I am not a recruiter, but I have had the good fortune to work with a few talent acquisition professionals over the years. As they shared with me their personal career stories, it struck me how common it is for recruiters to come into the profession as a 2nd or 3rd career. Many of them came from areas of business that are totally outside the human resources function – like marketing, sales or accounting – and were drawn to recruiting through serendipity or by seeking to expand their own careers in new and interesting ways.
I wondered, why so many successful recruiters come from completely different career areas. Is there something about having work experiences in other domains that helps people become top recruiters? And what transferrable skills did they bring to the job that have helped them be so successful?
I sat down with three top talent acquisition professionals who made the switch from completely different careers to ask:
1) How did you fall into recruiting?
2) What capabilities are most important for someone considering a career in talent acquisition?
3) Do you have any more advice for would-be recruiters?
I spoke with:
Rachelle Snook, Global Talent Director for WD-40 Company,
Brenan German, Founder and President of Bright Talent, and
Paul Gonzales, Director of Talent Acquisition for Orora
This is the first part of the series, where we would discuss: How did you fall into recruiting?
Paul Gonzales: I have hired dozens of recruiters over the years, and this is one of my favorite questions to ask people when I am interviewing for recruiting positions because almost everybody fell into recruiting somehow. When have you ever heard a child say, “When I grow up I wanna be a recruiter!”?
I started my career right out of high school working at UPS. While I was going to Pasadena City College I was loading up brown trucks at 3:00 am. After a couple of years there, at age 19 1/2, they tapped me for a supervisor role, which I did for about 5 years. Gradually, over time, I moved up the ladder in operations.
One of my mentors took a job in what was then called “personnel” (today it would be human resources). One day he approached me and said, “UPS is opening up a recruiter position and I’d like you to apply for it.” And that’s how it started for me.
Of course, I had no idea about recruiting or what the job would entail. He explained to me how I would be working to hire employees for the company, I would be interacting with lots of different people at career fairs, going to colleges and community organizations, etc. I asked, “Why me?” He said, “Because you’re a people person.”
I told him I would think about it. It did sound like something I might be good at, so I applied, got the position and thus began my 30-year career in recruiting. I started out hiring for three large UPS facilities in the metro Los Angeles area.
After about three or four months on the job, I knew recruiting was a career I would be in for the rest of my life. I love meeting people and I love the interactions. And I love connecting people to the organization – the success of being able to fill positions that support the company while at the same time helping someone get a job. Seeing that person succeed and being happy they got a job, is very fulfilling.
Rachelle Snook: I graduated from college with an accounting degree. I worked in a corporate accounting job for about six months and realized that job was not for me, so I took a job in a family-owned business doing their accounting and bookkeeping. They were operating two different businesses – the husband owned a bunch of coffee retail shops and the wife ran a fashion agency. I ended up not only doing all their books, but also their payroll, and then eventually I got involved in hiring people as well.
At one point they had a big fashion show coming up and needed to hire catwalk fashion models. The owners were too busy and did not have time to do it, so they asked me if I could take on the task of recruiting models. It was a completely new area to me, but by that point, I understood the business well. I worked with the fashion designers to understand the profile of the ideal model for their couture, such as specific physical attributes, height and build, and so on. With little direction from the owner, I recruited college friends, used modeling agencies, called models we had previously worked with, and asked the designers if they had any recommendations.
Recruiting, as it turned out, was a job I enjoyed because it tapped into my natural sense of curiosity and problem-solving – identifying what is needed in a given situation, and then finding solutions. And that is a combination of skills I think a lot of recruiters have in common.
When I moved from Australia to the U.S., I ended up working as a researcher in a retained executive search life science firm. Those were the days before LinkedIn, so we had to be resourceful in figuring out ways to find the right people for jobs. For example, I was sourcing for a regulatory VP for a biotech company, so first I needed to find out everything that specific job entailed, as well as the unique requirements for the hiring company, and the size and depth of the talent pool, before I could even start looking for potential candidates and requesting referrals.
From that job I moved to a contingency staffing agency specializing in HR and, eventually, I moved into corporate recruiting. The discipline and skills I developed in retained and contingency staffing have proven to be invaluable in my in-house company talent acquisition roles.
Brenan German: I was a distracted student until I entered junior college. It was there I found my love for reading and writing, and I had an influential English teacher, who encouraged me to study English and creative writing at university. I was not sure how that would translate into a career, however. At the time I thought I might become a professor and poet. I applied to a few MFA programs, but in the meantime, I met my future wife Lori and, by luck, landed a job with The Gallup Organization.
I saw a job posting on the bulletin board in the university career center for a project manager with The Gallup Organization and applied, despite having no skills or experience in project management. The interviewers at Gallup recognized some potential in me and hired me to work in their small field office in Irvine, California. As it happens, Gallup is the organization that developed Strengths Finder and was pivotal in the development of behavioral interviewing techniques to identify what behavioral competencies are needed for a specific job. That certainly worked out well for me!
I was working as a project manager between Gallup’s field office analysts and the operations team in Lincoln, Nebraska which was conducting employee/patient surveys for healthcare systems. When Gallup decided to open an interviewing center on the West Coast, they assigned me the job of researching how many college students were within a 20-mile radius of Irvine. (Polling work is a great pay-for-performance, part-time job for students)
There are a lot of colleges and universities near Irvine, so that location was eventually chosen for the West Coast interviewing center, and it was then Gallup tapped me to become a recruiter. I initially said no because I had no experience in recruiting. But, again, the Gallup team knew my competencies and strengths better than I did. They saw that I was good at engaging people, and convinced me that I was a great fit for the role.
My training was all on the job. They taught me the skills I needed for behavioral interviewing, and once I started, I discovered I really thrived in recruiting. I enjoyed the work because I was getting paid to do something that came naturally to me, and I loved learning all the methodologies of recruiting.
I was with Gallup for about four years, and from there I rose through the ranks in several different companies – from an IT staffing company to corporate talent acquisition and, eventually, into overall HR leadership positions.
A layoff inspired me to use my skills for building and operationalizing HR programs to start my own consulting business.
In the second part, we will explore what capabilities are most important for someone considering a career in talent acquisition, and in Part III, we will share the advice these recruiters have for would-be recruiters.