My name is David Brown and I am an entrepreneur. No, I am an Entrepreneur! I have to admit, it took me a long time to realize this truth about myself. Yes, I have been successful working for others, but it was when I started working for myself that my career started to hum. What I didn’t understand until I started growing my own firm is that I had been an entrepreneur all along.
Every recruiter is an entrepreneur.
It is this entrepreneurial spirit I feel drives any good recruiter. Without this drive, recruiting can be a hard and thankless career. What I want to do in this post is share the three attitude adjustments I made that unleashed the entrepreneur within me. These have worked well for me and I believe they can be used by any recruiter, at any level, in any situation. These simple rules have the same impact on a new recruiter as they do a seasoned firm owner.
It is your company.
Regardless of who you recruit for, be it on the agency side or as an in-house recruiter, treat your desk like it is your own company. Your own piece of the American Dream. This ownership in your own work has a profound effect on how you show up each day. Much of recruiting can be rote, unfriendly, and frustrating. In these ruts it is comforting to think you are doing it for yourself. Yes, the job is challenging but it is your baby and it needs nurturing, routine, and discipline to grow.
If not you, then who?
The first rule informs the second. If it is your work, it is up to you to make it successful. If you don’t call your candidates, who will? If you don’t dig deep into the candidate’s salary, who will? If you don’t reject the candidate, who will? The reality is no one is going to do it for you.
Now this is not to say you need to be responsible for every detail of the process. DBI is a firm based on T.E.A.M. (together everyone achieves more). What I want to share is that no one else is responsible for your success but you. And when you are working as a team, your success supports the success of others, much like the owner of a company supports the success of those that work for him or her.
Whatever piece of the process you are responsible for, do it with all the gusto you can because if not you, who?
Don’t save smart work for the fire drill.
We have all been there. The client needs a candidate yesterday and by the way, why haven’t you called? This call triggers you pulling out all the stops. You are in the middle of a fire drill and things need to get done! It is these times that you truly put all of you, your effort, into one outcome. You are creative, engaged, and have one goal in mind, getting a candidate over to the client. You are working smart, if frantically.
I would encourage you to work smart at every aspect of your job, big or small. We all love to give a candidate the details of an offer. It is important to know the details of what the offer is but more than that, it is fun, thrilling, to make an offer to a candidate. What about working down a call list? Thrilling may not be the word I would use. However, treat this activity as you would an offer, or whatever your favorite part of the process is. Be creative, work smart and set goals. If you work smart at each junction, you will eliminate the fire drill, I promise.
I hope that you find these attitude adjustments helpful. That have been a great help to me as my career has progressed. I find them useful in my day to day and they help to inform my goals and plans. In short, I define my career by these three, simple approaches.
Best of luck.
