3 Reasons Why Finance/Banking Professionals Should Switch into Recruitment

As a graduate with a Finance Degree in 2009 from a top business school, I'm very lucky and grateful that I never actually started my career within banking. Instead, I built a successful career as a headhunter and now lead my own recruitment firm, DG Recruit.

In order to provide more insight into why a career in recruitment is advantageous for some* finance/banking professionals, here are 3 key reasons to consider a career pivot into recruitment:

*Obviously, not all finance/banking professionals should become recruiters! There is a special/small subset who should seriously think about this option according to the qualifications and situations explained in this article.

#1. Immediate access to financial achievement and progression without age, regulatory, or educational constraints.

For go-getter young people who don't want to continue going back to school for graduate degrees or deeper technical knowledge pursuit, recruitment is the perfect alternative because our role is 100% people/intuition-based, unrelated to level of academic achievement and years of experience, while still being AS lucrative, if not MORE lucrative.

As my saying goes, we just recruit for the job; thankfully we don't do the job.

As we all know, careers in finance are highly regulated. There are legal risks in addition to tight regulatory controls on what you can and cannot do, say and cannot say. In recruitment, we don't have any constraints, governing bodies, or any other rule except to follow common sense and basic ethics in order to stay in business and thrive as a proper professional.

Furthermore, as long as you're good with people, articulate, and a strong writer, you can build a recruiting career successfully with no prior experience/advanced education because it's a sales job! Literally, anyone can do it (theoretically). I was doing executive search by the time I was 26, leading my own brand and standing up to recruiters double to triple my age and beating them at searches, which proves that ageism is surprisingly reverse in recruiting! Recruitment careers benefit young people massively and gives us a short-cut in life to go straight to the C-suite young, unlike finance careers that reward experience/tenure.

Tip: Many people in their 20s as recruiters make anywhere from $75k-400k a year. Depending on how your structure is set up and type of firm you join, it's feasible and realistic to make more than $150-250k yearly within your 2nd-to-4th year in your career while working less and not having to accumulate so many degrees. If you're someone who wants to get rich quicker, recruitment is a faster route.

#2. If you're like me, a job in recruitment is much easier than staying alive in the finance industry.

I've never been good with numbers (despite how much my tiger mom tried to make me). Having grown up in the USA, I was removed from the intense STEM environment in China so my technical skills like science and math plateaued early in life. In fact, I have a poor understanding of quantitative principles so it'd be hard for me to compete in finance.

Taking into account my personal weaknesses on that front, I devised a new approach to my career which was to leverage my gift of gab. I realized my strengths were outside of what a finance career demanded. Instead, the ability to engage anyone in conversation and persuasively get deals done fast made me more suited to recruitment.

As a bonus, thankfully in recruiting, there is very little technology involved. Throughout the generations, recruitment will continue to be the same sport and process, no matter how the rest of the world changes. It's a career that is timeless and easily adaptable - as long as we know how to use basic technology, we can survive any changes in market dynamics.

TIP: Unlike what the general public assumes, automation and LinkedIn have not diminished recruiters' opportunities. It's allowed us to make more money than ever because now we can reach out to candidate networks directly in a quicker manner to drum up business like we couldn't do before.

Unlike in chess, we humans beat out robo-recruiters every time!

#3. Your insider knowledge of banking makes you an ideal candidate to dominate and profit immensely off of recruitment.

Unlike the instability of the financial markets, over-reliance on macro-factors and economic cycles in finance careers, a career in recruiting is much more stable, reason being that you can control your own book of business and your behaviors on a micro-level. Sure, during economic cycles, hiring goes down, but it hurts internal recruiters, not those of us on the agency side.

Because companies are cutting down on talent acquisition folks, recruiters on the agency side (us headhunters), snatch up all the open requisitions to fill them while their internal staff are being slashed. So whether in an economic down-or-up cycle, a good headhunter is always busy!

TIP: If you come to the table with financial knowledge and connections with the pedigree to match, you'll have a noticeable unlimited competitive advantage over most recruiters, who don't come from the industry. Your pedigree is more attractive to recruitment firm leaders and also to the candidate pool, generating revenue faster than those without the background/knowledge. Your advantage is palpable and companies are willing to pay a premium for your connections in the industry.

In Conclusion

It's never been a better time to think about your career future as a recruiter if you're not interested to continue in a job that is overly tied to macro-factors/politics, highly regulated, extremely buttoned up, and technical in nature.

For those who understand how recruitment works, it's apparent that there are very few jobs that can pay people in their 20s $150-400k with NO FURTHER EDUCATIONAL degrees in addition to working normal business hours, to literally sit around and talk all day.

We all know how grueling a career in finance is. I'm happy to say, as hard as recruitment is to learn, once you DO learn it, it becomes a more flexible career, enjoyable role, and an easier job because all we need is a phone, computer, personality, and an internet connection to do our work. And we make bank to just talk for a living.

Therefore... We're here to help you make the transition if you're open to it:

DG Recruit is eagerly seeking finance professionals who are genuinely un-interested in continuing their financial careers and are getting sick and tired of a purely technical role, who feels stifled at work, who's working too many nights and weekends, who can't be themselves, and who can't leverage their gift of gab and networking as a major skill.

Get in touch with us here and learn more about recruitment through the DG Recruit Podcast. Sign-up to dgrecruit.com to learn more about recruitment as a career. Our clients in NYC are eager to hire finance professionals to become recruiters so let's talk confidentially today!