A recruiter argues that formal education doesn't matter in recruitment. What counts is resilience, emotional intelligence, and how you adapt your communication style as the job shifts from phone calls to email. Personality determines success, not your background.
Chapters
The cool thing about recruitment is it doesn't really matter what background, what education, or anything you have. It's not based on that at all. So you look at half the office here, you have people with meteorology degrees, law degrees, philosophy degrees, all great recruiters. But look at their resumes, you're like, they don't match at all, they're completely different people. So it does, as you say, come completely down to characteristics. And for me, number one I look for is resilience. So I always need some form of example from someone of a time that they failed. And it can be small, it can be huge, but I think what's really important coming into this job is having some muscle memory of failure and then what came after that. So what lessons you learned, how you changed the way you did something, because you and I both know this job is all about failing every single day, learning from it, doing it again, not giving up. So I think an example of this is something I look for in every grad interview that I do. If someone says I've never failed, one, I don't believe them, but two, they're going to have a pretty hard ride joining this type of a career because you start knowing nothing and the only way you really progress is by doing it wrong, being told, hey, change this up, and then just learning by doing. So I think resilience is key. I think number 2 is emotional intelligence. So this job's all about speaking to people, connecting people. If you don't like speaking to people or talking to different people, understanding one person's very different from the next, you've got to sell in a slightly different way or talk to them in a slightly different way, you're gonna struggle with this job. And I think recruitment is slowly like morphing into more of an email writing type thing rather than when I started where it was just like pound the phone, get on the phone, just call switchboards. I think now in the techie age we're at, it's harder to pound switchboards where most most of your clients might not even have a switchboard. So I think maybe it's less important just by selling with your words, but also now on email. But I think emotional intelligence, knowing your audience is also key. Those are the two main ones I think I actually look for outside of the, are you competitive? Like, this is a sales job, this is not HR, this is not a form of other consulting, this is sales. You have to want to be number one, hate being number two. But also, do you understand that working together is key to building a business? And for us especially, we can't have a bunch of salespeople who just want to be number one and not help the wider cause. We have to have people that buy into the vision, that want to help each other and grow the company, because they know if they do that, they'll be more successful for it. I think those are the things I look for. But apart from that, it's a really cool career where, to be honest, it doesn't matter what the resume or CV says. It's purely based on the personality interview when I speak to them. Like, I'm never going to know if someone's going to be a good recruiter through just looking at their background, which is why I love this sort of thing. I get to work with different people from different backgrounds who all bring different characteristics, but I think Yeah, resilience and emotional intelligence are the key things I look for.
