What Ties Communication, Compassion, Recruiting, Relationships, and Self-Awareness Together?

I use these every day in my career with over twenty (20) years of experience spent working in all functions of human resources, primarily in every aspect of recruiting. The communication, compassion and relationship building are the tools that have helped me fill somewhere around 100,000 or more positions successfully in this time. I started working in high volume recruiting many years ago prior to any technology being involved in the recruiting process. All of the bells and whistles recruiting tools that are popular and/or required to recruit today were nowhere to be found or even thought of. The fact is recruiting today is focused on tools, not people and we need people more than anything else to fill positions successfully at all levels. I generally do not look to spend money on tools recruiting candidates that use a sales format; why because sales simply does not work to recruit. The successful skills I learned to recruit with came from first and foremost the human aspect of building relationships, coaching candidates and hiring managers to see strengths or talent in individuals as the foundation. There was organic DEI way before any initiatives, specialized training and/or certifications were available. The reason for this was due to the fact that those who ran what we know of today as talent acquisition were incorporating compassion into the process, we were trained to respect everyone and value each person uniquely for showing up in person through our honest conversations. I spoke to see what each individual person could bring to the organization if not in the capacity they were originally applying for, but also as a potential employee for any other open opportunities. I learned the correct way to recruit was through communication with people to establish relationships at the beginning of the recruiting process and keep them even when they were not selected the first time. I want to mention, this was also learned after completing a college degree, where many of these skills were not taught in the classroom.

Why am I writing about this now, because everything I learn either in work, from others conversing, in training, educational programs and from certifications I add to and build myself up with as tools to use in my field. I put everything into my toolbox, and I use my knowledge together ongoing and cross functionally to be successful. This is important because the information, trends, skills and formal degrees provide insight that keeps coming back up and circles around in the work environment and in life. Therefore, in order to stay fresh and at peak in your craft, you have to continuously utilize your knowledge, skills and abilities from everything you learn to complete the work successfully and build relationships. The newest and most important foundational information or topic I learned about was self-awareness and ironically without this information it has held me back a bit even with everything else I have in knowledge, education, skills and experience in my career and in life. I believe this is a key factor that is missing in formal education at a very early age and informal settings of knowledge. We learn the opposite which causes issues for many. How can you be your best self when as a society we are not taught to believe in ourselves or our abilities or let others tell us how to view people we do not know, what to say or how to feel about ourselves or worse doubt our abilities and yet this is the most human aspect which could improve all of our environments. Doubt causes anxiety, depression, fear, and keeps us stuck from reaching our potential or in flight. We are made to grow biologically, yet many families or managers will tell people what to do, popular social media creates an environment which reinforces judgement and generality letting others take credit for what individuals accomplish creating co-dependency. If we truly want the best quality of life for all, we need to encourage individuality, and acceptance of people for who they are without tolerance for negativity which is self-awareness. I know personally it has been life changing for me to learn to be self-aware and answered many questions that always perplexed me about why I felt like I was always working harder but never going anywhere or stuck in many of my previous environments. There were so many people I noticed that did less, knew less, made me feel less and yet were always bypassing me using information I provided them, or they learned from watching me complete but had no experience or took credit for my work or accomplishments and I accepted it because I learned it. I can now very easily see when someone tries to change my ability to form my own belief, opinions or relationships by gossiping, creating stress, talking down to or about me and focusing on negativity. It is my cue that I have outgrown those relationships and or environments and I am destined to learn more with new ones to continue to grow positively and to leave. I am grateful for every experience and opportunity in my life always. The job of a recruiter is to assist candidates be self-aware about their talents for the roles they apply for.

