Career Advice for a 25 year old

[Greg]

I met this chap in London.  He was 25 and had drive and ambition but lacked critical thinking skill and experience.

Spent a while thinking about how to help him steer a sensible course with his future and wrote this.  Thought I would post it here too, in case anyone else can get something from the general principles.



Jon,

In a nutshell this is why I would not go into recruitment as a career at your age.

To make 200,000 quid a year in recruitment you have to be recruiting fairly senior people (VP, SVP. EVP, C) and have some level of exclusivity with the hiring firm.  If you are a trusted party who deeply understands their business then the chances your candidates are hired are much higher.

The 'dead ends' where you work just as hard, if not harder, and don't make any money are the limitation of the profitability of the recruitment business.  You are capped by the number of productive hours - Working hours that lead to revenue.

The recruiters I know who are making money are ex-senior business people who semi-retire or change-direction in their 50s and start a recruitment company from their garden office.  This makes good practical business sense.  They have sold or installed high-value B2B technology or services for years, can speak with great credibility and authority on the topic and have deep and wide networks of trusted contacts who tend to be senior people with hiring authority and influence.  Those contacts will prefer to deal with them over a general recruitment company, whether large or small, because the hiring manager is concerned with.  1.  Not wasting his time kissing frogs and 2.  That the specialist recruiter he pays remains loyal to HIS future hiring needs and not those of his competitors.

If you enter recruitment at 25 then at 50 years old, you can never be this specialist with deep inside industry knowledge and contacts, because you have spent the last 25 years recruiting and NOT installing, managing software projects, running operations, or the other niche vertical experience that has provided you with a senior network of people who trust you.  You are "just another headhunter", perhaps with a grasp of their business, but not an industry insider.

Now: factor in AI and Machine Learning.  These technologies are going to pull the %age of annual salary you can charge down to single digits, because machines can read and understand CVs and consider thousands and thousand of other data points a human cannot consider.  With enough data the machine can detect (predict statistically) whether someone is a likely alcoholic, or a gambler in debt, a sex pest and a host of other problems a human could not spot.

AI will make recruitment a commodity at the bottom 70% of the market (probably owned by LinkedIn) and only for the top 10% of jobs where the annual salary is high enough that 20% of it justifies a skilled human to consider and think about nuanced factors that a machine cannot think (for the next 30-50 years at least), will there be decent money to be made.  That subjective judgement is FAR MORE LIKELY to be within the skill set of a former industry insider and specialist.

So, who are they going to pick as their exclusive headhunter?  The recruiter with 10-25 years of wide but largely irrelevant experience to their business niche or the 55 year old industry insider who knows precisely how their back office or technology stack operates and therefore whose subjective judgement or gut feel about a candidate is much more likely to be right?

If you want a long and successful career in business aim for machine learning or robotics sales and or data sales.  Those will be the booming industries for the next 30 years. Going into recruitment (long term) at this stage would be as daft as going into the book of music retailing industries in the year 2000 before APPLE and AMAZON took off.

[Greg]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-25/saturday-humor-millennial-job-interview

Watch the video.  Very funny. And true.

I've interviewed over 20 people over the last month.  I wanted a person of 20-29 but couldn't find one who was remotely suitable, not even close.  Some in their 30s stank too.

Final two are both foreigners and 34 and 40 years old.

If you are in your early 20s and can do a 9am to 6pm office day 5 days per week and learn new skills and not complain or demand things that no business can reasonably provide; you are going to have very little competition, because a large number of your peer group are worse than useless.

I knew it was bad, but it's worse than that.

[Greg]

This might go some way to explaining how that 18 year old I placed in a job 4 years ago has hit a sales target 2 years running and is doing 1.4 million a year in compliance software sales.

In my experience it's almost unthinkable that he could pull that performance off.  In my day, nobody did that, not even me.  But it's possible his job is made easier because too many of his competitors are lazy, entitled tossers.

