This week on Strivin & Thrivin, we speak with Mitch King, Head of Talent Acquisition at Linktree.
After leaving school, Mitch had no idea what he wanted to do, and went from dishwashing to admin. From there, he found recruitment and ended up recruiting in the marketing and advertising space. After 12 years though, it was time to move on.
“12 years was too long. I started there as a Junior Admin Consultant and left as essentially, the Managing Director for the last three months, which I didn’t enjoy. I made the decision to do what I really wanted to do – I really liked the tech space. I really liked more of the hands-on recruitment side.”
Now, Mitch is at Linktree and has been for just over two years. But after a solid 14 years in the recruitment space we had to know what it was like working his way up from the bottom of the ladder.
“I would say I was a really typical junior consultant. It was just scraps thrown at me, I was trying to learn the ropes…I think one thing I learned from it was not to chase the greener pastures.”
After working his way up, being put in charge of the freelance desk to managing a couple of people, Mitch put his hand up to run his own office around the 8-9 year mark. But by year 12, there was no enjoyment left in the job.
“It affected my mental health quite badly towards the end and I made a decision that this has to change. This is the thing that’s ruining my mental health, so I’m going to change this thing and then figure it out. It took a while to make the decision – we’ve got two kids, a mortgage, that sort of stuff, leaving a job without a job. But it’s probably the best decision that I’ve made career wise.”
Obviously, going from agency to an internal TA role is a bit of a step, so why did it interest Mitch?
“There’s so much more diversity of thought, you get to speak to someone and go, “Hey, what do you think about this from a non-TA and non-recruitment perspective?,” that in a recruitment agency you’re all just sitting around talking about the perspective of recruiters. So there were a few of those things that I was chasing – a combination of tech being inside the company and not being transactional.”
Now, if you can relate to imposter syndrome when it comes to your career, so can Mitch.
“Every day, my internal voice continually tells me how shit I am. And it’s only at an older age that I’ve sort of learned to balance that with the facts…I spoke to some graduates at the start of the year or end of last year. And the piece of advice I gave them was, 99% of people are trying to figure it out on the fly.”
