Korean Job Discussion Forums

[yeramian]

Have you or are you working as a recruitor in Korea or your home country? I'm interested to hear what this work is like? HOw much you can earn and how to get started mostly in your home country? It seem like an obvious thing to do after a working stint in Korea, but you'd want to feel that teachers were walking into a situation that they could come out of with a minimum of stress and turmoil!
I'd love to hear from folks working in recruiting
Thanks
Gail

[chronicpride]

Yes, and here is my testimony that I put up last year highlighting a small selection of the reasons why I got out of it:

[Grotto]

Good post.

[Aussiekimchi]

I started out in business for myself, recruiting on the side with my Korean fiance. Things were tough but now I am working for a company doing the recruiting full time, it is much better. I was heading for a breakdown! These days, the stress is still there, but it is not my livelihood that is on the line.
If I had continued recruiting for myself in Korea, I think I would have been single, friendless and days away from a heart attack within 1 year.

The problem when doing it yourself is that you start experiencing the everyday problems most businesses do, and you are usually not prepared for them.

These days I can accept placing 1 out of every 10 teachers that apply to my company. Back then I couldn't. I wanted every teacher that emailed me placed into one of my schools.
And I had a great group of schools and the teachers were fantastic.
I really had no problems at all outside of my own work ethic. I just didn't get many emails form teachers or schools. It was easy.

It was however, an eye opener for me to witness the blatant racism, the importance of looks over everything, the amount of decisions that were based on a picture and the ridiculous amounts of mind changing with both parties.
Some schools, I worked my butt off for to find a teacher, some teachers I worked my butt off for to find a school.
Some placements were easy, some had many problems.
It is not just the schools and the teachers you have to deal with.

It is the other recruiters undercutting you or calling Immigration to check your visa status, tax records or just to generally harrass you. Immigration offices around the world, who like to change their policies on the hour every hour. Airlines, who are usually very professional and usually have only 1 out of every 1000 employees a total idiot. This employee is always on the other end of the phone to me. Courier companies, which get your package to Korea within minutes and then take a week to get it from Incheon to Gangnam.

You work around the clock and you become addicted to doing things right. But they never seem to be running smoothly. You are simply relying on too many other people to be professional also.
If you think both teacher and school can be professional in Korea, you are so surely mistaken.

You become greedy. You start taking a few extra schools. A few extra teachers. You start checking things out less. You are no longer as thorough as you were. There just aren't enough hours in the day or you simply just say bugger it...everything will be ok. I want the money.
And then the problems come. You get your first midnight runner. You should have checked him out more. Your first school starts causing problems. You should have checked it out more.
Teachers start not showing up for interviews.
Schools start not honouring their contracts.
Suddenly your perfect money making world has all the same problems every business has. If you have any AJITS you will see these problems through. There are people relying on you. But everyday you feel like saying bugger it...I can't do this anymore.


If you want to be a recruiter, great...good luck.
You will work your arse off, get belittled by people who do not realise what you do, but because most recruiters are asses, those belittlers will usually be right!

You will console yourself at night by telling yourself that you are not like the other recruiters, you are honest, you are the only guy in the country who cares. But you will be kidding yourself. Because if you have not taken a short cut to make a quick buck yet, you are only a few days away from doing it.

Oh and you will laugh at the posters who think your only task is to hand over a resume to a school and collect a huge fee.

[guangho]

I was close friends with some legal recruiters in NYC. An average week:

-Huge, Greedy P.C. wants 100 paralegals and wants them to start on Monday
-Your ad garners 400 resumes and 200 phone calls
-Out of the 200 calls, 150 do not leave call back numbers.
-Out of the 50 you do call, 25 are not at home/leave message etc.
-You speak to 25. They don't know if they are qualified/interested/available/etc. but want to come in for an interview. You ask them to fax their resumes. (Never ask them to email- we'll discuss that later.)
-10 resumes are faxed
-You now have 410 resumes to go through; 300 emailed, 110 faxed.
-The emails are 75% crap. Viruses everywhere. Resumes written on crack. Glorious falsehoods which are easy to check abound ("I had a caseload of 500 matrimonial files and 1000 personal injury files during March." "I graduated with a 5.76 GPA." "I was single-handedly responsible for briefing and arguing Bush v. Gore".) Attachments that won't open. Cover letters like "I'm being evicted and really need a gig." But you plod through them. About 40 are worth talking to. As for the faxes, about 25 are tolerable. When people fax, it costs money, and they tend to do better work when they have something invested in it.
-You now make 65 calls. Because that is short of the 100 goal, you also try again the 25 who did not answer the last time.
-40/90 agree to start on Monday.
-You plod through the resumes again, and select almost tolerable candidates to fill the remaining spots.
-100 are ready to go on Friday. You're gonna get paid!
-Partner McGreedy's secretary calls at 4:59 P.M. to say that the project is cancelled.