Several folks have recently asked me how I got into marketing recruitment, and why I love it. Aside from having family in admissions recruitment and in the publishing and advertising industry in New York, there was one monumental moment when I knew that impacting peoples’ careers was for me.

Flash back to fall of 2004, just after I graduated college. I found myself teaching university English in South Korea. An advanced student wanted English lessons specifically to land herself in one of the most competitive professions for college grads: being a flight attendant. (Think of Korean Air or Asiana Airlines as the Seoul equivalent of the top New York investment banking firms that hire a select few top graduates per year). Interviews are rigorous; English skills must be world class; and candidates must be nothing short of the complete package. I worked with Park Ga Yeong privately for the entire fall semester, role-playing customer service situations in English and practicing for the big interviews. In Korea, many parents go to unfathomable lengths to ensure their children’s educational and professional future, and many children attend school all day and usually for an additional few hours each night, with private tutoring on weekends. Ga Yeong set her sights on a flight attendant job before she started college. When the semester ended and I returned home in December, she was just starting to interview with Korean Air. Then in January, I received an ecstatic email from Ga Yeong, informing me that she got her ‘dream job’ and couldn’t have done it without me. I will never forget reading that email, nor screaming ‘YYEEESS!!” at the top of my lungs and fist-pumping in my empty living room. It was then when I started to process how I didn’t want to teach because I couldn’t impact people enough one-on-one, and that helping individuals with their careers could be unimaginably rewarding.

I then started in campus recruiting, learned about human resources, and quickly learned how recruiting is a tasty concoction of 2-parts HR, 1-part marketing & sales, and 1-part project management. As my passion for the business world grew, I gained tremendous satisfaction from realizing the importance of the people within a company, and how cool it was to put people into a company and watch them take that organization upwards.

This is why I love recruiting. It’s the one-on-one relationships, and the immense responsibility as an HR professional as I shape companies by sourcing their people, and I help individuals with their careers.