What career is there for someone who has worked in a recruitment agency?
It is always worth starting a little earlier in your career in considering your options. What you were doing before joining a recruitment agency will also have an impact together what your ambition is going forward and the skills that you have acquired along your journey.
For example, I was a teacher and found it a smooth transition into recruitment. The assessment of candidates requires looking to qualify them against the requirements of the vacancy. I need to determine where they are in regards to motivation for change and readiness for the challenges of the role and consider what additional skills might they need to fully deliver to the requirements of the role or perhaps take the deliverables to a new level.
Becoming an internal Recruitment Manager
So with this background in mind, life for me after my recruitment agency days was to head into Corporate life as the Recruitment Manager. I was given the responsibility to design and centralise the recruitment activities of an Australian national Government Enterprise. This involved negotiating and influencing senior managers across the State of New South Wales to engage in the centralised model of recruitment. Supporting the smooth recruitment of 15,000 positions became the domain of our newly established team.
So from day one, we were running. Absolutely everything we had learnt in a commercial recruitment practice was needed. Customer service, agility, confidentiality and our honed technical skills! The organisation asked for us to deliver an efficient process which passed the test of fairness and delivered the highest quality of recruits available at the best possible price. Within our first twelve months we had filled 1000 positions with customer satisfaction rating of 97%. 80% of these roles had been filled within 20 days.
As manager of this branch of HR operations, I became involved more and more in performance management, succession development, union discussions, agency agreements and management of the expansive and complicated casual workforce. My knowledge of generalist HR expanded enormously during these three years and has been a strong part of my bag of tools that I have carried forward. At this time I studied executive coaching and implemented into my management practice.
From this organisation I was recruited by a major Australian Bank to run the recruitment of a division of 6,000 people of institutional bankers. A particularly demanding group of clients, but then again no worse than my memory of Year 9 lower ability class of boys on a Friday afternoon from my original career of teaching! As an agency recruiter, you can’t afford to offend any clients no matter how challenging, so the strength of backbone developed during my previous careers came in very handy at the Bank.
I was asked to move across to assist procurement role out a preferred supplier agreement across the bank, covering 35,000 positions with an estimated category spend of $245,000,000. Over the two years in this position, we were successful in recording saving of $43,000,000 dollars to the Bank.
So where do you go from there?
I took a break overseas then returned and decided to take up a private executive coaching practice. I was asked by a small firm of executive search consultants to join them and provide search and coaching capability to their clients, generally in mining and infrastructure sectors.
Executive coaching and search
After two years the time was right for me to launch my own practice. That was three years ago and I am still going strong at SDTalent supporting clients with generalist HR advice, coaching to senior executives and succession candidates and conducting executive search as required.
If your career needs a boost after being a recruiter, we would love to hear from you for a chat.
