As a Tech Recruiter, You Hold Untapped Superpowers—Here’s How to Harness Them

As someone who sources and hires technical people, you have one of the best jobs that society has to offer. But sometimes, this reality is tough to remember because—let’s face it—there’s a lot more hard work than glamor in your role.

Between communicating with company leadership, supporting hiring managers, providing candidates with high-touch processes, and the sheer number of times you hear the word “no,” in your day, the work can feel like sorting laundry piles.

You likely don’t make the highest salary at your company. It’s rare that you gain the visibility that you deserve. Sometimes, your work feels repetitive. Despite your contributions, you might wonder what your career advancement prospects look like.

Maybe you don’t think or feel any of these things. That’s the goal, after all, right? Maybe you out-earn everyone else at your company, routinely receive recognition as employee-of-the-month, face new surprises every day, and manage teams of hundreds of people. If that’s the case, hey—you need to write a guest post for the Humanpredictions blog (seriously, email us and rock the heck on) 🙃🙌🤘

Regardless of how you feel or what you earn, you know what you deserve? 

• Your best life.
• A pathway to make a difference in the world.
• To take pride in your work.
• To come to work happy and go home feeling satisfied.
• An income that reflects your behind-the-scenes value-adds.
• A career that you love.
• A clear sense of meaning and purpose in your everyday existence.

Knowing what you deserve, do you know what you already have? 

• All of these things. 

They’re hidden in the stories that you tell yourself.

Your job is more than a job—it’s a superpower, and here’s why

Planet earth is experiencing a never-before-shift in the way that humans experience life. It’s tough for most of us to see because we’re busy with what’s in front of us—family, friendships, work, health, deadlines, and our neverending lists of responsibilities.

But there’s an unseen, big-picture undercurrent that we’re all guiding. That’s because we’re living in an era that the World Economic Forum calls The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The people who work in tech are responsible for how this movement shapes up.

“Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people,” writes Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. 

“This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”

Despite the promise of our unique time in history, our species is walking a tightrope, Schwab elaborates. Schwab elaborates:

“Organizations might be unable to adapt; governments could fail to employ and regulate new technologies to capture their benefits; shifting power will create important new security concerns; inequality may grow; and societies fragment.”

Put short—we’re living a tale of two realities. Whether or not we realize it, the decisions that we make every day in the tech sector are defining the world will become.

Enter your superpower. As a tech recruiter, you’re responsible for hiring the world’s most privileged, empowered decision-makers who are writing the story of humanity’s future.

For this reason, recruiters and hiring managers have alter-egos as superheroes who are changing the world. Remember Clark Kent and his secret identity as Superman in the DC Comics series? That story was about you, recruiter. You are superman and superwoman in disguise.

So what can you do to tap into the full strength of these superpowers?

Harness your superpowers

Now you’re clued into the tech industry’s biggest secret—that the decisions that you’re already making are helping shape a brighter future for generations to come. How do you harness this power to create actual change, during a time in human history that’s so critical to the world’s future?

Step 1: Convince yourself to love your job—every moment of it

If you don’t love your job, you need to change the story that you’re telling yourself.

Yes, the practice of loving your job can be challenging, especially since social media creates a dynamic in which we’re constantly comparing ourselves to each other. Across Facebook tech groups, Instagram, YouTube, developer forums, and even private social networks, it can be easy for our minds to think, “I wish I had that.”

But think of how many people in the world want exactly what you have—and you, human, became a recruiter because you love the art of connecting with people. Think of how many of the developers you’re hiring want that too.

The reason why we compare ourselves with others is due to a concept in human psychology called “relative deprivation theory,” in which people define their self-worth based on others in their immediate environments. That’s irrational, says Malcom Gladwell in a recent talk, Why You Shouldn’t Go to Harvard.

“We form our social standing based on those in our immediate circles—those in the same boat as us,” he says.

If you want to learn more about this concept, take a look at Gladwell’s talk below. He talks about university STEM graduates, so the substance of the material is very-relevant to your recruiting profession, too.

Imagine how many people see your boat as a life-changing rocketship. Love what you have. Keep a journal. Every day, when you arrive at work, write down 3 things that you love about being a recruiter. When you change the story you tell yourself, you’ll be better empowered to advocate for raises, find paths to advance in your career, and elevate the prestige of the profession, overall.

That open door makes you a pioneer in your field.

Step 2: Reduce the cognitive overhead of your job

One of the challenges about the recruiting function is that there’s a lot of context-switching involved. Think about how many times you shift gears in a typical day to complete your neverending to-do list:

• Reading emails
• Responding to emails
• Talking to hiring managers
• Talking to candidates
• Creating reports for your executive team
• Sourcing candidates
• Working with the rest of your recruiting team

It’s very human to feel exhausted at the end of the day. This tiredness may also be the source of some of your career-related frusrtations. 

That’s because, believe it or not, four parts of your brain are involved in a simple cognitive task-switch. Even if you think you’re being productive, you’re not—your mind is tricking you.

“That switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one thing,” says Daniel Levitin, professor of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University, in an interview with Quartz.

Here are 3 simple things you can do to give your brain a rest:

• Focus on one task at a time
• Use software to offload mentally intensive tasks
• Take more breaks from the screen—go for a walk, sit on a bench, spend time with a notebook, and give your eyes a rest from the refresh rate of your monitor

When we’re rested and well-nourished, we’re happier and more productive. We can accomplish more and feel better about it, too. Our bodies will stop tricking us into frustration. With less frustration interfering with our everyday lives, we can unlock higher levels of performance and job satisfaction.

Step 3: Connect your individual story to a series of larger stories

How does your job impact overall performance? What will be the ripple effect of the decisions that you make today, for your company five, ten, or one hundred years from now? How does this ripple effect translate into global change during the Fourth Industrial Revolution? 

Try telling yourself two different versions of this story—one with a positive mindset and one with a negative one.

You are better to the world, and a more powerful force within it, if you can connect your personal actions to a bigger picture. If you offer a positive perspective, your impact will be positive, too.

Isn’t it funny how the colloquial expression, “change begins with you” really is true?

It’s pure logic.

Final Thoughts

When you see a bigger story for yourself, you’ll have a bigger story to tell. You’ll teach the people around you to value your work, more. You’ll increase the prestige of the recruiting profession, as a whole. You’ll be happier in your job. Oh, and did we mention that you’ll change the world, for the better, along the way?

Yes. You’re already doing it. Give yourself a big hug, and high-five the person next to you. 

Sending virtual hugs and high fives,

Team Humanpredictions

P.S. If you find the information from this resource helpful, please share it with more people on your team, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and with your networks of recruiters.

P.P.S. We care about diversity, inclusion, and respecting pronouns. We thought that the quotes below would hit home with humans of all walks of life. We love to push communication boundaries with our content, respectfully. If you’d ever like to see a change in our communication style, please let us know.

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