Recruitment Is Hard. That's The Point.

Over the last three months, I have gotten an even closer look inside recruitment companies with our new show format, 24 hours inside recruitment companies.

What I have found very interesting so far is how different each company is, even though we produce the show in exactly the same way.

I highlight this because I would hate for amazing people in our industry who could experience tons of success to end up leaving it because they think their experience working at a company will be the same everywhere else.

It won’t be, and don’t choose to leave our amazing industry until you feel you have truly tried to find the right culture that helps you become the best recruiter you can be.

No recruitment business is the same, truly.

I hope your recruitment career is hard right now.

I know how that sounds. But hear me out.

It doesn't matter whether you're three months in, three years in, or running a desk you've built over a decade.

If you've been doing this long enough, you'll hit a stretch where nothing lands. Offers fall through. Candidates you were sure about go quiet. A market shifts and the pipeline that used to fill itself suddenly doesn't.

It doesn't announce itself. It just arrives, and it can arrive at any point in a recruitment career.

Here's what I've noticed after enough conversations with recruiters who've achieved real success. Almost every single one of them can point to a hard stretch somewhere in their story.

Sometimes it's the classic version. Brutal first twelve months, every deal falling apart, wondering if they'd picked the wrong career.

Sometimes it's the one you're in right now. Building an entirely new market from scratch, with none of the shortcuts a warm desk gives you.

But just as often, it shows up later. A recruiter who had it easy early, built confidence fast, then hit a wall two or three years in when the market turned, or a big client stopped hiring.

Or someone ten years into a successful desk who suddenly has to relearn how to sell in a market that no longer rewards what used to work.

The stage doesn't matter as much as what the hard patch is actually doing while you're in it.

Every deal that fell through teaches you something about the warning signs you missed.

Every quiet stretch forces you to rebuild your process rather than coast on what used to work.

Every difficult market teaches the kind of resilience that's impossible to fake and impossible to learn any other way.

None of that gets built while things are going well. It only gets built when they're not.

That's why the recruiters who never hit a proper hard patch, at any stage, tend to be the ones most shaken when one finally arrives. They haven't built the tolerance for it yet, because nothing has ever demanded it of them.

So wherever you are in your career right now, first year or fifteenth, if it's hard, that's not a sign you're doing this wrong.

It's not proof the market's broken or that you've lost your edge. It's the part of the job that quietly builds the recruiter you're going to become, and it's very likely the same story the people you admire in this industry would tell you, if you asked them honestly about how they got to where they are.

Recruitment is hard.

That's not a flaw in the job. That's the point, at whatever stage it finds you.

This week's episode with Kevin Fasting is essential listening for anyone earning well in recruitment and wondering what to actually do with it.

If you've ever looked at your bank balance and thought "I should probably be doing more with this," this one's for you.

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Next time you're in a hard patch, whatever's causing it, try this instead of just pushing through.

Write down the answer to three questions:

What went wrong, specifically?

Not "the deal fell through" or "the market's slow," but the actual moment or signal you missed.

What would you do differently next time this exact situation shows up?

What has this stretch already proven you can survive?

That third question matters most. It's not there to make you feel better. It's building a record you can look back on next time it gets hard, proof you've been through it before and come out able to do the job better than before.

Keep smashing it & honing your craft!

Hishem x

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