I have left the industry for many years now. Going on 9 years. And I bet the recruiting business hasn't changed much at all. I often wonder if I would ever go back. I fancy I was quite good at it when I was a recruiter. I wasn't by any means a cut-throat numbers cruncher, so maybe I wasn't that good, from the company's perspective. After all everything is about the numbers. You don't make the cut, you're gone. While I was in it, I did reasonably well.
My first "in" was a cattle call, off one of those short ads for making money you should never believe. It was straight off the heels of a mass interview from another of those kind of ads where I was ripped to shreds because I asked too many questions. It was a scam for selling perfume to people off the streets, in parking lots and back alleys. It was all incredibly shady and I was glad to walk out of that one and shame the recruiters and warn the potential "job seekers" of the fanciful accounting they were trying to sell to them.
Anyway, like I said..my first "in" to recruiting did come from a similarly worded ad. A reputable company with a proven track record was looking to hire fresh-faced, untarnished people to sell...people! And I had not learned anything from the perfume lesson, and went to try for this one as well. I was still new to America then. That's my excuse!
Turns out it wasn't so bad after all. My first boss was intimidating. She was this petite middle aged woman with neatly cropped short hair. She was attractive and somehow very enticing in her ways. We were first put through a battery of tests and the last one was a Myers Briggs test to make sure we were the right personality for her team. We were three of us, new to her team, and she picked me to watch over daily, situating me directly in front of her while we worked. She scrutinized my every move, every call, every word. I was so fed up of having to look at her day in and day out but I really appreciate her and thank her for maybe not trusting me to do well.
Our goals were, if I remember correctly - an average of 60 calls a day, totalling 2 hours of phone time. Every day. We read and "improvised" from a script and took notes while talking to candidates. All calls were logged and recorded, times were tallied and reports were printed. It was all in the numbers and you couldn't cheat the system. I learned fast. Initially she would stop me after each call and point out what I did wrong or didn't do. She would question why we took lunches or breaks. It was a hellish training that I loved so much that I would go home and continue to make calls. Then on weekends I would go to the office and make more calls. I think that this whole training way back when is the reason I can't talk to people on the phone for long any more, preferring face-to-face interactions any day.
With my boss's help, I was able to make some lucrative "permanent" placements and make quite a bit of commission on top of our meagre salary. Like any sales position, typically the salary is really disgustingly low, and you're supposed to be motivated to make all of your income via commission. For instance, this particular company charged a 30% commission off the new hire's starting salary. So if you place a person who makes 100k, the company would make 30k for the placement. That commission is then split top down, and the lowly recruiter still gets a nice chunk of change. Not a bad deal at all. It was a different breakdown with people who were placed as "consultants" but then the recruiter would get an ongoing daily commission based on the hours the consultant billed. Build up a nice base of consultants working for you and you'd still do all right.
to be continued
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