How I discovered my passion for recruitment

I am passionate about people – their motivations, behaviors, their success stories, main achievements, and also reasons for failure. That is why I am fortunate to work in Executive Search/Talent Acquisition/Recruitment – whatever you call it nowadays.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to meet talented people and learn every day about their jobs. I also get to meet new clients and learn about new businesses and industries and their challenges. But how did I get here?

It was all just a big coincidence.

Well, to be very honest, I came into this job “accidentally”.
If I go back to my youth, I have always been passionate about people and their behaviors. At a very young age, I wanted to be a teacher, first of all. This would later change to wanting to become a psychologist. However, back then it was not lucrative to be a psychologist, and those I knew guided me away from it, arguing that if I was so great at math and languages (which I was), I should go study economics. So, I allowed them to influence me.

During my studies and also afterward, I worked in my parents’ company and was mostly responsible for the sales and marketing of special cosmetic products. As it was my first job after completing my studies and also with my parents, I felt I needed to experience other things too and applied for the role of Marketing Director of a well-known cosmetic company and was selected for the position. I was supposed to be soooo happy when selected, but…

I had a feeling – call it intuition – that something was not right. Somehow I did not feel that I was a good match with my future manager and I did say NO to a very appealing offer after being successful in several rounds of interviews and assessments.

Everyone called me crazy.

Everyone around me was asking me WHY????? I could not actually answer that since I had no rational explanation for my decision; it was all just feeling and intuition-based. I was perceived as crazy or weird. People told me that I had just committed career suicide.

A few days later I received a call from a recruitment consultant who had been in touch with me during that process and asked me if I would like to talk to his manager – about another position.

Recruitment – what is that?

“Why not?” was my answer. So I came and was absolutely surprised when they offered me a position in their recruitment company. I was offered the position of Recruitment consultant… and I had not applied for it. Without having any previous experience in this field, imagine how surprised I was.

I had to admit to them first, that I had no idea what the job was about. So, they explained to me everything from the beginning. To me, it definitely sounded like something new ☺. Exciting. Challenging. And so close to people.

I did not have to think long.

So, I said YES. And in 2002 I started to work as a recruitment consultant in a smaller recruitment company in Slovakia. Quite soon, I joined another very well-known recruitment company and later became the Managing Director of that company. I had grown the team, doubled turnover, and expanded the business into an international one, becoming a member of the international network.
Due to family reasons, I decided to move to Finland, where I live today, and continue my recruiting journey there. For an extended period of time, I have also worked for the iconic Finnish corporation Nokia, as an internal “in-house headhunter”, which gave me new perspectives and I have learned a lot there.

I still LOVE IT!

Since I started my career as a recruiter 2 decades ago I have interviewed over 4,000 candidates and successfully placed over 300 of them in several countries.

In this profession, I work with people very closely, evaluate their potential, motivation, skills and feel that I was really fortunate to get into this industry and not become a psychologist, as I find this much more interesting. I love my job and I am really passionate about accomplishing every single assignment and I wish that also other people would have a fulfilling career too. I am dedicated to helping them to find their core passions and talents and align those to their career and if needed to change the direction too.

Really, I can’t say that I regret my decision to go into recruitment for one day. If we all would love our jobs and careers, this world would be a much better place. And I am dedicated to influencing that as much, as I only can. And I do encourage you to follow your passion as well.