25 Years of Recruiting

2020 will be my 25^th year as a recruiter and my 50^th year on this planet. Half of my life spent courting candidates and following up with clients. There have been nights where I lay sleepless, thinking of everything that could go wrong with the offer to the engineer who has 2 other offers besides the one from my client. Phone calls where I have had to bite my tongue to avoid making a rude outburst as a client explains that they decided to go with someone internal for the role rather than my candidate who completed 15 interviews with them over the past 4 months. The constant evolution of a job description from the first day you start working on it to the 30^th day is a special kind of torture. Recruiting has always been a challenging job, competing with job boards, other recruiters, and internal hiring. Speed is essential in this business and as the demand for the best people heats up, it is getting more intense.

I would not trade my job as a recruiter for any other job in the world though.

What other professions would allow me on one day to discuss the needs of a Fortune 100 firm with their CEO and how it relates to the CTO they need to hire and the next day to be chatting with a new software startup and strategizing on how they can balance their programmer hiring and outsourcing to minimize costs while still meeting growth forecasts. With Fidel’s focus on Technology and Language we cover a broad range of clients dealing in entertainment, banking, manufacturing, startups, and more. Everyone has a need for IT and technology and as companies expand around the globe, it is impossible to ignore language as a key job requirement for many roles.

The global aspect of being a recruiter these days and the excitement of being involved with new technology everyday is an exciting part of the job but more important to us AND more gratifying is the impact we have on the people we work with every day. Terms like recruiter, client, customer, candidate, company are necessary and descriptive but they take away from the fact that we are all human beings first. We don’t deal with a company but rather the hiring manager at that company who is someone’s dad or sister or uncle and by helping them fill a role we make a difference in their life. The Delivery Manager who needs 3 more engineers to meet his deadline will get his bonus and maybe a promotion because we helped find the right people for him. That is a big deal and to use economic terms, will trickle down to his family as well. That is what drives us at Fidel to spend an extra hour in the office for an interview Friday evening.

There is nothing like that call from a candidate after their first day on the job thanking us, the recruiter, for helping them to begin this new adventure in their life.

Work-Life Balance? Who Are We Kidding???

The first result in a google search for “how long do we work” comes up with a study from Gettysburg College claiming that we will spend one-third of our life working. What kind of difference would it make to your outlook on each new day if instead of dreading the trip to your office, you sprang out of bed excited about your life (this is how I greet the day!)?

When you are working all this time, spending almost half of every weekday focusing on doing the job you were hired to do, it is nearly impossible to think about a career outside of your current sphere. How can you possibly know that the experience you have gained as a database engineer has made you a good fit for a role consulting on fraud detection at banks or insurance firms? We know though. We see all the jobs and from a bird’s eye view, we can see the connections and overlapping skills that most people do not have the time or energy to research themselves.

As a recruiter, we have a chance to make a difference in someone’s life.

The Next Generation Matters

I have been teaching a course on career strategy at Temple University in Japan for much of the last decade. I hope that I am helping to make a difference in the future lives of my students. They are heading into a fast-changing world where the jobs of the past may not exist and new ones may not be obvious yet. The example I often give is a drone pilot. 10 years ago very few people even know what a drone was much less that they could build a career out of it. Now there are drone racers, drone crop dusters, drone building maintenance, drone mapping, etc. all requiring skilled remote control pilots. I am sure that 10 years ago there was a teenager getting scolded by his parents about spending too much time playing with toys. That teenager is now making an average of 5 to 6,000,000 JPY a year playing with those “toys”.

The War for Talent

Staffing and retention is listed as one of the top challenges for companies the world over in every industry. As more routine jobs are automated the competition for the best and brightest will increase. I have already seen many changes in the last 25 years. Companies who made due with one generalist human resources team who handled some recruiting are now made up of dedicated and aggressive talent acquisition teams equaling and sometimes surpassing the size of the human resource generalist division. At Fidel Consulting we do not just want to deliver resumes but actually make a difference in the success of the company by providing talent solutions. The pool of perfect fit candidates (known as unicorns) is small. We can bring new insights into how talent and skills from other industries might be transferrable to the client’s needs. While our clients need to be focused on their core skill sets and industry categories, we cover a broader range and see connections they might overlook.

What is next?

Like most of us, I have many titles in my life: husband, father, brother, friend, professor, recruiter, and manager to name a few. I try to make a difference to the people I come in contact with. I want my wife’s life to be better because she is married to me. I hope that I am making a positive difference in the futures of my children through both guidance and by setting a good example for them to follow. For my team, I want them to grow professionally and financially so that they are more capable recruiters and can make a difference for their families first and our clients and candidates as well.

Everything we do at Fidel has the final goal of making life better for those we come in contact with. We want the people at our clients to hit their targets and grow because of the difference our introductions and candidates make to them. We want our candidates to feel that they are on a better and more gratifying career track because we identified and introduced them to the perfect job and company. We strive to improve daily and to understand the needs of both clients and candidates so that we can add more value to their businesses and their lives. We want to make a difference.

Fidel Consulting KK 

COO, Lawrence Kieffer