New Year’s Resolutions are notorious for being short lived. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them. This year, consider what you can use this opportunity for. A Resolution should be something that reminds you of things you often forget. In other words, consider your New Year’s Resolutions as an opportunity to keep great advice at the forefront of your mind. In the recruiting business we all know that hard work is an absolute requirement, but with all the dashing around, trying to be the first to snap up a great candidate or fill a great position, it’s easy to forget the things that create a great base for strong recruiting skills over time.
Here are a few New Year’s Resolutions to consider for 2015:
1. Don’t Compare Yourself to Others
As a recruiter, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the competitive side of the job. Stop doing that this year. Remember that you are your own worse competition and focus on doing your job as well as possible.
2. Value Honesty and Sincerity
Recruiters are usually some of the most confident and enthusiastic people in a room. It’s easy to let those skills – which are absolutely necessary for the job – run away with your mouth. We can all afford to step back from time to time and re-focus on the importance of being sincere and honest.
Enthusiasm can all too easily look like insincerity, and sincerity is what builds a great relationship, whether it’s between you and a client or you and a great candidate. You want people to like you, and you’re confident they will, but honesty and sincerity are the groundwork for a really powerful relationship.
3. Set Goals with Dates
A lot of people use New Year’s Resolutions as a time to set goals. That’s fine and it’s a great start, but you’ve got to put a date on a goal. Put yourself in a position to succeed by resolving to set the kinds of goals that have an expiration date. Measurable goals are real goals. Come up with goals that are reasonable for you to accomplish. If you’ve averaged 3 placements per month this year, make a goal of having at least 4 per month. At the end of each month you’ll know whether you’ve reached your goal.
4. Join a Group, Learn to Use a New Tool
Extend yourself a bit this coming year by doing something specific which will increase your tangible skills. Joining a group will help you to extend your network and may lead to educating opportunities. Using the tools available to recruiters is required, but with so many out there and new ones being added all the time it’s easy to just give up and say you like what you work with now. Make a New Year’s Resolution to teach yourself to effectively take advantage of a recruiting tool that you’ve brushed past or only learned the very basics about.
5. Get Over Bad Days
It’s something we say again and again, but it bears repeating. No matter how many times or how often you have bad days, you must be able to get over them quickly. If you let bad days, or bad weeks, slow you down, you’ll be wasting even more time than you already feel you have. When something falls through, let it go with grace and get on to the next thing.
Write yourself a letter about the things you’d like to see yourself do over the coming year. Seal it and put it somewhere so you can open it at the end of the year. New Year’s Resolutions are hard to keep, but they’re still an opportunity to make promises to yourself about how things will get better from now forward.