I want a career change out of recruitment but don't know which way to go

ShiftDoctor answer

By Toby Buckle

Recruitment is a sales job and of course money is a factor in people doing sales roles and then claiming to get stuck. I have often heard that in my time as a careers coach and as an ex recruitment director.

It is important to recognise that sales and recruitment roles are often paid more because it's easier to draw a straight line between performance and profit and therefore justify a % of that profit going to the person who "generated it".

Other roles will require elements of experience and expertise to justify a salary paid. It is therefore important to recognise what transferable experience you have which could help justify a salary, but not use this as the sole criteria for selecting a career change.

As a recent father myself I appreciate the desire to earn a level of income to support a family. It is also important to be happy in your work though. At the moment you seem to be using the need for an income level as a reason not to chose a change as opposed to seeing it as just one in a set of criteria that a new role should have.

I would suggest making a list of criteria that a new role should have. Figure out exactly what will challenge you mentally - what does this mean to you specifically. Also what elements of problem solving and analysing a situation need to be involved.

Give a weighting to the criteria and see where you are prepared to compromise. How much of a percentage of the time in a role will have to have these elements for you to be satisfied. If a role satisfied all your criteria would you be prepared to wait a couple of years to have a family in order to make a change to a lower paying role. If pay is the overriding short term factor should you accept this and look for roles that will allow you to earn more. Simply changing environment or sectors can often be challenging enough.

Once you have a clear criteria list you should then make an action plan to research roles to see if they will match this criteria. I have known recruitment consultants to go into many different avenues including HR, project management, training, charity fundraising, and other recruitment roles such as headhunting, but this list is by no means exhaustive.

It sounds like you need to broaden your terms of reference from just looking at those around you. Speak to your friends about jobs they do and also research the jobs pages of newspapers and online to see what jobs are out there and what matches your criteria and then you can work out what you would need to do in order to get them.

It may be that it would involve study, training, or working your way up. Are you prepared to do this for the end goal of doing a job that satisfies you? This is a crucial test of your motivation to change.

If there are no magic solutions that let you have it all at once, working out where you are prepared to compromise in the short term is often a useful thing to do as a first step.

Finally it sounds like you want to be 100% convinced you are going to be making the right change before taking any action at all. I'm afraid all change involves taking a risk. As long as it is a calculated risk, taking action and trying something out is often the only way to know for sure. Going to interviews and actively applying to roles often gives you a gut instinct as to whether they will be right, and much more so than simply mulling over the pros and cons on paper. I'd suggest aiming to do this before deciding to quit your current job.