Being the exception today might make your career an easy ride.  As a native English speaker you only have to compete with foreigners who are at a natural disadvantage.  The millenial tossers tend to be native born, not imports or immigrants.

[Bonaventure]

I've interviewed over 20 people over the last month.  I wanted a person of 20-29 but couldn't find one who was remotely suitable, not even close.  Some in their 30s stank too.

I always knew that millennial hygene, even at work, was pretty bad, but what were the lowlights of these people?

[Greg]

Machine Learning is going to decimate the job market.  Choose your career wisely.

Accountancy - Dead career path.

So which other professions are at greatest risk?

Martin Ford, futurist and author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, explains the jobs that are most at risk are those which “are on some level routine, repetitive and predictable”.

Telemarketing, for example, which is highly routine, has a 99% probability of automation according to The Future of Employment report; you may have already noticed an increase in irritating robocalls. Tax preparation, which involves systematically processing large amounts of predictable data, also faces a 99% chance of being automated. Indeed, technology has already started doing our taxes: H&R Block, one of America’s largest tax preparation providers, is now using Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence platform.

Robots will also take over the more repetitive tasks in professions such as law, with paralegals and legal assistants facing a 94% probability of having their jobs computerized. According to a recent report by Deloitte, more than 100,000 jobs in the legal sector have a high chance of being automated in the next 20 years.

Fast food cooks also face an 81% probability of having their jobs replaced by robots like Flippy, an AI-powered kitchen assistant which is already flipping burgers in a number of CaliBurger restaurants.

Wait! What jobs will be safe from robots?
Ford, the futurist, classifies resilient jobs in three areas.

The first is jobs that involve “genuine creativity, such as being an artist, being a scientist, developing a new business strategy”. Ford notes: “For now, humans are still best at creativity but there’s a caveat there. I can’t guarantee you that in 20 years a computer won’t be the most creative entity on the planet. There are already computers that can paint original works of art. So, in 20 years who knows how far it’s going to go?”

The second area is occupations that involve building complex relationships with people: nurses, for example, or a business role that requires you to build close relationships with clients (salespeople - Hooray!!!)

The third area is jobs that are highly unpredictable – for example, if you’re a plumber who is called out to emergencies in different locations.

[Prayerful]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-25/saturday-humor-millennial-job-interview

Watch the video.  Very funny. And true.

I've interviewed over 20 people over the last month.  I wanted a person of 20-29 but couldn't find one who was remotely suitable, not even close.  Some in their 30s stank too.

Final two are both foreigners and 34 and 40 years old.

If you are in your early 20s and can do a 9am to 6pm office day 5 days per week and learn new skills and not complain or demand things that no business can reasonably provide; you are going to have very little competition, because a large number of your peer group are worse than useless.

I knew it was bad, but it's worse than that.

I'd hazard a guess the stinkers are cyclists who think a Mexican shower (lots of deodorant) suffices instead of a proper shower. Basic office hours cannot be too taxing for anyone except the chronically ill.

[MilesChristi]

Working 9-5 sucks but it's not water torture

[Greg]

https://il.linkedin.com/pub/avi-harel/45/a3b/70b

This made me laugh.

"Mentoring in sales and business success" by a person who CLEARLY never had any.

He was a freelance photographer who otherwise had a series of failed jobs.

The amazing thing is some people actually buy this bullshit.  It's like being taught to walk a tightrope by a clown in a wheelchair.

[Bonaventure]

https://il.linkedin.com/pub/avi-harel/45/a3b/70b

This made me laugh.

"Mentoring in sales and business success" by a person who CLEARLY never had any.

He was a freelance photographer who otherwise had a series of failed jobs.

The amazing thing is some people actually buy this bullshit.  It's like being taught to walk a tightrope by a clown in a wheelchair.

Is it really a surprise? I mean, it's (((Avi Harel)))...

[Greg]

It's not the Jews that are con-artists.  They are everywhere.