MightyRecruiter
Successful recruiters get to the top echelon of their profession thanks to a varied skillset and the drive to find the perfect candidate against all odds. Ultimately, it can be this same never-let-up mentality and intense motivation that can be a recruiter’s undoing. But, if you believe Jodie Garrison, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Garrison, a recruiter with nearly a decade of experience, is the senior tech for ARM, with expertise in recruiting sales, IoT, CPU, wireless, and more. Dubbed the Recruiting Yogini, Jodie has used her decade of recruiting experience and her yoga teacher training to look at recruiting through a new lens. Thanks to yoga, she has become an expert on finding her Zen while kicking butt at work. Garrison maintains that it isn’t just a willingness to work hard that will help a recruiter succeed but the ability to bring balance and flexibility and personal Zen to work. She touts the concept of “recruiting from the heart”, and in her August 9th webinar, Zen Recruiting: A Recruiting Yogini Shares Secrets to Staying in Flow, Jodie shares her methods for staying organized, staying focused and keeping her Zen.
MightyRecruiter sat down with Jodie to get a sneak peak into the talk and to learn more about how yoga influences her work and how improved relationships between recruiters and hiring managers can bring heart back into recruiting.
What is your background in recruiting?
I came into recruiting through franchising… [and then] I made the transition from franchise recruiting to general recruiting to hiring hackers, designers, and different kinds of freelancers to full-on technical recruiting. Today, my role is pretty varied: sourcing, recruiting, projects.
When did you first notice the connection between yoga and recruiting?
I think it’s been building. When I first came to yoga, I was doing Bikram (hot yoga), and I was like ‘wow.’ I started because I needed to get out of the office – I was gaining weight from working so much. So, I would come into the studio and sweat through the poses. At first, I just wanted to get one of those yoga butts and get to buy fancy clothes. I don’t know if that’s common, but I wasn’t super inspired to elevate my consciousness. As I found my way, though, I just really came to understand the power of meditation and focus. Through movement, I can become still, and when I take the time to do the practice, I’m more able to focus on work and be more available for my clients.
What area of recruiting are you passionate about right now?
I’m really passionate about the hiring manager experience. We talk so much about the candidate experience that sometimes I think we forget that we have a job to do. After all, we work for the companies whose jobs we’re filling; they’re our customers. How are we leveraging their expertise and their networks? How are we supporting them and partnering with them as their subject matter experts in recruiting? How is our relationship with them, in terms of combining what we bring to the table with what they bring? Can we make 1 + 1 equal to more than just two through partnerships and collaboration? From what I’ve seen lately, I think we’ve lost a bit of that focus on our clients.
It sounds like the needs of the hiring manager are sometimes overlooked in the hiring process?
Yes. I mean, we only have so many hours on this planet, so I advocate being kind. Be kind to your recruiting team, to your candidates, to your hiring managers—and have it come from the heart. Understand that your hiring managers are building teams and that these teams are comprised of people. Sometimes we get super transactional and overly focused on whatever hot role we’re trying to fill. When that happens, we don’t talk about the human side. We don’t take the time with the hiring manager to be sure that we understand the role in the marketspace. We forget to ask hiring managers questions about how their team has evolved and how the role – particularly the soft skills – may have changed over time.
How will correcting this oversight improve recruiting?
Having these conversations brings the humanity and the heart to recruiting. But, it also inspires hiring managers to see the potential in candidates. In recruiting, especially in technical recruiting, we’re so focused on the functional, technical job description, but the workforce is moving at such a quick pace that the skills we’re hiring for today are not the same skills that are going to be needed two years from now. So we need to be identifying people who are quick learners and who are agile and flexible. Presenting candidates who fit the team rather than just the job spec will help.
In your webinar, you talk about “recruiting from the heart.” Can you say more about that concept?
Recruiting from the heart [is] about my passion for working with hiring managers. Again, I think that we talk a lot about horrible or positive candidate experiences, but we don’t provide enough information or support to hiring managers. As a result, sometimes hiring managers are left in the dark.
I think a lot about bringing lightness to the process, about not holding our processes like dogma, about using new tools and experimenting with shortcuts. It’s also about leaving behind tools and processes that aren’t working anymore. I think a lot about how to keep things simple. When you are recruiting from the heart, you’re giving yourself space to fall back in love your purpose as a recruiter.
Want to learn more about how to maintain your Zen in the midst of recruiting madness? Register today for MightyRecruiter’s webinar with Jodie Garrison, Zen Recruiting: A Recruiting Yogini Shares Secrets to Staying in Flow, on August 9th.
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