Why leaving agency recruitment was the best decision I've ever made

For over 3 years I worked as an Agency Recruiter, and I thought I was really enjoying it until one day I decided to leave. Since then, I have never looked back and I have built an amazing career at an Embedded Consultancy as part of an Internal team. But why did I decide to make the change?...?

My time at University.

Let’s start right at the beginning which was when I had just come out of university, and I had literally no idea what to do with myself. I had studied a degree in Acting (random I know) but I knew that I didn’t want to just be sat waiting for the phone to ring, I wanted to make money quick as I had some serious life goals. First, I started looking for jobs in an office in London, mainly because that’s what a couple of my friends were doing, and it just seemed really cool. When I was scrolling, I came across Recruitment and honestly didn’t even think that was a job – I thought it was just what companies did. Upon further inspection I found that it is one of the best ways for graduates to earn money quickly with hard work, sounded ideal for me!

My First Job (and Recruitment role!).

The first role I applied to called me back same day and before I knew it, I was in for interview then had a new job all within about a week. Looking back on the interviews I was asked a lot of things about what I wanted to achieve and where I wanted to be, and I really had some high expectations back then! But those high expectations sound great in a sales setting as it means you are going to work as hard as possible to achieve them. After getting the hang of the role I was off to a pretty good start seeing as I had never done it before. I loved working and going out in London, the people I worked with were a really good time and the team I was in were a really tight knit bunch. I used to work the Contract market almost exclusively placing JavaScript developers across big name clients in London. This was an interesting market as I joined around the time that React really started becoming the tech to be working in.

After around a year I started getting more into the business development side of recruitment (speaking with clients and hiring managers to get new business) and I never really appreciated how difficult this was. I kept managing to get loads of permanent work but due to my vertical I stuck to only contract business which really was a challenge. Finding candidates by that point had become a breeze for me and I had started branching out a lot from JavaScript to working all kinds of different technologies.

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?By James Walker

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