Following on from this:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/more-job-stress-retrain

I was offered a position as a Recruitment Consultant yesterday. Not something i’ve dreamt about doing, but i’ve been offered a comfortable basic salary with an attractive commission/bonus structure. Any stories/advice?

There is more than one kind of recruiter. If its a firm who value building relationships and providing clients with a good service that’s great. If you have to spend your day phoning companies who have advertised a vacancy stating no agencies and pester them to get on the list that’s not so good.
Try to find what the successful people there are like and ask yourself if you’re like them.

My flat mate does it. He’s not at the consultant level yet but he can double his basic salary if he gets a couple of folk into a position. He seems to enjoy it and the consultants in the company he’s with seem to racking it in. As far as I can tell, if you’re good at selling things and enjoy talking to people, it seems like a good job.

Be under no illusions, it’s a sales job. If that’s for you then it’s great, you’re largely master of your own destiny and if you’re good then the rewards are excellent. On the flip side there’s nowhere to hide if you underperform and not much of a career path to anything bigger/better. I enjoyed it for a good few years before I got bored as it’s not much of an intellectual challenge. I’m now in-house in resourcing/hr and a bit poorer but much happier.

I was a retained recruiter for 8 years or so working on senior sales and sales management roles 75k+ basic salaries and up.

The money can be very, very good if you are prepared to work hard, have the abilty to manage relationships well and are personable, well organised and likeable. A typical person in my firm took around 40% of their total billings which could be anywhere from 200-400k a year.

The upsides are the cash, the ability to build your own business unit and you can progress quickly if you’re good and find a solid niche.

The downsides only exist if you’re not resilient, hardworking and smart. I saw many people fall by the wayside.

I liked it but left to go back into enterprise sales as I found recruitment boring in the end.

There are companies who service the needs of a number of customers and focus on finding great candidates and delivering long term value. There are far more who pile the vacancies high and relentlessly and often underhandedly pursue the revenue, virtual boiler rooms so be very careful who you work for as shoddy practice is endemic.

It is a sales job, your candidates are your product. It is not HR, it is not people, it is sales. Some good employers but the industry is generally quite mercenary, you need to be able to look out for yourself. I hated it but learnt a lot and can see why other people enjoy it.

To earn decent money you need to be good, work very hard, long hours and not be afraid to be a bit of a git when you need to.

I do, 9 years in the industry. I absolutely love it but it is bloody hard work, silly long hours and mega amounts of stress. I work 60 hours per week on average, but even out of work my mobile is in 24/7 and when I go out I am constantly networking, I always want to know who works where and what they do. The plus is that I earn really good amounts of money and am in a job whereby I am pretty much in charge of my own destiny, this means if I fail it is down to me and I can’t pass the blame anywhere else. The company is really important as well, I could earn more (in the short term) at companies with less ethics but I like to be able to look my clients and candidates in the eye and know I don’t screw them over.

To conclude, it’s great but hard work and high stress. The cliche is that if you want to succeed in your first year of recruitment expect to do nothing else.

One of my mates does it, he’s at a consultant level so does pretty well from it.

Make no illusions though, they get their pound of flesh from him. He came from a fairly cut-throat car sales environment, which despite the stigma, set him up quite well for it. Only the strong seem to survive long term, and he always jokes about only being 3 months away from losing his job if he has a bad few months.

You might as well phone an estate agent

10 posts for the estate agent comment. My deliberately provocative response is that you get the recruitment consultant you deserve. The best people in the industry get contacted by the best consultants, the guys down the chain get the crap consultants. So if you’ve had a poor experience with an agent…

I haven’t done it but came close – I did work in other sales jobs for years though. It’ll probably be far more pressure and stress than your current job but you would get paid a lot more if you succeed – and if you don’t you won’t be there long! Definitely takes a certain sort of person, for better or worse…

10 posts for the estate agent comment. My deliberately provocative response is that you get the recruitment consultant you deserve. The best people in the industry get contacted by the best consultants, the guys down the chain get the crap consultants. So if you’ve had a poor experience with an agent…

You say you have worked in the industry for 9 years?