I use writing as a tool to not only provide information and insight on my work knowledge in recruiting to help others, but also as a way to promote my passion to help others get ahead with employment opportunities. I know that employment helps not only a person and organization with work, but creates a role model for fiscal stability to provide for their families while feeling inspired to work and accomplish more professionally. I love what I do, and I love the human aspect of conversing and building relationships in human resources compassionately and also volunteering in many ways to support employment opportunities for others. I always see the opportunity to help others develop in their environments, and in doing this I learned how to further develop myself in the process of life as a human being. I am an extremely honest and compassionate person, I am not shy about speaking up when things seem unfair, I work hard to support the best of the environments that I am in or part of. This is just how I live, when I do not know something, I take on the personal mission of learning, investigating and getting to the root cause of things, people and subject matter especially in recruiting. I personally look to learn every day from every person and every experience I have, I find opportunity or inspiration in everything even adversity. I learned early on in my career recruiting that the human aspect of compassion will get you far in building relationships, inspiring others and to recruit. I was fortunate enough to learn boots on the ground up through professional recruiting from professionals who not only taught me this, but they also role modeled it and were respected successfully in their field. No one, no environment and no situation were overlooked to build talent pools and establishing positive relationships in person to build trust with empathy and compassion to provide opportunities to everyone. I learned that building hidden talent pools was as easy, going to all areas to meet people and the important part was meeting the leaders in overlooked communities would enable you to connect with many talented people who had drive, desire, knowledge and talent to fill the roles but may have lacked the opportunity, resources, role models or relationships to become employed. These individuals could otherwise be bypassed, yet if you took a few minutes to create a relationship by calling a pastor, a local known leader or person in the community with compassion and who cared you could easily connect to this talent. The skill of recruiting did not include computers, cell phones, texts, applicant tracking systems, AI, posting and sourcing sites, etc. The tools in the recruiter toolbox were a conversation, connection, communication, respect, trust, compassion and relationship building as well as a pen, paper and an opportunity. Whether I spent the entire day in a neighborhood local church or at a hotel hosting a hiring event, the add in the local paper informed people to come and recruiters built secure relationships with talent for high volume entry level positions up to management, technical and leadership roles we recruited working as a team to communicate until the last person was greeted and provided an opportunity to complete an application with respect for their time and interest in the position or organization. It was in environments like this that I learned to really recruit and the art of building relationships through trust as well as having conversations with candidates to coach them on what skills they had valuable to the roles open, and many were not aware they even had these skills. In this type of process, I learned these conversations helped build up potential employees' self-confidence, which many may not have ever experienced before. A typical job post might be for sales, telephone customer service or technical roles that required manual labor or higher, candidates did not realize their part time job in the local market was customer service, teamwork, labor, etc. The conversations or interviews inspired discussion about the skills they had, not the lack in what they believed they did not have, and this is where self-awareness comes in to play. When you speak with people to inspire them to feel secure, believe in themselves and learn what positive traits they have a confidence is built as well as trust and safety. This self-confidence creates positive energy which allows for opportunity, motivation and good relationships by connecting and this also good for retention. In many of the organizations or environments I learned these recruiting people skills where the businesses had employees with careers for multiple decades, and they would refer their kids, siblings, cousins, friends, neighbors, etc. This is not to take away from all of the knowledge, skills and tools available today which I was fortunate to have learned almost every aspect of too, this is just not what makes the foundation of recruiting but enhances a recruiters ability to perform their jobs.

In closing, we as individuals have the ability to shape our own lives, environments and workplaces to build positivity and it starts with how we feel about ourselves. The energy from self-awareness and believing in our own abilities inspires gratitude, happiness and kindness. When we take our positive energy with us to different places we show up at, it impacts the people in it and if we can stay this way even when we are dealing with adversity not knowing outcomes, we can act as a light to those around us. So when you use compassion for yourself, you are grateful, when you communicate this to others because you are self-aware, you can build positive relationships where you can use each moment as an opportunity to build someone up, make mistakes, learn, or need coaching you can discover what is working for you and what is not; this is an opportunity to grow. I am going to honestly say that this can come with growing pain at times and when you are self-aware you trust yourself enough to know that you will be fine. When you have relationships built on trust and security, you learn to work within challenges to be successful and this is a very big part of recruiting being comfortable having conversations with strangers, to build trust where they can feel safe being themselves and learning about their strengths and weaknesses to build a career in an organization. Environments like this weed out competition, comparison, judgement or prejudice, bias, insecurity, gossiping, superiority all which are the traits of people with low self-confidence. Positive people do not go around looking for problems and tearing people down, they look within themselves to grow, which helps them to support others to grow secure relationships and this is where teams are built in the recruiting process that work together because the foundation is built on what each person can differently add to the environment to make it better. Diversity and authenticity is not only encouraged it is sought out and included at every level to make organizations optimized and starts with the communication, compassion and relationships in the recruiting process.