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A Recruiter, a Retiree, and a Consultant Walk into a Blog
And teach me the most important lesson about being professional
It started with a conversation with a recruiter named Andrew.
He wasn’t recruiting me — I’m not nearly upscale enough. But we’ve known each other and worked together for years at various events, and now game together via zoom.
During a pre-game lull, we started talking about presenters we’d seen over the years, and the subject of “professionalism” came up. He considered very few of the presenters he’d seen over the years to be truly “professional.”
I pushed back at that a bit, mainly because I was one of those presenters more than once. We tossed around the meaning of that word back and forth a bit — dismissing quickly the silly trope that “a professional is someone who gets paid.”
We both knew that we considered the quality of “professionalism” to be more than that. We also could easily list behaviors that we considered un-professional: things like using the audience as a recruiting pool (for either business or personal use), “prima-donna” behavior, badmouthing the competition in an effort to make themselves look good.
It was easy to determine what wasn’t professional, but it was harder for us to narrow down the…
