From initial training, to learning from the best, to having fantastic role models, to building up my own company…
My Story How I Became a Recruiter
People often ask me: „Caro, why did you become a recruiter?“
After my A-levels, I started studying international business administration. I have been travelling and surrounding myself with international people since I can remember. It was clear to me that I want to work in an international work environment eventually. „Yes, someday it will happen“, I thought to myself.
I gained my first international work experience during my internship at IBM in Stuttgart where the company language was primarily English. I received many nice tasks during the internship and stayed there as a working student. Plus, I wrote my diploma thesis at IBM.
So what next? I wanted to stay at IBM, but there were no opportunities at the time. One evening, we invited friends over to our apartment. One of my friends was a recruiting coach working for Manpower. We talked about my professional future and then she explained the recruiter role at Manpower to me.
The only thing I answered was: „This is what I want to do!“
Bringing two parties together and being the person who makes this happen sounded absolutely fantastic to me. Throughout my childhood, I have been doing a great variety of sports, performing many, many competitions… Losing and winning, both were always part of it.
Working as a recruiter sounded like the right and perfect next competition for me. I started working for Manpower in October 2007 in one of their branch offices close to Stuttgart.
Learning from the best!
After a few days, I heard stories about a very, very successful Recruitment Consultant that was working for one of the other branch offices in this area.
I asked myself: „How does she do this? I want to be as good as her!“
This Recruitment Consultant had one very special and unique approach of working: She was recruiting in the field of IT and knew that we did not have any experience to recruit in this working field. She offered her help to train us. She knew that if she taught us her skills, candidates and open vacancies can be matched in a very effective way and we could all benefit in the end.
She gave us many insights about IT recruitment and what we have to pay attention to. Guess what happened? We managed to have a win – win situation for our candidates (more open vacancies to apply for), for ourselves (enhanced skills) and for our very successful Recruitment Consultant colleague (more placements which led to more overall revenue for our branch offices).
You might think that working as a recruiter is competitive. Yes, it definitely is. However, you can also arrange working successfully in a competitive working environment where everybody can profit from.
Initial training!
A big part of my skillset in the field of recruiting comes from all the great training, nice colleagues, very professional superiors and all the support I have received at Manpower. (A big thank you to Dijana Zdravkovic, Thomas Schonscheck, Rita Pophal, Nicola Reichert, Birgit Greschner, Manuela Kalchgruber, Katja Gose-Krüger and Teresa Leahy). This helped me to have a smooth start in a totally new working field.
During that time, I have been working on many commercial roles as well as logistics, technical, automotive and IT roles. I was never interested in anything „technical“, but that changed when working for Manpower.
Through all the conversations and briefings with clients, client visits on-site getting insights e.g. about car workshops and productions plants, I soon got familiar with a great variety of working fields. This crucial experience taught me to be curious and open-minded to new things.
Never say no to new things. We can all learn. As a recruiter, you can never be a „Software Engineer plus Car Mechanic and Accountant Specialist in one person“, but you can develop a feeling and get a good understanding of all these roles. This is the beauty of this working field. There is so much to explore, so many nice and interesting jobs and branches out there!
Role models
I definitely want to highlight one special thing that I will never forget about my time at Manpower. I had superiors who gave me the chance to work absolutely independently. My superiors all had their own way of leading their teams, but giving us the overall trust in our work, decision making and giving us the confidence that we can reach anything was a very good feeling.
One of my superiors led a team that consisted almost only of remote workers (full and part-time) spread over Germany. This was already 9 years ago and it worked pretty well! It is all about the communication, trust and the team rules you implement that make you successful.
At some point while working at Manpower, I was in contact with a company that I used to work with in the past. We mostly recruited car mechanics for this company. I told the CEO that thanks to them, I was recruiting so much in the field of automotive. This company showed me and taught me so, so much. Do you know what a diagnosis tester is? I didn’t. now I know!
Jumping a bit into the year 2011… I had the chance to build up the cross-border recruiting department at Manpower Germany together with my Project Manager and another colleague. This is what I have always been dreaming of! It was a great and fantastic experience. I have received so much assistance, coaching and advise e.g. from my colleagues in Ireland who were much further along in the field of cross-border recruitment.
As you can see…the expression of „learning from someone“ is used quite often in this article.
In 2014 another journey began. I have built up my own international operating recruiting agency from scratch. The „I“ turned quickly into a „we“. We are an international team consisting of very unique, fantastic, motivated people who speak many different languages using them to talk to our candidates and clients which makes our work really convenient for all parties involved.
Six years with many experiences later, I have to tell you that the love and the passion for this job have even grown! I am personally where I want to be.
- I can do want I love
- I have the best team
- I can recruit for so many different roles internationally
- I learn so much every single day
We all read and heard about the reputation of recruiting agencies in general… If you read this article I hope you feel the love and passion for recruiting that we all have at people-s-place. It is not that we want to steal the work of corporate recruiters. We want to be there for you when you face bottlenecks or need expertise in different languages!
Think about this when looking for a new vendor. ;-) You can be sure we work hard to make your life easier!
I can truly say that I found the profession that I had been always hoping to find. Sometimes it just takes a good conversation to lead you to your dream job!