I’m a recruiter.

I’ve fallen prey to over complicating my profession and sometimes I even did it on purpose.  As I talked to friends, colleagues, future clients or prospects, it was easy to creatively embellish what I did to add value in the world and my creative phrases and titles made me feel like I was being more cutting edge, cool or even sophisticated than was fact.  I’m confident that I’m not the only person in the history of recruiting to embark on “title creativity”, am I?  Hell, the industry I chose to join and have continued supporting since 1997 has gone through an evolution over the years and this evolution was sparked, in large part, by people who were interested in being perceived as something more complex than their role (s) required.  All of that said, our business is awfully simple and it is clear that this overabundance of titles and career explanations has placed a bit of a cloud around the clarity of what we do, professionally.  Let’s remember that a responsibility comes with our profession and this responsibility is rooted in supporting other people!  

Have you ever heard the phrase, “the cobbler’s kids have no shoes”?  The etymology behind this phrase is very straightforward - it means the cobbler - who makes shoes for a living - chooses not to provide shoes for his own family because he is too busy making shoes for his customers.  With all of the evolution going on in the recruiting industry, could it be possible that some of us had fallen into the trap of being the “cobbler”?  Please know that I’ve worked within a specific segment of the recruiting industry for the bulk of my career and it’s called Recruitment Process Outsourcing; or RPO for short.  As proclaimed experts in the field of recruiting, we design and deliver recruiting support (sourcing for candidates, screening candidates, interviewing candidates, background check support for those receiving offers and our teams produce the actual offer documents for our clients, too).  We do this so our clients can realize more efficiency, attract top talent, generate stronger business outcomes than they would without us and maybe even save some money in the process.  So suffice it to say, we know what it takes to attract, interview, hire and support recruiting, right?  So what happens when one of our “own” joins the ranks of the unemployed?

I’m a candidate.

I’ve recently joined WilsonHCG, a global provider of Recruitment Process Outsourcing and Talent Consulting services headquartered in Tampa and my role was designed to support the growth of our Americas’ region.  I had a positively unique hiring experience because their passion, their delivered promises and their belief that this industry makes a positive impact on the world was very clear.  The interview process wasn’t as positively unique with some of the other organizations I visited during my search.  I’m writing this article as a reminder to all of us in the business (hiring managers, recruiters, sourcers, executives and business developers), that I was a business leader (focused on running an RPO company) in December of 2016, who quickly became a “candidate” in the market partly because I had forgotten about how critical is is to add value to the clients you support, the candidates you attract and the people you lead.  For the first time in 15 years, I was required to proactively seek out employment and I put my “recruiter” skills to work and networked my way into great discussions about the next stop on my career and I assumed that I would see some amazing things from our industry.  Logical, right?

I’ve already told you that this chapter of my story has a positive ending, but the middle of this chapter- it kind of sucked.  Between December 23rd and March 3rd, I interviewed with some of the most widely respected recruiting companies (in the world) and my experiences were less than pleasant.  No one did anything mean, rude or intentional...it just felt like they weren’t very good at creating the “candidate experience” that so many of them talk about during their pitches and proclaim on their websites.  Promises of call backs, engagement and collaboration were made and then squandered.  The discussions about “setting a meeting” were scheduled and then pushed and pushed and pushed again.  My applications, delivered through the most cutting edge applicant tracking technologies, were laborious and made you feel, every day, like the experiences gathered during a 20 year career were worthless and this didn’t anger me.  It made me sad!  I was (and still am) an executive in this industry, and what I’ve learned through this process and what I’ve recognized during my search was something of karmic law.  I’d lost sight of what I was, so when I became a candidate, I was afforded another perspective, the perspective of the candidate and although we all have board meetings, big presentations, giant requisition lists, tough to fill roles, challenging hiring managers and a variety of other deterrents in our days, we are all responsible for our own actions and those actions (and some days in-actions) caused a ton of anxiety, for me, during this process.

I chose a profession that carries with it a responsibility to be responsive, proactive, engaging, compassionate and caring and I wasn’t being consistent in those actions as a leader, which led to my change of employment and these are the very actions I found from the team at WilsonHCG and I’m thankful for their support and interest in having me support them by adding value into the business .  

I’m a recruiter and a paperclip thinker.

In the near future, you’ll hear more about what it means to be a paperclip thinker.  The philosophy was something I created over eight years and it is all focuses on how we can choose to think, divergently versus convergently.  I’m looking to explore divergent thinking (the “how many” behind the phrase- how many ways could you…), so let’s try it.  How many ways could you come up with a process for staying in contact with a candidate?  How many ways could you update your hiring managers?  How many ways could we work to form a new RPO partnership?  How many ways could we add value, today, as a recruiter?  Those answers are up to us and are part of being a paperclip thinker.  The power of this methodology; I believe thinking divergently can make an impact on people...every single day.  I hope we get the opportunity to chat, so when you ask me what I do for a living, I can respond, simply with...I’m a recruiter and paperclip thinker.