The Importance of Vacation in Recruiting

In Japan, we were lucky enough to have a whopping 10 consecutive days off recently for what was truly a Golden Week. I spent 9 days on the Gold Coast, Australia with my son enjoying the beach, taking a helicopter ride along the coast, eating fish and chips and meat pies and most importantly, just unwinding.

For those of us in the recruiting industry, vacations don't come often enough but should. Recruiting, especially in Japan, is much tougher than other regions and not getting any easier. It is important to reset our private lives to balance with what we do for our work.

Whether you are in HR, an in-house recruiter or agency side recruiter, the amount of hours we put into the job deserves an equal amount of time off or better yet, time away from work.

While on vacation, I was able to read. Something I rarely do anymore but should take more time to do. One of the books I started reading (and actually finished) was "Thrive" by Arianna Huffington. The book highlights the importance of making time for yourself and managing your time (and mind) better in order to make ourselves thrive in whatever we do.

In recruiting, it is important to focus on ourselves and reset our minds to balance with our professional lives.

Recruiting is a demanding, people-focused job that takes more energy and patience than most other professions. For HR professionals and recruiters, work-life balance and the ability to take vacations when we want (and need to) is essential to how effective we are on the job, dealing with people. For some, it is hard to take time off away from clients and candidates and closing deals, however, it is not impossible.

I recently conducted a poll on Linked In to get a sense of where people spent their GW vacation and am glad to know that most who responded, were not at work, however, I assume many were still checking emails (myself included).

In Japan, we are lucky to have three-day weekends at least once a month and longer ones, every so often, like the recent Golden Week break, which is nice since the whole country (for the most part) is on vacation at the same time. This is nice since it means we are not putting our clients, candidates or colleagues at a burden and can come back to work with fewer emails in our inbox.

You don't even need a national holiday to take a break. It is easy enough to just reset without taking an extended day off or sabbatical, you just need to make time to do it whether in the morning, after work or on the weekend.

Using techniques from the book "Thrive" can help you manage your time more effectively as a recruiter and focus better on the job.

So for all HR professionals, in-house and agency side recruiters who came back to work this week, welcome back and best of luck fighting the good fight. Remember to reserve some time for yourself and reset when needed. We won't have another long break for a while so make the best use of your reset time.

Let's hear from you:

- Where did you spend your GW?

- What are your thoughts on vacations as a HR professional or recruiter?

- Is there such a thing as "too long" on a vacation?

- Where are good places to go?

-Do you use your paid holidays regularly or align with national holidays?

- How do you reset?

Stay tuned for more HR and Recruitment focused content in the coming weeks. See you next time.