Go Home Proud

Nearly one million young people in the UK are not in work, education or training. One in eight. I have been thinking about that a lot this week.

Because recruitment is genuinely one of the best careers a hungry, competitive young person can choose. Effort directly rewarded. Real commercial skills from day one. A ceiling that is yours to set.

The problem is nobody chooses it. We all fell into it.

What would it look like if we actually went and found the next generation instead of waiting for them to stumble across us?

I am thinking more and more about what we can do to change that. Because our industry is exactly the type of industry young people should be choosing.

This job can become extremely hard to love if you don't figure this out.

Recruitment will give you extreme highs. Completing a deal you have worked on for months. Signing a retained client. Getting a meeting with a client you have been chasing for years. Those moments are brilliant, and they are why most of us stay in this game.

But you cannot get those every day. And if a good day in recruitment only feels like a good day when one of those moments lands, you are going to spend most of your career feeling like you are falling short. That is a hard place to live.

The other week Luke McCluskey, founder of Circle Recruitment, shared with me on the pod how they have built this mantra into their business to help prevent exactly that.

Not go home having closed a deal. Not go home having placed someone. Go home proud. The distinction matters more than it sounds.

Luke's point was simple. If the only dopamine hit you get from recruitment comes from the ultimate output, you are setting yourself up to struggle. Because you cannot manufacture a placement. You cannot force a client to sign today.

What you can control is whether you left your recruitment desk in a better place than you found it when you walked in at 8.30 that morning.

That reframe changes everything.

Instead of measuring your day against an outcome you cannot guarantee, you measure it against a standard you can actually hit every single day.

And the question becomes: What does that standard look like for you?

You called every lead from yesterday before midday.

You had three real conversations with people in your market.

You moved a live opportunity a step forward.

You did the thing you have been putting off for three days.

You sent the email. You made the call.

You did something today that your future self will benefit from.

A clear hiring need identified.

A booked meeting with a hiring manager.

A candidate-led lead turned directly into a BD conversation.

A contractor extended.

None of those are a placement. But stack five of those in a day and you are leaving your desk in a better place than you found it. Do that consistently, day after day, and the outcomes will come.

The reason this matters goes beyond performance. Think about what it actually feels like to walk back through your front door at the end of a long day knowing you gave it everything. That feeling of I had a mega day today. Most of us know it. Most of us do not get it often enough.

Because here is what happens instead. A live job you have been working on gets pulled at four o'clock and suddenly the whole day feels wasted.

You sit down for dinner but you have not switched off. That underlying feeling of I could have done more, I am not sure that was a good day, follows you home and does not leave until you are back at your desk tomorrow.

That is no way to build a career. And it is no way to stay in love with the craft.

So manufacture the feeling. Define what a good day looks like before it starts. Write it down if you have to. Make it specific to your market, your goals, where you are right now. Then go and do it.

Fall in love with that standard and this industry will give you everything it has got.

Go Home Proud.

This week I sat down with Dean Kelly.

Dean has built and sold multiple recruitment businesses, been chairman to some of the best founders in our industry, and spent decades distilling what actually separates the recruitment businesses that scale from the ones that stall.

It is one of the most honest conversations I have had on the pod about what it really takes to run a recruitment business well.

Your best month in recruitment already has the answer.

Think back to it. Not the outcome, not the number at the bottom of the commission payslip.

What were you actually doing that month? How many conversations were you having? What did your mornings look like? What were you doing consistently that you are probably not doing right now?

That is your go home proud list. It is not something you need to build from scratch. It is already in your history.

So do this. Block out twenty minutes this week. Pull up your best month. Reverse engineer it. Write down the five to ten daily activities that made it what it was. Then turn that into your standard. Not an aspiration. A standard.

That is what you measure your days against from here.

Keep smashing it & honing your craft!

Hishem x

Know a recruiter who needs to hear this? Send it their way.