Stop! have you evaluted your work-life quotient?
It’s no secret that the recruitment industry is a tough nut to crack. You’re constantly working, networking and connecting clients and candidates. Your levels of success hang on the decision of one person who can completely make or break you.
When it’s good, working in recruitment is great. When you place a candidate you feel on top of the world, your riding on the coat tails of success and feel empowered and motivated to continue to succeed and celebrate with your teammates after hours.
But then at the other end of the scale it’s all too easy to get stuck in a rut and spiral out of control. You work longer hours to find the ideal candidates for your clients, your tired, frustrated and your working on an incredibly short fuse.
So what gives? We can pretty much guarantee that it’s quality time at home with family, friends and loved ones.
Work-life balance soon becomes work, work, work with a bit of life thrown in for good measure. This can easily and quickly lead to resentment from loved ones, arguments and relationship breakdowns.
When you work so hard to make a success of your career you can often be doing so to the detriment of everyone around you.
Take Mitesh Parikh as a prime example. Mitesh is a recruitment specialist who had to turn his own life around when his job started to take over his life and affect his relationships. He was so busy celebrating success and chasing the high that brings that he didn’t realise how he himself was changing, and not for the better: https://www.morganmckinley.co.uk/article/fitness-recruitment-importance-work-life-balance
There’s no denying that there are incredible highs in recruitment but there are also some really dark lows, some that need addressing before drastic action needs taking.
Recruiters put immense pressure on themselves both physically and mentally and this can quickly escalate into career burnout. But would you know what warning signs to look for?
And aside from all the obvious reasons why you should have a better balance between your career and your family, you also need downtime to spend time on becoming a better person, learning a new skill or further developing your career.
I fact, how can you perform at your best when you’re tired, stressed and feeling under pressure. Time away from work is healthy as you can relax, get creative and enjoy the rush of ideas that come flooding into your head when you’re least expecting it.
When life is all about work then you’re not really working to live, it’s no longer a necessity but a need.
The subject of Work-Life balance is calling a lot of employers into question, putting the onus on them to provide everything their employees need to feel fulfilled in life; from the time they spend in the office to the down-time they should be enjoying at home.
Technology has enabled us to stay connected to the outside world 24/7 and allows us to be contactable at a time when perhaps we shouldn’t, but this should be the exception and not the rule.
It’s not as easy as being black and white. Work sometimes gets in the way of family life and family life often gets in the way of work, but as long as we all work harmoniously and feel fulfilled with our achievements then there’s no reason why we can’t have it all.
So if you’re stuck in the office after hours reading this blog when you should be at home reading your kids a bedtime story, or having dinner with friends then now’s the time for an intervention.
After all, if you’re too busy working towards creating a better life then it may just pass you by.