Is there a career path for Recruiters??

Dear Team,

 Today when I see my team, I feel so proud of the current headcounts. We are about to touch 80 pharma recruiters  supporting different clients. At same time,  I have noticed many of you have joined the recruitment industry to just earn some money but not thinking to make your career. 

Whenever I ask  a recruiter where they’ll be in five or ten years and see what they say.

I’m willing to bet the vast majority would respond with “I have no idea” or something to that effect. That exact scenario played out in one of the suppliers meeting when someone asked the crowd if they had a career path for the next five years. There were more than 100 people in the room and at most, one or two recruiters raised their hands. The fact of the matter is, we are in a constantly evolving field with no clear path. In many cases, we make up the rules as we go along. 

My own career mirrors that of many recruiters out there. After graduating, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Somehow, I landed at Pinaki Technologies as an agency recruiter. This is where the majority of recruiters learn the fundamentals of recruiting; networking, sourcing, screening, negotiating and closing. I worked with an incredible team and to this day, remain close friends with my old co-workers, including board members Sharad Srivastava, Gautam Mishra and Kamal

In 2008, after more than seven years as an individual contributor, I started to yearn for a new challenge. Some folks naturally progress to Recruiting Manager but that that never appealed to me. During that time and by sheer coincidence, an old co-worker asked if I could help him find a contract recruiter. We found a guy and for the first time in my professional life, I found something I was truly passionate about. Three months later, I dedicated all of my time and efforts to growing LanceSoft Pvt. Ltd. 

Recruiting is a stark contrast as the field didn’t exist until the second half of the twentieth century and to my knowledge, no university in this country offers a Talent Acquisition degree. Hopefully that changes in the future but it won’t help those of us already in the profession. 

As recruiters, we constantly interact with people both inside and outside of our organization. The savvy recruiter is constantly networking and extending his/her sphere of influence. They are always on the lookout for a new challenge and on occasion, an opportunity presents itself. Odds are, there is no guarantee for success. You have to be willing to take a chance and fail. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world and you are better prepared for the next opportunity to advance. 

My advice to any recruiter wondering what their next step should be is to ask yourself the following question: “What am I truly passionate about?” 

There are an infinite number of potential career paths in the world of recruiting. Are you a superstar sourcer? Do you like tracking metrics? Do you enjoy public speaking? The career path for a Recruitment Professional is well established, just not well documented. For the first three years in a Recruiters professional’s career, they spend most of their time learning the core tasks of sourcing, interviewing, and presenting. The end of the fourth year of a Recruiter’s professional career offers them a variety of choices. Some opt out of the agency side of our business to go in house for clients as either a Human Resources professional or Corporate Recruiter. Others leave the industry completely. The ones who choose to stay in the industry on the agency side move into Senior Recruiting roles. 

The next evolution in a Recruiter’s career is in the tenth- to twelfth-year time frame. At this point a Recruiter will have accumulated a significant amount of knowledge about what it actually takes to:

Make a single desk model profitable

Develop and maintain great relationships with clients and candidates to maximize profitability

Develop and manage others to develop and maintain profitability

The unifying theme is that the responsibility for career development rests squarely upon the shoulders of the recruiter. No one is going to sit you down and tell you what you need to do. It really is up to you. I’ve been fortunate enough to have some incredible mentors in my career and advise every recruiter to seek out those willing to share their wisdom. Overall, we are a helpful breed and most are willing to guide folks with less experience.

At the end of the day, I wouldn’t want to have it any other way. Recruiting is like life; you get out of it what you put into it.