Response about someone starting in recruiting

If I haven't, my gut feeling on her is that she's never going to be a top biller. Not saying she couldn't be, or shouldn't be. My own experience is that the environment you work in makes a huge difference in your billings and earnings.

After being away from staffing for about 7 years, I came back to the loosest recruiting firm you've ever seen. Sure the owner was the definition of a Crisis Manager, but she offered 50% of the placement fee (100% contingency practice with a no draw, all commission). And while I didn't work my discipline alone, the process control field is clearly large enough to handle two recruiters working at it. Fact is, I failed even though I could have continued working there for years. No one ever got fired from that place.

Following that disaster I talked myself into a job at Bruce Whitaker's. He didn't even like to take on existing recruiters. Further, the turnover there was not cruel, just astonishing. Bruce largely didn't fire anyone whimsically, instead most would simply pack their stuff up and be gone, sometimes during a lunch in the latter part of the first week. That said, and no one was hired at that firm without a canonical interviewing process, those that would listen, work, and learn from him, made money even though he paid at most about 30% of the fee.

The difference here was that it was a focused and determined learning environment that rigorously scrutinized and measured everything. And what gets measured, gets done. I've told you plenty about how things were there, and perhaps it sounds remarkably like a sweatshop. However, none of us minded and we were seriously some of the best professionals in this industry working for someone who would rip us apart for thinking any less of ourselves.

So, J___. Well, my own opinion doesn't count. Your boss' does. In the right place, she would either hunker down and do the work necessary to make it her profession, or she would give up (soon typically), because it's "too hard", or the rewards aren't soon enough. I have seen a lot of people enter recruiting this way only to jump right back out again. My guess is these same people might jump into a series of ill informed sales type positions, only to realize that it's not easy and it's not quick. The ones I have seen who made it refused to capitulate so quickly.

And to be specific about money, Bruce started a woman whose background was largely as a housewife. She never made evening calls, and she didn't work on weekends at all. However, she did show up early and worked nonstop with short breaks for lunch. She placed environmental and safety people. This was 1991. She made roughly two placements a month, and typically had 3-5 sendouts per week. Her billings for her first year in the industry were over $185,000. She probably took home a little less than a third of that. It is certainly doable.