Meditations of a recruiter
I've been starting my days with a meditation practice for a while now. My journey with meditation started in 2014 when I attended a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. Since then, meditation has been an important tool for me to gain more insight into myself and the world around me.
I decided to write this series of posts documenting the insights that I get from my daily meditations because a lot has happened in the almost 10 years since I got into recruiting as a career. It's been a wild ride with lots of ups and downs, and over the last three years with everything going on in the world, working as a recruiter in the tech industry has been an experience like nothing else I've ever gone through before. So I want to talk about it.
It's been two months since I was laid off from Quora where I worked for almost a year (the layoffs happened two weeks before I hit the one year mark) as a senior tech recruiter leading the sourcing function for the team. This was the second time since the pandemic started that I was let go by a tech company after having done what I consider some of the best work in my career in very turbulent, uncertain and in many ways unprecedented market and socioeconomic conditions.
Anyone who has ever been let go from a job, you know it doesn't feel good and there are tens of thousands of people who have experienced that feeling in the tech industry over the last 6-12 months. Feelings of guilt, self-doubt, shame and anxiety about the future start creeping in quickly and are difficult to shake. Those are only magnified in the current market conditions where few companies are hiring recruiters while there are literally thousands of them looking for work.
So I've decided to write this daily post for anyone who has or is going through the same experience in the tech recruiting industry and beyond. We will get through this and come out better on the other end. Pressure makes diamonds and this challenging experience will only make us better, more empathetic recruiters better than ever at building deep and meaningful relationships with our candidates, hiring managers and teammates.
Until tomorrow...