How to Effectively Manage Stress as a Recruiter in 2023


Let’s be honest - it’s stressful being a recruiter: Between chasing targets, dealing with candidates, and manging your clients’ (often unreasonable) expectations, you often don’t have time to breathe. Over 75% of adults report moderate to high levels of work stress!

With such alarming numbers, we believe it’s more important than ever to address the issue and share some of our favourite ways of dealing with stress (you might want to take them with a pinch of salt, though!):

Start ghosting your candidates

Recruiters are always complaining on LinkedIn about how stressful and frustrating it is when a candidate ghosts them. Here is an idea - why don’t you give them a taste of their own medicine, all whilst reducing your stress levels?

We all know that some of the most stressful interactions can be with candidates - those heart-breaking calls from immediately available candidates when you don’t have any feedback for them can really get to you… So why don’t you ease yourself off that burden and stop making the calls? And if they tag you in a post on LinkedIn complaining about you ignoring them, just delete LinkedIn, too - as we all know social media causes anxiety.

Add a few more days holiday

There is nothing better than a nice relaxing holiday to clear your mind. But don’t worry – even if you have used all your holidays for the year already, there is a way around it! Why not just book some client meetings?

With modern CRMs able to automatically log emails, the old trick of booking meetings and lying to your boss that it’s your client that wants to cancel doesn’t really work these days. You need to be creative.

The best way of doing this well is to make sure your meetings are FAR AWAY from the office - if you can swing some oversea-based clients, you’re in for a great little city break! And for the adventurous ones, adding in some phantom flight delays can really stretch out your holiday!

Disengage from incentives

With your usual target being hard enough to hit, why take on the extra stress of pushing yourself to get the lunch club or company holiday target? We all know it’s more relaxed when your boss isn’t around (don’t lie), and there’s no easier way to enjoy some ‘you time’ than letting your high-performing colleagues take the boss out – as far away from you as possible!

Besides, the rewards alone can be stressful enough: Thinking about what to wear for a week in Ibiza with your boss is just far too much for any sane mind. Or worse - imagine your boss insists that they take you out to a fancy restaurant - one of those serving food the name of which you can’t even pronounce – and you hate it! If you hadn’t bothered to hit target in the first place, you wouldn’t be stuck in such an awkward position.

Start running your interviews in pubs

Getting out and meeting your candidates in person is always encouraged, so why not make that work to your advantage? If your manager has been questioning your every move and those pesky candidates keep calling, it is time to book an afternoon of candidate interviews.

No one said that it is mandatory to meet your candidates in some soulless coffee shop, did they? Taking your candidates out to the pub is a much better idea. Not only will their engagement go through the roof (as long as you’re the one buying the rounds) - there is a chance your candidates might reveal some secrets that you can use to help them take your job offer!

Stop going into the office

I hope we can all agree that sitting at home in your pyjamas is much more relaxing. While human interaction is important, dealing with getting ready and going into the office is just far too much to take some days. For that reason, a recruiter that is focused 100% on avoiding stress should be avoiding the office – ideally, you will have a convenient excuse ready (such as a cute little dog that needs to be walked every lunchtime.)

For some more (and maybe a bit more serious, too) tips on creating a killer strategy for this year, have a read of your eBook!

Candidate Driven Market

David Connolly

David is a Senior Growth Outreach Specialist at Firefish. After working as a 360 recruiter, he loves innovating recruitment with Firefish Software.

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