A break into recruiter life

When I say “ I’m a recruiter “ a lot of people (including my parents) think “ Oh so you are … er, HR ? Right ? “

Truth is, recruiters are often external employees hired when the company is in need of someone to look over the job recruitment process — Meanwhile, human resources is often a department within a company that take care of employer branding, salary and benefits, … anything makes the working environment and employees more fun and productive.

A typical day for me

Disclaimer: this process varies cases by cases — as I am working for a top international recruitment firm, my job should be 360 recruitment instead of 180 recruitment — this means I have to face both the client side and the candidate side. My speciality lies on technology so its also quite niche comparing to other departments

me talking to a client (joke aside)

Now lets dive right in the first part: clients. Top banks like Techcombank, FMCG enterprises or tech giants like FAANG are using our services globally. We are expected to find these one by ourselves; convince them to trust us to do the hard job that the internal HR team or their own network cant do as well as help them to save time by giving a broad perspective about the market and manage their expectations since we must be experts in respectible fields. Gotta tell you this is the more challenging part in recruitment, but also a lot more rewarding in my not-so-humble-opinion

Cold calling a candidate

The second part is dealing with candidates — it takes 70-80% of a normal working day — from sourcing to interviewing to presenting them to clients, guilding them through the whole interview process as well as the negotiating offers and onboarding. Briefly dividing them into sections we:

• Source candidates: from Linkedin to Github, we have to improve our techniques relentlessly everyday — and usually not just because we have a job that we need to fill in but also to talk with top talents in the market to get more insights, what kind of technology is being used in different companies, which one is the top company etc
• Interview candidates: this is more like a casual conversation where we get to know each other, what candidates can and cant do so that we introduce to them the most suitable opportunities — if we don’t have, we will be transparent and save their sharing for further collaboration. As mentioned above, we also have a pool of talents not just a pool of jobs — because we want our work to be efficient — not like sending 10 JDs to a front end developer and asking them over again if they are matching with the keywords. We try to understand each individual properly — about their expectations as well as their expertises
• Building a bridge between clients and candidates: We assist our candidates — not in term of selling them to our clients but to help the interviewing and negotiating process runs smoothly the best way we can to avoid any miscommunications

my daily frustration

Soooooooooooooo what is fun and not fun while being a tech recruiter?

• Pros:

+Work with talented and most brilliant people, both in the candidate side and candidates

+Get updated with the latest technology trends and market

+Everyday is different: you will never get bored

• Cons: My job requires a lot of being out and about, meeting a lot of people, putting up with small talks so in my free time I just want to decompress. But I guess its hard to not to be contacted in a day. My housemate always complain about how my voice can be that loud and how can I spend 5 to 8 hours per day just to talk 😔

To summarise my sharing, this is something I feel very resonated to myself:

“ Recruitment gets a bad rap. There are many different opinions of what recruiters do and most would say that it is somewhat akin to people-trading — we pick a candidate closest to a job advertised on Seek and hard sell them into a company to simply get commission. This is incredibly far from the truth.

The reality is, good recruiters will genuinely care about a candidate and a client because we are all human beings at the end of the day. I personally love the buzz I get when I place someone in a role they are happy with. There’s absolutely no better feeling in this job than helping someone further their career AND helping a client find someone who will add value to their business.

Hats off to all the recruiters in my network because this job is hard…especially during a global pandemic. So, please don’t forget how important your work is and how much of a difference you can truly make to someone’s life “

What are your thoughts about recruiters? Let me know!