recruiter as a career start

Hi Martin

I work as a recruiter. I did corporate temporary recruitment, worked for an agency doing permenent and temporary recruitment for a while, and now I do corporate recruiting for permanent staff.

Edit: should have read your title!

In my experience recruiting is a really easy job to get into. Agency recruiting has a really high turnover (because it's HARD!) so there's usually spaces.

Novice recruiters get a 'desk'. That's one section of the market. I had temporary accountants upto £9.00/hour. It's your job to make that desk profitable. Your wage usually depends on it. You will have a low base salary and commision dependent on your placements. Recruiters usually work early morning till late at night, meeting candidates, meeting customers, calling customers, sending CVs, calling more customers!

The people who are good at it are competitive, driven, don't take no for an answer and have the resilience of rubber balls. I am a soft hearted, pillow minded girl and I was rubbish!!!

Be good at running a desk, and you'll get to run an office. But the pressures are the same - you have to make that office profitable.

Corporate recruiting is harder to get into, you usually need experience, and there's more competition. But it's more secure, and better for those of us who need to feel nutured! If I wanted to be a manager - I'm not sure I'd use recruiting to get there. I'd go into an operational role in a company and become a team leader - personally, I think that's more valued - recruitment (and HR) is a cost, whereas operations make money.

I hope that gives you the basics. Feel free to ask if there's more I could tell you.

Wendii

Martijn,

I have done short (6 months each) stints in corporate recruiting and agency recruiting. The corporate recruting role I did from a base of having been in operations and operations management for some years - I had a deep understanding of the requirements of my internal customers for their recruitment needs.

The agency stint I did was, as Wendii says, HARD WORK! The thing I did gain from that role was a fantatsic understanding of the details and content of many different roles in industry. It was a real eye opener to many new and exciting jobs I'd never realised existed let alone looked at closely!

I would suggest a limited time in an agency role if you want the opportunity to find out about different jobs. But personally (and I identify with Wendii here) I wouldn't take it on as an entry - per se - into a management role.

Hope that helps.

Martin-

You're getting good advice here. Recruiting is NOT a good way to start a career change because you'll have little knowledge of one side of the fence or the other.

Ops is the way to go for now.

Mark