I want to work in recruitment, but I don’t want to manage people. Now what?

31-10-2022
Job seeker advice

A big misconception when working in recruitment - or, at least, when working in recruitment at Scantec - is that to develop in your career, you’ll eventually have to manage a team of recruiters which could limit the amount of placements you can make.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the recruitment process: searching for candidates, screening them, arranging their interviews, negotiating with the client and onboarding them when they’re offered a role is a time-consuming process. For that reason, when you manage a team of recruiters - whether it’s two, ten or twenty people - you tend to take a backseat when it comes to recruiting directly, because your role shifts into coaching and leading your team.

Although career progression into a management role for some recruitment consultants is exactly what they want because they are able to share their knowledge and help other people develop, this route certainly isn’t for everyone. 

Why? Because:

 

1.     You can sometimes bill less.

When you are a manager in recruitment, there is the possibility that your opportunity to bill reduces as not all your time is spent recruiting - it depends on the capability of your team. While this is fine for some people, others want to continue to be the biggest billers, at the top of the ‘leaderboard’ and exceed their targets every month.

 

2.     Your focus is on your team, not yourself.

Managing people takes the focus off your role specifically, and becomes more about coaching, guiding and developing your team. You will be responsible for motivating them, giving them advice, showing them how to improve and helping to achieve their goals.

 

3.     Your targets are different.

You go from working solely towards your own targets to being responsible for the overall performance of your team. Whilst there’s a lot more opportunity to achieve success, more people can sometimes mean more challenges.

 

How can I progress in recruitment without managing people?

If management just simply isn’t for you, and you’d like to continue billing and progressing your career without managing a team, there are options within Scantec to progress all the way up to Director.

It looks like this.

When you start off in recruitment at Scantec, there are various paths you can take. Whilst some people come in and stay on the resourcing team, or some people can come in as 360 consultants, you can also start and develop in different ways. For example, if you begin as a Resourcing Specialist, you could then develop into a Senior Resourcing Specialist, and onto Principal Resourcing Specialist.

You could also come in at 360 Recruitment Consultant level, followed by Senior Consultant - or develop into these positions via the resourcing roles.

From there you can choose between various progression routes - the managing roles being responsible for a team, unlike the principal and business roles. Progression at Scantec can, in many ways, look how you want it to - we offer all our employees the opportunity to sit with their line managers, and consider various career paths within the company.

Plus, you also have the option to go directly down the business development route, which would begin with a client Client Relationship Manager position, followed by Senior Client Relationship Manager, and eventually leading to Sales Director.

The best part of recruitment career progression at Scantec is that there is flexibility across the different paths. For example, someone could be in a 360 role and love sales, and swap their career pathway to the business development route to utilise their skills there instead. It isn’t fixed - if wanted, you can go from one stream to another. We give all our employees the opportunity to discuss what they want to achieve in the future and how they would like their careers to develop. From there, we can devise an individual career development pathway.

 

Get in touch

If you are interested in finding out more about recruitment jobs at Scantec and how you can develop your career with us, get in touch with us today.