Hi, my name is Tim Sackett, and I love recruiting. Yes, it is considered an illness by many (hi, SHRM ladies!). Yes, I’m probably addicted. So, for this Valentine’s Day Eve, I wanted to give you guys all the reasons I love recruiting. The business my mother taught me when I was a child, sitting on her bed watching TV on silent as she called a pile of resumes, trying to find candidates for openings she was working on. She made every position seem like an opportunity the person could not live without. I didn’t know I’d fall in love with recruiting. I went to school to be a teacher. I fell into recruiting because my wife was attending graduate school and I needed a job to help pay the bills. Recruiting was the vehicle that not only allowed me to pay for her school, but it allowed us to have her stay home and raise our three sons.
Recruiting has given me a lot.
Here are 7 reasons why I love recruiting:
1. Recruiting allows me to be strategic. I like being in the action in the organizations I work for. HR can do that, and recruiting must do that.
2. Recruiting allows me to make decisions. Not having the ability to make decisions is one of the most disengaging issues employees have with any position. Recruiting allows me to make decisions. Every. Single. Day.
3. Recruiting helps me keep an eye on the future. I don’t want to know where my organization has gone, I want to know where it’s going. Recruiting gives me those clues.
4. Recruiting lets me love my organization. I’m a company guy. I’d put the corporate logo on my a$$ if I were asked to. I want to love the companies I work for. Recruiting lets me love my company every single day, and lets me share that with the world.
5. Recruiting lets me hunt. I get bored just farming and gathering. I’m a hunter by nature. Recruiting lets me hunt for the best and brightest. It lets me capture them and make them one of our own.
6. Recruiting lets me be me. I like to get involved, ask questions, etc. I’m loud. I move my hands around a lot when I talk. I like to laugh at stuff that’s funny. I like to make people laugh. I like to hug. I like to speak my mind. No one questions a recruiter that does all that.
7. Recruiting gives me a reason to talk to everyone, about everything. In recruiting there really aren’t any bad questions. There might be some that are illegal. But I have a license to ask pretty much anything I feel is important for our organization to know about a candidate. This leads to some very interesting conversations. I like interesting conversations.
I know many people don’t love recruiting and recruiters. I’m alright with that, recruiting isn’t for everyone. If it was, I probably wouldn’t love it like I do.
If you Google “Tim Sackett” you’ll find our Tim, and a truck driver chaplain. Our Tim is NOT the truck driver chaplain, although how awesome would that be if he was!? He is a prolific writer in the HR and TA space who just happens to also run an Engineering and IT contract staffing agency (HRU Technical Resources) out of Michigan. He also writes every day at his own blog, the Tim Sackett Project. Weirdly, he’s known as an expert in workplace hugging, which was kind of cool years ago, but now seems painfully creepy, but we still love him and he’s fairly harmless. Tim is also on the board of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), lifetime Michigan State Spartan fan, husband to a Hall of Fame wife, 3 sons, and his best friend Scout. He also wrote a book with SHRM called The Talent Fix, you can find it on Amazon.