Looking At Recruitment As A Career? Here Is What You Should Know

As an HR student or someone who wants to pursue a career in the HR field, one would want to know the various options available to choose as a profession. Well, there are multiple job profiles like Recruitment, HR Generalist, HRBP, Payroll, Compensation & Benefits, Learning & Development, etc. In this article, I am going to share some insights on Recruitment as a career. 

Ideally, when you run the job search on portals, chances are that you may come across numerous job openings for a Recruitment profile and comparatively fewer opportunities for other roles mentioned above. But this shouldn’t be the only reason to choose Recruitment as your profession. It is always good to know how your job is going to be like.

The first glance of the job description (which talks about roles & responsibilities), may not give the hindsight of the actual job profile. So, here are a few things you should know about the nature of a Recruitment Job. This will help you get a better understanding and prepare.

Recruitment jobs can seem like the following:

Monotonous Job

Because Recruitment has a Standard Way of Operating (SOP). You may hear that the job is Monotonous quite often. Specifically when someone is working as a part of the consulting firm. After a point, the job would feel the-same-old since the tasks are repetitive. However, it is up to you to look at the actual essence of it and enjoy your work, or, go with what you hear from others. Undoubtedly the work process remains the same, but you get to learn much about various industries, profiles, hiring trends, innovative hiring approaches, you develop problem-solving perspectives, etc. So, once you overcome this monotonous routine of the job, your career becomes more likeable. If you think about it, helping a candidate with his career is a noble job.

Target based Job

Ideally, recruitment involves dealing with numbers. Numbers of positions, number of closures, revenue aspects, and all these working around a TAT (Turn Around Time). Basically, a time factor within which you need to plan your strategy and realize the expected outcome. If you like such challenges then why not go for it?

Desk Job

It is mostly a desk job, except when you are a part of Campus Hiring Team or Volume hiring team where you need to manage various job drives and events to recruit candidates, outside of your office space. With the use of technology, most of the tasks are performed through a system in place, which does not demand much physical movement.

If this seems a right fit for you, here are a few attributes needed for an aspiring Recruitment professional:

Self-learning

Most of the organizations provide you with training on how you should carry out your job, along with some organization-specific inputs. However, that’s just to start with. There would be an infinite number of new things that you come across while working as a recruiter and everything can’t be taught. If you have a habit of self-learning by researching, interacting, etc. then it makes your work more interesting and easier to perform. A hunger to learn keeps you going forward.

Patience

Patience is a virtue for a recruiter. Not all the requirements that you work on are going to be a cake-walk. Many times you may have to go out of the way to reach out to that niche pool in the market. Sometimes you learn through trial & error when you work on a completely unknown skill-set. Your expected results may take time. But you need to be focused, keep learning, and trying rather than getting demotivated. Remember, giving up a step before a finishing line is no wiser.

Effective Communication

This not only means how efficient you are at English but also how you use it to connect with candidates. Specifically when you are interacting with them over a call. As they cannot see you face-to-face or your expressions, your voice plays an important role. It’s about using the right pitch, tone, speed, etc.

Approachability

The way you approach candidates to offer a job is very important. It helps build a good rapport with them. You will eventually have to create an image of a recruiter who is kind, helpful, and informative to candidates. If you are a talkative person then use this quality as your strength.

Personally, the Recruitment profession was something I never thought I will get into. Back then, I had only considered a role as an HR Generalist. It could be due to lack of awareness or exposure to my corporate knowledge, or lack of information on planning a career well in advance. But, after years of experience, I am glad I chose Recruitment where I grew in terms of knowledge, exposure, professional connections. Today it feels like my profession chose me.

I hope this article gives you an insight into the hiring profession and help guide your career in Recruitment.