, you can actually make better people out of people, and that is what recruitment means to me.
PS, if you want to write something for us as part of the 500 words series: the only criteria is that it must be a unique piece of writing you’ve not published elsewhere, you must work within a recruitment function or a recruitment agency/consultancy and you’ll need to stick to the 500 word limit. To take part send me your 500 word blog post with author biog and we’ll publish all which match our editorial standards.
