After I relocated from Bangalore to Tokyo with my husband, I found myself looking for work in a completely new city and culture. Not long after arriving in Japan, I joined Robert Walters, discovering a whole new world that combined my specialist IT experience with the exciting challenges and opportunities of a career in recruitment.

Before I moved to Tokyo, I was working client-side for an IT consultancy in India managing IT projects on behalf of a major international consumer goods company. It was a great role, as I had to have really strong communication skills to work with clients to understand their requirements, but I also had to have the technical knowledge to relay that information to our team of developers.

I hadn’t really planned to work in recruitment — it wasn’t an industry I was familiar with back in India, so it wasn’t until after we’d moved to Japan that my husband heard about Robert Walters and recommended that I look into it. Once I started learning more about recruitment, I felt like it was something I should have been doing all along.

In many ways, the recruitment is a lot like my previous job — talking to clients to understand their requirements, then working to deliver a solution that works for them. I had always enjoyed working with clients, but what really excited me was the opportunity to work with candidates as well.

Recruitment is such a varied career, and so while there isn’t really a ‘typical’ working day, the core of my role is all about building and maintaining relationships, and with my background in IT consulting I can really understand my clients and candidates. I think it’s exciting working in recruitment. Even though the recruitment process loosely follows a cycle, every scenario is unique — there’s always a new challenge to solve. You’re working with different companies and different candidates, and they’re all looking for something specific.

If you enjoy working with clients and want to use your communication skills to help people find a better job, this is the right place to be. Your technical knowledge will be a huge advantage, too — it will help you better read and interpret job descriptions, but most importantly, it will help you speak to clients and candidates in a way that reassures them that you understand, at a detailed level, what a particular job entails and what a candidate will need to be successful in the role.