The recruitment industry generally receives some bad press. It’s seen as a challenging career that sometimes requires long hours and hard to hit sales targets. To be successful you need to be self-motivated, resilient, have grit, be an excellent communicator, express empathy, know how to work in a team and show determination. This is exactly why athletes would make ideal recruiters and generally why recruitment agencies look for an “athlete mindset” when hiring.

As you may know by now, athlete2business places former pro athletes into corporate jobs. Almost 60% of our successful placements have been in the recruitment industry. The athletes we’ve placed have not only been successful in their role, but also found fulfillment they’ve been missing since retiring from pro sports.

Recruitment can not only be a lucrative career, but also a fulfilling one! Here are 7 reasons why:

1. Meeting Clients: Unlike most office jobs, you’re not chained to your desk. You’re attending meetings at various client’s head office locations dissecting their hiring needs. You’re also attending various networking events in order to win new clients. Not only are you perfecting your communication skills (you’re talking to people all day everyday), you’re building relationships with high level executives which will last a lifetime! If there is no immediate benefit for those relationships, there certainly might be in the future as having a business network adds massive value to your resume.
2. Meeting candidates: Just like meetings clients, you’re meeting with candidates to assess their skills and ascertain whether they’re the right fit for your client. You become an expert listener, which again adds massive value not only to your resume but life in general.
3. Finding the perfect match: Essentially you’re like a real life dating app. Instead of finding love, you help people find the right career and clients find the right candidate. When the match ends up being perfect and the client offers your candidate the job and the candidate takes it, the feeling is honestly similar to hitting the game winning shot, pitching a perfect game, hitting a home run, scoring the winning goal or try, winning a race, setting you PB or winning a championship!
4. Enhancing people’s lives: Work and career is a massive part of people’s lives. We spend most of the day working and providing for out families. Whether you like it or not, your career has a massive impact on our general self esteem. Working in recruitment, you help people find their first job or enhance their career with better jobs which means you have a massive impact on people’s lives and they have you to thank for it.
5. Career Consultant: The longer you work in recruitment the more you learn what skills and qualifications are needed to succeed in a certain career. Also the longer you stay in the industry, the more you’re seen as a “go-to” career consultant. People will come to you for career advice on how to enhance their skills and what training courses to take to add value to their resume. Same applies for clients, they’ll see you as an expert on company culture and how to attract the best talent.
6. Money: As recruitment is a sales orientated job, in most agencies you will have a generous base salary along with a commission structure. So, the more jobs you find for people the more money you will make. To put it in perspective, it takes lawyers 4 years of studying plus another 4 years of experience to make $90k. In recruitment, you can make $100k in your first year.
7. Build confidence: Of course, recruitment is challenging and you deal with a lot of rejection. For every “yes,” you might get 10 “no’s.” Therefore, it takes some serious resilience and patience to be successful. Due to overcoming rejections and securing jobs for people, you eventually build a huge level of confidence. You can carry this confidence to propel you to succeed not only in your career, but life in general.

If you would like to explore a career in recruitment get in touch with us for a free consultation.

info@athlete2business.com.au