Your “diliberately provocative response”,let me see you are the unicorn of the recruitment industry?

Ill hazard to get an inbox full of chancers hoping to net 25k for putting you in a principle engineering role…all for trolling the net,or seeking some CV’s on a websit with job in the title

If you have ever been on the hiring side, and whilst I might not have dealt with you or the ethic you seem to allude to? 40 PHONE CALLS IN A DAY from a multitude double barrelled “partners” all claiming to be working on my behalf once the word is out that there’s a role at named company,

And yup how many trot out the ethic line “ill work for you to find you that guy/gal”, if truffles were shit I would have battery hen houses full of Recruiment agents I would be a millionaire purely on yield per head

Even the interviewees don’t know wether to tell the truth RE: what the agency has told them to say and are often somewhere between what has been said in reality between the company with a position to fill and the fiction of what the agency has told them to get them in front of,
they have barely left the interview before the agent is on the phone asking if I want to sign…

You might think your “down the chain” is some justification that a wanna make money for doing pretty much sweet f-all other than canvassing names and CV’s from sites where desperate saps put their hopes.

And on top of that if I was looking for a new role as a principle engineer ,I wouldn’t want anyone ringing me up and offering me 10k more because they know thats a cash cow placement if they can find someone on the move, I decide where and who I work for 😀 and companies hire me because they know of my abilities in certain fields.

So it’s really not good either way is it?, your “down the chain” companies aren’t doing you any favours in that they have done a lot of irreperable damage to even your lofty position, and people in my position wont give agencies the time of day.

I’ve been on both sides of the industry, and spent many years hiring engineers. Guess what? There are an awful lot of crappy engineers out there too. And some good ones too. That’s pretty much the same as any other profession. No one is forced to use agencies (I don’t in my current role), the fact that they exist suggests they provide a service that people want.

I might also have more sympathy for your point of view if you could express it coherently.

Struggled to follow misinform’s post but I’d agree with lunge (both from employer side and candidate) – the further up the chain you go, the more professional the agencies. At eng level for example, you get the “stack em high” mentality of trawling websites/databases for target words and volume approach at more senior levels things are much more focused.

Hora works in recruitment.

Does anyone want to translate missinformers post for me? All I took from it is that he would be entirely unemployable in any job that requires written English.

Aye I’m in the pub on a phone but crappy engineers tend to come from seat filler type agents, We now vet candidates the old way and despite it costing time and money up front it saves plenty in crap and fee’s

From the client side, if you want a stress free job don’t go into recruitment. I regularly put our agency under quite a lot of stress to supply workers at very short notice. I guess the sector(s) the recruitment agency services dictates how much stress and out of hours work there is. I am often on the phone to our agency in the small hours in the morning, I guess people who are recruiting bankers don’t get calls at 3am need in staff for 6am.

Pook – Member
Hora works in recruitment

Seems like a nice guy but can be full of shit. Sounds about right 😉 To be fair I quite like hora.

A mate has been doing it for about 12 years. Worked for 3 firms then went solo. Shortly before going solo he was earning £100k. Since going solo he’s doubled that and works literally a few hours a week. Global IT placements.

I met him in his first role. He was about 20 but a good laugh and 100% committed to doing the best for his clients and candidates. Almost a unique individual TBH, particularly given his age at the time.

The hours are long irrelevant of the industry as (cliche alert) the best people are already at work so you have to talk to them out of hours, whatever their hours are, yours are longer. I work in IT and telecoms and whilst I don’t get many calls at 3am, 9 or 10pm is pretty normal as is 7am.

As I said before, it’s really hard work, it’s really stressful and it’s not easy. But get with a good firm and you can earn well and have a really rewarding career.

Cheers guys. The jobs in education recruitment, upside is shorter working hours during school holidays, but i’m not going to be earning above basic during that time. I’m willing to give it a go, there’s nothing stopping me finding something else if it’s not for me.

Did you read the post above you, or did you just want to post ME ME ME again in case we’d not got it first time around?

I interviewed for a recruitment company a few years ago, as said, excellent money, but they were all complete dicks. Got an instant vibe that I really didn’t want to work there. Obviously not all companies will be like that, but I definitely dodged a bullet.

