Recruiters – how to build your self confidence

Working as a recruiter requires high self confidence, so how can you build yours?

As a recruiter you are expected to be self confident by everyone you deal with, but do you always feel confident? Your confidence may change depending on how things are going at work e.g. whether you have just made a placement or whether you are struggling to find good candidates for your best client. You may be more confident in some areas of your work than in others or you may have always had low self confidence.

Your level of self confidence can be evident to others through your behaviour, your body language, how you speak, and what you say and it can also impact your thoughts, feelings and actions. People with low self confidence may avoid taking risks and stretching themselves and will struggle to reach their goals and targets.

If you want to build your self confidence here are some things you can do:

Notice what you have achieved

To help you feel more confident and have a more positive view of yourself, make a list of your achievements including your skills, experience, personality, what others like about you, what has brought you success and challenges you have overcome.

Model confidence

Identify people who you think are self confident and look at how they act and behave and imagine how they think. Try acting and behaving like them and thinking in a confident way and see how it makes you feel.

Mix with people who build your confidence

Choose to mix with people who have a positive impact on your confidence, that tell you what you are good at, that you can go out and achieve it and ask you questions that help your thinking.

Imagine success

Think about successful outcomes to situations — if you think that something will be a success, it is more likely to be successful. The more success you achieve the more confident you will feel.

Feeling anxious and nervous is natural

Feeling anxious and nervous is completely natural. If you start to think that these feelings are natural and positive you will start to feel more confident in all situations.

Learn from your experiences

To build your confidence, review situations when you have felt confident and when you have felt less confident. Look at what went well, what did not go so well and what you will do differently next time.

Manage your mind and choose what you think

How you think, impacts how you feel and what you do. Therefore, it is important to choose what you think and to think positively to build your confidence.