Leave your recruiting job for an MBA? Stay, and hone those skills everyday.

For the first years of my recruiting career, I struggled. Often our work is heavily transactional, driven by an endless list of “things I still need to be doing”, while not requiring much interesting conceptual work as the best frameworks are already known. It seemed like a dead-end for learning. Maybe I should get and MBA and pivot my career?

Today, I think it is a great platform for learning and personal growth, if we only know how to use it as that.

Keep learning. (Chinatown, July 2016)

How Recruiting Can Teach You the Most Valuable Lessons of a Top-Tier MBA

The benchmark of continued education is the MBA: programs that teach the breadth of business-relevant topics, allow students to build a strong network of contacts, and are structured to drive personal growth. Prestigious programs are highly selective and costly. On the flip side, many of the curricula are available and how we grow a network should be obvious to any recruiting. Importantly, I think that we can get the most meaningful lessons, namely personal growth, out of a recruiting career as well.

During graduation season this year, I ran into a former colleague who about to graduate a top-ranked MBA program and we were reflecting on her main learnings. Four came to her mind right away: (1) Flexibility in negotiation, (2) Effective Communication, (3) Complex and Varied Perspectives, and (4) Self-Reflection. We talked through why these were meaningful and how she had gotten to her insights: often they came when applying focus and simple frameworks to an area, combined with the environment and opportunity to try and experiment.

It struck me that I had found versions of all four learnings in my own recruiting career:

1. Flexibility in Negotiation: core piece of the classic recruiter skill set, negotiation is required not only when going back and forth at offer stage. A zero-sum approach is based on a limited view. The best recruiters close throughout the process, driven by a genuine desire to find the right match between company and candidate. They think flexibly and creatively about the different components that matter and they seek to prepare the outcome through building rapport, understanding all variables and framing the conversation. An absolute must-have skill, that you can definitely learn on the job.
2. Effective Communication: taking up most of my days, it is the essence of my job. Paying attention to subtleties, messaging clearly, and paraphrasing are some of the key components. We learn quickly that what is said is not necessarily what is heard, that message sent is not message received. That’s why we write things down, in scorecards, notes, on a post-it and in contracts. (Though sometimes intentional ambiguity is required as well.) By working on varied roles, for different companies, or just with different personalities, we face both the challenge and the opportunity to build out communication as a strength.
3. Complex and Varied Perspectives: what a privilege to get to ask a unique breadth of different professionals about their background and experiences in detail. Inquisitiveness is key. Great recruiters are curious about the person in front of them, the industry they’re researching and the job somebody has. While we usually don’t have the time to tweet and blog about it, we must take perspective, to get the right perspective.
4. Self-Reflection: probably the one attribute that doesn’t come in a bundle with the recruiting career itself, but instead depends on everyone’s own willingness and ability to spend the time. Though for those inclined to self-reflect, develop and become better — recruiting offers plenty of input to compare, contrast, and reflect vis-a-vis the various stories we are exposed to day-to-day.

Insight is usually personal, so I cannot say whether my former colleague’s learnings and mine are exactly the same. Yet, for me, they resonate directly. It is these opportunities I had to uncover to find joy and growth in my recruiting career.

And I believe we recruiters have one particularly powerful tool for growth at our disposal.

Use the powerful growth tool of recruiting: experience and experiment

Often, as for my former colleague, the most valuable learnings seem to come from experiential learning as described above. Fortunately, in recruiting it is fairly easy to focus on a personal growth area and experiment:

We touch many different worlds, e.g. researching top performers in a target company, interviewing someone from a different industry, or understanding the product roadmap to distill the hiring plan. At the same time, much of our work is transactional — we do the same thing over and over again many times. That means that you can try new things easily, because the more interactions you run, the lower the stakes in it: get feedback on your negotiation style, try a new communication strategy with a candidate and take the time to self-reflect. Seek new experiences and experiment, it might save you the cost of an MBA.

And what to do — decide yourself.

There are many things in an MBA program that you won’t get out of your recruiting job. There are plenty of good arguments for and against making the investment. Whether you choose to get an MBA or not, until then it is worth getting as much as possible out of your recruiting career.

When I was struggling and considered moving into a different career, it had a conversation with a friend on a random Friday night years ago. It made me realize the many ways to find personal growth in recruiting, if only I was willing to see it. Maybe thinking of your recruiting career as a “mini MBA” is an interesting perspective for you. Personally, I continue to recruit. For now.