Knowing How To Win and Learning How To Lose

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Recruiting is like baseball; hit the ball with a small wooden bat 33% percent of the time and you are an all-star. You might fail the other 67% of the time but it will be your failures that you’ll learn from and eventually drive your success.

Everybody wants to win and while winning isn’t everything nobody goes into a situation and says, “How do I lose?  How do I make sure that I prep myself to fail?”  A lot of careers are based on wins and losses–it’s a numbers games (that will never change). Just as a batter lines up for a pitch, you go into any recruiting situation prepared to talk to a candidate, sell him on the job, get his resume reviewed and hit it out of the park every time you send it to the manager.

That being said, recruiters don’t get paid on resumes. They get paid based on the success of that resume turning into something more than just a piece of paper. So naturally it makes sense to focus on the piece of the pie that has catered to your success and results in more “wins”. However, that doesn’t happen every time. Although we try to prepare for whatever might get thrown at us and mitigate the risk, you might not always have the “perfect” position or candidate, but put a positive spin on things and look at it as a chance to get even better at what you do!

Recruiters fail a lot more than they succeed but what tends to sabotage their careers is when they focus on their frustrations, elements out of their control and the ability of others to carry out what they feel should have been their own success. Sometimes there is no logical reason why a candidate doesn’t convert to a hire; some people call it pure luck, some people call it destiny. I call it learning how to lose. The best thing you can do is move on with your head up high knowing you gave it your all.

The bottom line is this: give each opportunity 110% every time and even if things don’t work out in your favor, don’t dwell on your losses.  If you let negativity fuel your mind you’ll psych yourself out and you will never win. But learning from those moments will make you a powerhouse recruiter.

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