In this vlog, Hishem Azzouz explains the core motivation behind launching his recruitment-focused podcast. He begins by emphasizing the importance of having a strong "why" for any long‑term endeavor. As a daily podcast listener who uses his hour‑long commute to learn, he noticed a gap: existing recruitment podcasts didn’t deliver actionable, memorable insights. Drawing on a year of running a recruitment blog where he interviews recruiters, he sees an opportunity to turn those conversations into a podcast that extracts failures, setbacks, wins, and lessons from recruiters and recruitment business owners. His stated purpose is to provide practical value to listeners—helping them apply at least one new idea each day—thereby fostering collective learning and improvement within the recruitment community. This personal mission fuels his excitement and commitment, even when motivation wanes.
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So the podcast idea is great, but why do I actually want to start a podcast? This is what's important. I wanted to share with you guys why am I actually starting a podcast, because I think if you really don't have a strong why, with anything that you're doing in life, there's a real big chance that it's not going to end up being a long-term thing which you intend and hope it will be. So I wanted to share my why around why I'm starting my own podcast. So firstly, I'm someone that listens to podcasts daily, and that can be anything about just general life, self-help stuff, business, about people that I'm interested in. And because I work as a recruiter, I commute to work, takes me an hour, so I really utilize that time to listen to podcasts and learn, obviously, on my way to work, which I think a lot of people do now. And what I thought was, well, hang on a minute, why don't I actually listen to something which could help me when I get to work and turn up there? So I started listening to a couple of different recruitment podcasts, and none of them really sort of hit the spot for me, really. And I— it didn't leave me thinking, wow, I learned something there, or something that I could apply in that day. So I've been doing a recruitment blog now for over a year, and as I said, a big part of that is basically asking questions to recruiters like myself about their experiences, etc. So I was like, hang on a minute, we can as a collective we can learn. So if I can actually speak to other recruiters and also recruitment business owners on the podcast, and it's down to me to really extract their experiences, speak to them about their failures, what they learn about that, their setbacks, their wins, what they put that down to, then hopefully this podcast, which is the why essentially, is to give value to others like myself and also to people in the industry so people can listen to it and hopefully take at least one part of the conversation that they think, wow, I didn't think of that, or wow, I'm gonna try that today. And that's my, my real goal, and that is my why, because I think that's what it's all about, giving value to others. And that gives me great joy and what I'm excited about. So hopefully this podcast can achieve that, and that is the why that's gonna really drive me on and make sure that maybe sometimes when I can't be bothered to make a call or do a podcast, that is gonna keep me going, and that's what gets me really excited. So my why is to give value to others in the recruitment industry by extracting other people's experiences and sharing that with the world, which hopefully means that we can all learn as a collective and become better as a collective, which is what it's all about. So that's my why.
