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Hi my name's Nathan Hathaway and I work in the Human Resources field as a
recruiter for Pierce College and I've been working here for a little bit over
a year. I've also worked in some other areas of recruitment in my past work
experience that has prepared me for this position here.
I've worked as a supervisor before,
done a lot of hiring type of activities and I just really enjoy
working with other people and so I tried a lot of things before I kinda
found my fit in Human Resources.
So as far as education or background or anything that has helped
prepare me for this type of a role,
I do have an undergraduate and a masters degree in business.
When I first started in school
I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to, so I chose a business degree because it's
very versatile and so, I actually went through and I tried a variety of different things
before I found Human Resources and so I feel like a business degree really prepares you for
for kind of just the the basics of, of the work world. So you get educated, you
get your communication classes
which help you to communicate with other people and you're writing a
lot so it helps to kind of phrase things the right way. I also found that I
gained a lot of I'm good critical thinking type of skills when I was in school
which really helps you to problem solve. There's a lot of things that you
have to really think about because there's a lot of issues that
that could revolve around the decisions that you make so
you really want to be able to think through,
think about what ramifications that might have if you decide to go one way
versus another and so I feel like that school really help me do that.
In HR we definitely work in a team setting
me and my co-workers, we all back each other up.
We bounce ideas off of each other.
I really wouldn't be able to do my job and I'm sure that they wouldn't be able
to do their job nearly as effectively if we didn't have that kind of
give-and-take relationship between, between all of us.
As far as surprises go after having come to the HR field,
the one main surprise I would say is how legal driven it is.
So you don't kinda really, you don't really realize until you actually are in the
profession that we constantly have to be thinking about the legal aspects.
Are we complying with labor laws, are we, if we have
information requests are we, are we doing things the appropriate way.
We as, as HR professionals have to make sure that we're advising
supervisors and other employees
in the, in the correct way to do things and even, even sometimes we have to
worry about just the appearance of not doing things correctly even if we are.
Just the way that it can look from the outside, so we wanna make sure that
everything that were doing is really on the up and up
and that we're following all rules or laws that now we have internally and also, you know,
state and federal laws too. So the economy has affected recruitment in several ways.
One, we're getting a lot more applicants in our recruitments and so that really,
that really makes it easier and harder for us.
It's easier in the fact that we have a lot more
applicants to choose from and so a lot of times we'll get better qualified
applicants that we probably wouldn't get in a normal economy.
But on the flip side to that
we also, some of our jobs we're getting over a hundred applicants and we
might normally get thirty or forty
and so that just means that we have a whole lot more people to review
applications for and so it's a lot more time-consuming,
but ultimately we are getting better applicants, so I thought feel like
it's kind of, it's kind of a benefit to us and it's also kind of a,
a hardship in, in the fact that it just takes more time to do things. One really
nice thing about being a male in the HR field and being, being
somebody who is different than, than your typical HR person
is that certain employees feel more comfortable with certain people. So
the way that we have it here, we have, it's, you know, female dominated
however having a male presence too,
some employees feel more comfortable talking to a male presence or,
you know, there's just, there's different perspectives.
So I find that when we're doing brainstorming I might think of things
differently than some of my female counterparts do and so it really benefits
the whole organization because we have, you know, a different breadth of, of
ideas and of ways of thinking of things, perspectives,
and it also makes people feel a little bit more comfortable for those who,
who prefer to talk to a male because some people do prefer that.