I recently celebrated my 2-year anniversary at Nmbrs, and I thought it would be an interesting moment to reflect on the impact Nmbrs had on my professional path.
Recruitment is quite stressing. We meet a lot of people, we need to be kind, and we always have to fill spots. We work in constant shortage so we never have that calm “ah ok, now I can breathe for a bit” moment.
As a recruitment professional, in my opinion, so far I found some skills that I consider crucial for someone who works in this field:
- Be able to build trustful relationships with colleagues and stakeholders;
- Keep healthy coping mechanisms to stress;
- Curiosity and openness towards your field and other fields that can help you do your job better
For these skills to flourish, a lot of this depends on you. However, you also need to have the right environment. I’m not telling you Nmbrs is the only place in the world where this can happen. But I do want to show you how this place has helped me improve as a person and as a professional.
Better at building more trustful relationships with colleagues and stakeholders
I’m a noisy person. I sing in the office and I make weird jokes about my hometown. But I can also go from that to a more calm and serious profile very quickly. I used to think that in order to be good at my job I had to shut down this noisy side of me and become the stereotypical professional figure (serious, always thinking about work and not so fun) so people would take me seriously. At Nmbrs, we are different. Each one of us has idiosyncrasies and, more importantly, our differences are celebrated. Nmbrs taught me that I didn’t need a mask for people to actually think I’m good at my job.
Now, I felt more at ease to open up and share what I’m really feeling and what I think about a given subject, which helps foster richer discussions.
Taking care of myself became a priority
Working in recruitment, there are a lot of things going on. All the positions are urgent and may stop the company if you don't hire fast. You can also lose candidates easily to other companies. And to add more pressure, at the same time, we need to worry about how everyone’s feeling in the process – candidates, colleagues, interviewers, etc. Stress is our job’s middle name.
Keeping a good mind balance is important. If I’m not ok mentally, I can forget about candidates, be biased in my assessments, or have less mental space to solve the multiple obstacles and challenges I face daily. I already knew this before I started working at Nmbrs but here I found a place where taking care of ourselves, of our emotional well being, and our work-life balance is more important and is recognised as a condition for the success of the company.
In meetings, it’s normal to discuss how you are, if you’re treating yourself right, colleagues pushing you to stay home if you’re sick. I have a colleague who sends me weird gifs when I’m down. I’m crazy about gifs! All of this is valued like any other task.
Expanded my technical skills beyond sourcing and interviewing
Something that made a lot of difference in the way I see myself as a professional is how much autonomy I was given to create my own role and shape it in the way that makes sense for me and the company. At Nmbrs, we don’t have managers so everyone is their own “job builder”.
My focus is doing “traditional” recruitment but, in my perspective, being a recruiter is not only the person who does interviews and sourcing. We have to be good at data and operations analysis, marketing, being good at psychology, in sales skills, know a bit of every function that you hire for, and be an ambassador of what your company does and wants to achieve. Besides needing a lot of mental flexibility and genuinely being curious about the world, we also need an environment that recognises the importance of more than an existence of a job. There are multiple small roles we can take in order to help the company reach success.
Nmbrs has helped me by giving me the space to explore those skills.The fact we work with cross functional teams helps to have access to more information on different fields and responsibilities. For example, I’ve been part of teams that are taking care of the summer event, salary structure, internal movements, and other diverse tasks.
Solidified my values in my working field
At Nmbrs, I could explore my own values as a professional, and apply it fully. Where am I standing? What are the values behind my job? Where would I like to see recruitment evolve to? I had my own ideas and purposes before, but it was at Nmbrs that I found the space to fully develop my perceptions on things. The company not only invites us to talk with colleagues, to go to events and share what we’ve learned but it also has a clear purpose and a “why” that we can see behind all the decisions that are made. Knowing this improved greatly the quality of my decisions.
What I’ve been learning with Nmbrs and in managing an organisation, is that good things come when the company genuinely sees humans and humanity as a part of its success and fosters that on a daily basis. In our case, it turns the environment into a safe place where people can be themselves, make their own mistakes, and draw their own life journey. For me, that’s what helps me become a better person.
What about you? Have you ever thought about it? When we were young, school was the place where we spent most of our time and the relationships we built there impacted how we’ve developed as a person. Now, our professional life has taken that place.
So I finish with a question: How has your company helped shape who you are as a person and as a professional?
The personal and professional growth of every single one of our colleagues is very important to us. We're looking for new people to join the team!
