Ten years in HR and recruitment, and the roles on my desk today are narrower than anything I had handled before. By this stage I assumed there was not much left in the profession that could catch me out. Then Liubov asked me to put aside everything I knew about recruiting and build a new strategy from a different starting point. My first reaction was fear, and the weight of that stayed a while. A challenge repays you once you accept it and grow into it, and being ten years in and still learning is not a bad place to stand.
Six years as a people partner taught me what really decides how a conversation goes. Candidates can tell at once when the person across from them is a machine ticking through prepared questions and writing down answers. Working that way is beyond me anyway. What I look for is a proper exchange, and trust grows out of it rather than out of anything on my list.
There was no winding path into this. My earliest job already involved recruiting, I was nineteen or twenty when I ran an interview on my own for the first time, and by the end of it I had decided. Nothing else has held my attention since. My LinkedIn gives no sense of how much I enjoy this. The work sits nearer to a hobby than to employment, and that covers every part of it, the people and the craft alike.
I came in with high expectations. The interviews had gone well, my second one with Liubov was warm, and I had taken to the place while I was still on the outside of it. What followed exceeded that. People here understand you and factor you in. Neither the agencies nor the fields I came from resemble this one, because the roles and the clients are so narrow. And the job leaves enough room for a life around it, which in my book is not a minor detail.
Tbilisi is where I have lived my whole life, but I consider myself a citizen of the world, because I love to travel. Europe, Asia, Africa, and a long list I still have not got to. I live with two dogs, my fur babies. At weekends I see friends, and I like getting out of the city, a book, something to watch, and the best kind of weekend is the one that does not drain my social battery. Abroad it is not the same, those days go on exploring instead of resting.