Recruitment was something that I ‘fell into,’ like most people I know in the industry.
I spent the first five years of my career routinely swinging between different possible exit strategies. I would drop everything and travel, or enrol in a Master’s degree, or become a secondary school teacher, a physiotherapist, a marketer, an accountant, an astronaut. Name a profession, and I had probably spent a few hours Googling ways that I could get into it.
Recruitment was something that I ‘fell into,’ like most people I know in the industry.
For the most part, I enjoyed my job. The pay was good, my colleagues were a decent bunch and the rough edges were smoothed over by generous performance bonuses and a well-stocked staff wine fridge that we routinely emptied every Friday.
Nonetheless, I spent the first five years of my career routinely swinging between different possible exit strategies. I would drop everything and travel, or enrol in a Master’s degree, or become a secondary school teacher, a physiotherapist, a marketer, an accountant, an astronaut. Name a profession, and I had probably spent a few hours Googling ways that I could get into it.
I didn’t mind what I did for a living. But I always felt that somewhere out there, at the other end of an imaginary career development rainbow, was ‘the job’ – the vocation that I was destined to have. In my mind, recruitment wasn’t it.
That all changed in a heartbeat in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the bubble of the City’s financial services industry burst along with it. Suddenly my evening Metro was full of pictures of be-suited office workers walking out of their glass towers with their worldly possessions in archiving boxes and job applicants were calling my desk line to make a general enquiry between floods of tears. My two biggest clients made sweeping redundancies that same week, and my entire desk was wiped out. Clients became candidates as the HR representatives and internal recruiters for whom I recruited lost their jobs.
Since my job was filling other jobs, and very few of those were now around, it was a miracle that I still had one. From that moment, and for the next two years as I managed to cling onto the job I had until the market turned around, I loved every moment that I was gainfully employed, and I’ve loved it ever since.
Hopefully you won’t need to experience the fear of redundancy or a recession as a catalyst, but there’s all sorts of reasons why staying in your current job, and making it a better place to be, might be a better career move than finding a new one.
You might have a patchy CV history and need a longer stint in your current job before looking at a move. Maybe you are nearing a step up in seniority and you need to stay where you are and get a promotion before moving on at that level. Perhaps you are lucky enough to be paid over the market rate in your current role, or the circumstances of your job might suit you, like flexi-time or a short commute. Whatever the reason, if you are stuck where you are for now, here are 11 ways to make it better before you fall back on ‘grin and bear it’.
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