Crafting your career in recruitment jobs

One thing is certain, if you are good, you can make a lot of money from the recruitment industry, but how should you build on your early years in recruitment jobs for the best long term effects?

To answer this, try to imagine the view of a recruitment agency director looking for hot candidates to join his team. In an ideal world, what is he looking for?

• Experience of the type of recruitment they do, either temporary or permanent

• Experience of our sector, either as a recruitment consultant and/or perhaps employee in that sector.

• An excellent track record of results in what ever form of recruitment you have worked in to date.

• Honesty and a positive outlook

Having been the above recruitment agency director, there have been occasions where my immediate concern has been to avoid a particular candidate joining our competitors, achieve this and the world is your oyster! But how?

Personally, I would view your first three years in recruitment jobs as an apprenticeship in which your goal is to make your self irresistible to anyone looking for a recruitment consultant for their team. To do this, you need to build the components above, ie. experience in temporary recruitment, experience in permanent recruitment along with a strong and demonstrable track record in both. I would look to achieve this irrespective, and if necessary independently of earnings potential. The reason for this, is that once you have crafted your CV to become the perfect recruitment consultant candidate, then you can go about picking the most lucrative sector to work in, your earnings here would more than make up for any deficit in your first 3 years.

In the right sectors, a good recruitment consultant is worth their weight in gold. Think about it for a minute, in financial recruitment for accountants and such like, average fees for major players are around £8000 per placement. The difference between an 'ok' recruitment consultant and and excellent one, could be 2-5 placements per month respectively. That would be a difference of £24K per month £288K over the year in fees! In this scenario, a recruitment director stands to make a huge profit even off a large basic salary and 50% bonus. This shows why in some sectors, top consultants can easily command earnings in excess of £100K. The further good news is, it normally only gets better as contacts and networks grow.

So why write this article? I was approached yesterday form a consultant with 18 months in temporary recruitment and had apparently done well on a £15K basic earning £20K bonus. She was looking for a job with a bigger basic salary, maybe £20K and wasn't concerned whether it was permanent or basic. This is the time to think big, speaking as recruitment director, good recruitment consultants are very profitable and hard to find, and 'big' earning recruitment jobs are out there. With 12 more months experience in a permanent recruitment job and a good track record at it, this lady would be ripe to go after a recruitment job in a big paying sector, it's the same job bigger fees!

I began by saying that recruitment jobs are not for everybody, and they are not. But, if they are for you, and you're good, make the most of your opportunities, it's a great career with huge earnings potential for a little thought early on with your job selection.

Good luck