Did you read the post above you, or did you just want to post ME ME ME again in case we’d not got it first time around?

Wrong side of the bed?

Scunny, education recruitment is very feast and famine. Silly hours in term time, dead when its not. That would drive me mad but you’re opinion may vary. As an aside, I’m pretty firmly of the belief that recruitment is too hard to just “give it a go”. If you’re going to take that approach save yourself 3 months and don’t take the job, the only way to succeed is to throw the kitchen sink at it.

I’m not a recruiter but have been in the past. I still work in the industry and over the past few months been looking for a new role.
The laws in recruitment have changes over the last few years so there are less cowboys but the recruiters now have a lot more paperwork etc to juggle, leaving less time for a quality service.

In my own search for work I’ve been pretty appalled by the crappy nature of recruiters BUT a lady from Hays was very proactive and very professional.
Her comments were – if I’m pretty sure I can place a candidate, I’ll invest the time to do my best.
This payed off as I’ve now started a 6 month contract paying 70% more than my last role.

Recruiting is a pretty thankless role so stay strong, give it a try and try and move to an on site role ASAP 🙂

Did it years back. Long hours, great money, boozy nights on the town, punch-ups in the office….happy days.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Ever.

I had a mate who’s one, and his experience ties in with what’s been written above. Good money, your fired if you don’t get results, fistfights with both colleagues and candidates, widespread cocaine use and the mental instability which accompanies it.

Yep I saw a couple of colleagues with major dickhead dust problems, neither ended up in a good state. So I guess avoid all the substances and you will do fine, the money can be great.

From what I’ve seen it is a very pressurised and sometimes unethical sector to work in.

You can kiss goodbye to a lot of your free time and you had better be prepared to cut other peoples throats to be successful.

Long hours? One company had a policy that Consultants couldn’t leave their desks before 7-8pm otherwise it’d look like they weren’t committed. The ex-employee told me that they were literally sat there twiddling their thumbs bored with nothing to do for 2hours every evening.

If I went to an interview and the interviewer told me ‘its work hard/play hard here’ I’d get up and leave on the spot. There ARE good people in Recruitment- they stay as it just seems to click/work for them- probably because they do research, listen to both parties and aren’t shisters.

The stress and nature of the role churns out the nice people but also the plastic-estate agent types who will lie/deceive to get a sale within 2yrs of them starting.

OP- if you MUST do sales, do product sales. Products don’t let you down or disappear (there are some great candidates but sadly some with fictious CV’s/flaky and will disappear or try and go behind peoples backs (EXACTLY like Rec Consultants)..

Did it for 3 years, and been an inhouse recruitment manager for a further 9.

Some people seem to love it. I personally hated it. Not all recruitment jobs are sales however. I mangage the relationship between the bank i work for and one of our suppliers, one of the biggest non perm accounts in the UK. They run a manged service arrangement and don’t have to sell me a thing. Some of them find candidates and some manage relationships with the buisness. Find yourself working for a company like that and you’ll enjoy it. If you cold call me trying to place people from a non prefered supplier however I will ignore you.

Wrong side of the bed?

Sorry, if it wasn’t clear then that was actually aimed at Lunge’s post, not yours, which was entirely reasonable!

I did it for a short while but realised that I wasn’t cut out for it – I’m not a natural seller and you need to be for that job. I went to an interview in cheadle and the guy doing the interview was such a t0sser I actually stopped the interview halfway through and said ‘no thanks’ and walked away. I have never done that before or since… I put that down to the individual though, not the industry because even though it’s testostorone driven they are by and large ok

if you did do it for a while and then got out straight away then no-one would bat an eyelid because a lot of churn happens within that industry

I lasted 7 weeks before I had a melt down and told my Micro-managing Manager to go fist herself (shortly after recieving an email from head office offering £100 to anyone that places a candidate using the most imaginative scare tactics). Now back in the sector I left earning more money/less hours and with a clear consciense.

Haha, well done!

Beats the two days I lasted in East London selling photocopiers from a boiler room. I bet between us we could make an amazing sitcom.