Your Talent Agency sources, recruits, and relocates international tech talent so your teams hit their milestones, your investors stay happy, and you blast your company into the f*cking stratosphere.

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Your Talent Agency People of Your Talent Agency, Recruitment 0 Comments

Ridge Forrester: My #epic journey

My career first started in South Africa where I gained a little over 7 years of sales and account management experience. This is where I realized I had a passion for people and this grew my love for this career path. I have never shied away from hard work or achieving my dreams and of course with this comes a great amount of challenges, similar to the one I was about to experience relocating to the Netherlands.

Let me take you back to March 2020, a year that the entire world changed along with my life journey. This is the year that my wife and I decided to pack up our lives in South Africa and leave behind everything we knew to create a life that is filled with adventure, challenges and an abundance of opportunity.

Being an expat in the Netherlands is an incredibly enriching experience and an experience that I am still in awe of everyday, with this being said, it does come with its challenges. However, this is not something that I was going to allow to prevent me from creating a successful life for myself in this incredible country.

In February 2022, I had the honor and privilege of joining Your Talent Agency and being placed in the role of Recruitment Business Partner. I can confidently say this is where things changed completely for me. Why, you may ask? Well, I found my core values and beliefs aligned perfectly with YTA. This is a company that strives to put people first on a daily basis, always focused on getting shit done and has ambitions to blast our partners into the stratosphere.

I immediately knew that this was where I was meant to be! There’s a quote by Steve Jobs that resonated with me during that period and still does to this day. 

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle as with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it”

During my first week at YTA, I was welcomed with open arms. I had the pleasure of meeting my EPIC colleagues who I have had some time to get to know throughout these last few months and can truly say I have been able to develop some unforgettable friendships with them. This is an important aspect for me when it comes to the people you work with and it is extremely reassuring to know that I have the opportunity to experience these types of friendships within my workspace. 

But its not ALL play…I’ve had the incredible opportunities to work with some of our EPIC partners, Fabrique des Lumieres, Solvinity, Routescanner and Cannondale. During these projects I was given the responsibilities of sourcing and recruiting local and international talents. These were some of my first experiences in a recruitment role.

Receiving the positive news that your candidate has been successfully placed, offers no better feeling. Knowing that I could have possibly changed a person’s life with their dream job is something no one can take away from me. This gives me peace of mind knowing I have chosen the correct career path. Although it’s not always sunshine and rainbows, as a recruiter we face many challenges on a daily basis. I’d like to share a few; First and foremost is the stereotypical perception that society has of recruiters. We are not all evil, I promise. We are here to help build organizations and change lives one step at a time. Secondly, competition in the market is absolutely insane. An interesting fact to know is that on average a Developer receives a total of 8 InMails daily, crazy isn’t it?!

Now how do you stand out from the rest? It took me some time to overcome this but with the help of Marcel van der Meer, a Sourcing Master, I now realize the importance of bringing creativity into my everyday workflow, after all we are dealing with people, not robots. With that being said, I’m mastering a unique and personal way of reaching out to my potential candidates and I encourage other recruiters to master this skill too, the success will follow. It goes without saying, no two days are ever the same, which makes this job so exciting. I have undoubtably learned a lot from my first few months working as a Recruitment Business Partner and intend to keep growing and challenging myself throughout my career, with no plans of stopping or slowing down. I intend on making my legacy known!