Abby Dooley

I attribute my success to my determination and my personality. As a former college athlete, I'm very competitive, and we definitely have some benchmarks and numbers that you have to hit in recruiting in order to be successful. So I love the long game, the numbers, the metrics, the chase, the challenges, the sales quota - all of that is really fun, so I'm really determined. Another thing that helps me be successful is my personality. I love people - I love adults, I love grandparents, I love little kids, I love recent college graduates, and I love to connect with people. It's one thing to apply on a job site to a website and hope that your resume gets picked. It's another thing to speak to a human about your resume and learn from that human about the job. I have the pleasure of being a recruiter where I get to represent both sides - I get to represent the company, and I get to represent the candidate. Being able to connect with someone one-on-one, learn about them personally, what they're looking for in their next job, and to be able to help them, I think takes a really strategic personality, because you can't be mean, but you also can't be all rainbows and butterflies, because finding a new job is really important, so you want to be professional. So I think having the personality allows me to be successful, as well as my determination.

The biggest piece of advice that I was given was 'they put their pants on the exact same way that you do.' My boss actually told me that, because sometimes I would be really timid to speak to employers, or I would be nervous to speak to people with really big titles. Sometimes I've hired CEOs, and I've hired VPs of sales, and I've hired senior directors of professional service. And sometimes I let titles make me nervous when speaking to people, but this great piece of advice really helped me. It's about seeing people as people. They're looking for jobs, and they need help supporting and finding jobs just as much as the recent college grad does. Really just seeing people as people and knowing that people are looking to connect with recruiters - it kind of sounds corny, like, the sky is the limit - I'm able to help anybody, which is such a cool part of my job that I really value. I am able to help people at all levels, and help companies scale and hire their teams at all levels as well.

It is the best job in the world. It's very motivating, it's very challenging, and it's pretty special to help someone find their career or their dream job. It's very special to be a part of somebody finding their career or their dream job. My advice for those that are looking for jobs is respond to recruiters that reach out to you on LinkedIn - we're not looking to waste your time, and you can let us know if it's a job that you're interested in or not. My advice for someone who is in college looking for a career is there is so much fun to have in recruiting as a recruiter. It's a really unique career path, too - not a lot of people know about recruiting.

I'd say some challenges are finding the right job for the right candidate, and then vice versa - finding the right candidates for the right job. I represent companies and help them build their team, so they will give me a list of 5 skills that they're looking for, and then I go on LinkedIn Recruiter and use LinkedIn to type in those 5 skills to find people that demonstrate that, and then I reach out to them and try to get a hold of them to see if they would be a good fit for this job. Sometimes that process can take a little bit longer, especially when those job requirements are very specific. Another thing that I think can be challenging is sometimes you can get all the way to the finish line and find the right person and get them to the company and get a job offer, but at the end of the day, the people have to be excited about the job. This is very life-changing - you maybe change your career 5 times in your life, maybe 10 times in your life, so it's a pretty big deal. It takes a lot of courage to quit your job, to accept another offer, so sometimes you work really hard to get people all the way to the finish line, we get them an offer at the exact starting salary that we agreed on, and at the end of the day, they just decide that they don't want to take that risk. So that could be challenging.