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When I quit my job at the end of 2018, my plan was to just live off of my savings and budget travel for a year or so. A couple weeks into 2019, however, I remembered that my brain starts to implode when I’m not being productive. Coupled with the fact that I really do want a career for myself—and to do something impactful and challenging—and I was surprisingly unhappy with the idea of traveling without work for a year ☹️
I left San Francisco as a “Product Design Lead”, i.e. some brand of product manager. But, honestly, I felt burnt out from working and working just to produce some pixels on a page that would be translated into an app that people would use every once in a while. I appreciated (and still do appreciate) the discipline and the world of app development in general, but it just wasn’t for me anymore.
So I got to work finding something new to do. After a lot of soul searching and long conversations with my father (one of the best advice-givers around), I decided to explore the world of recruiting. I had functioned as a hiring manager when I was a PM, and I really appreciated having a direct impact on people and their livelihood through hiring.
Long story short, I now work as a Recruiting & People Operations Specialist. This basically means I help companies make their recruiting and people processes more efficient and effective. I stumbled into this field, and despite working more than 40 hours per week across my contracts, I sometimes feel like I’m cheating the system by simply doing what I want to do. Here’s a breakdown of the “job”, if you can call it that.
40% data analytics for recruiting processes
A good portion of my work entails analyzing data to find weaknesses, red flags, and patterns in recruiting processes. I’ve gone back to my roots and write a lot of Python scripts to extract, clean, and analyze data from recruiting tools. I also write thought-leadership material on best practices in recruiting. What I love about this portion of my job is that it makes me feel like I’m having a direct impact on the way people get hired, improving the satisfaction of both the people doing the hiring and the people getting hired.
30% actual recruiting work
Recruiters often gets a bad rap—like they’re the door-to-door sales people of the human capital market. But I think there’s a real art to hiring people—complex, emotional, demanding people—for a job. I spend a portion of my time working with hiring managers to specify their needs for a hire, searching LinkedIn and other job markets for candidates, writing outreach emails to those candidates (an especially challenging and rewarding task), and following up with them to get them into an interview process. It feels impactful because work is such a huge part of so many people’s lives, and I get to be a part of helping them decide where they want to spend 30% of life.
30% leadership and culture management
This is the most creative, and arguably the most challenging and rewarding, part of the job. I spend a fair amount of time working with people to solve their work-related problems. One example is restructuring an engineering branch at a relatively small company to reduce friction between two engineering managers and improve the productivity of the reports. Working with people is messy and nebulous and nuanced, and I love the challenge. It also makes me feel like I’m having a direct impact on people’s happiness at work, which is incredibly fulfilling for me.
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Life as a Recruiting & People Operations Specialist isn’t so bad—especially because I made up the title and thus get to define what it means on a daily basis. For once, I’m doing work where I can see the impact clearly, and that impact is meaningful and important to me. There are things that I miss about being a PM like doing design work—but when you’re a remote freelancer, I find that time for miscellaneous projects abounds.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about recruiting, people, or how to go about switching your career.