“Building a network and community around you so that people know who you are, trust you, and can come to you to ask for help or information is invaluable.” – Adam Rabinovitch, EMEA Senior Technical Recruiter in AI, Engineering, Machine Learning, Big Data & Data Science at Databricks, speaks to us about developing a career in Recruitment.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Adam Rabinovitch at Databricks, who began his career as a B2B and B2C Telesales Consultant at Axis for Business before moving to work as a B2B and B2C Membership Sales Consultant at Fitness First.
With his recruitment career beginning in August 2009, Adam transitioned to the roles of Resourcer, Junior Recruiter, and later Senior Technical and Commercial Recruiter at eSynergy Solutions, while serving as Director and Co-Founder of Abso-Fashion-Lutely alongside this post from January 2013. Adam also founded AI Community Jobs in May 2013, where he continues to serve as CEO alongside his current roles.
Adam’s recruitment career continued with an international role as Principal Technical and Commercial Recruiter for Opus Recruitment Solutions in January 2014, and an 18-month term as Head of Recruitment at CognitionX from August 2016. In December 2017, Adam founded and became an Advisory Board Member for AI-Adam; a role he continues alongside his current responsibilities at Databricks and AI Community Jobs.
Adam joined the team at Beamery in February 2018, initially serving as Senior Technical Recruiter and Evangelist before ascending the ranks to become Global Technical Recruiting Lead and Evangelist in January 2019, and later moving to Databricks to assume his current role there in April 2020.
Can you tell us how you got into Recruitment and why?
Recruitment chose me, I didn’t choose it! When I first started in the field back in 2009, I joined a firm as a Resourcer, and later jumped into becoming a Principal Recruiter and Managing Consultant. Around that time was when I first started to get the knack of the technology side of things. I’m more of a techie recruiter, so I like to understand the technology I’m talking about and how it actually works. I do a bit of coding and development in my spare time, because technology has always intrigued me and I like to play around with it, and doing that gave me my first taste of cloud and the power of Big Data and AI.
Recruiting in the technology sector and hearing about the technologies that candidates had used to support companies made me want to go back and learn more about them to understand them and boost my credibility. In doing so, I could present clients with profiles and explain in depth what candidates had achieved and how they had achieved it rather than just looking for keywords.
I love recruitment, it’s really enjoyable. Although I’ve moved through a variety of different companies throughout my career—having started off externally working for a recruitment agency and moving into internal recruitment after a recommendation to the company from one of my clients—I’ve always been in the AI and data space, and to see where it’s changed and how things have moved forward now is pretty crazy.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the Recruitment sector in terms of AI and technology?
I think our biggest challenge is that there’s still a lot of debate around AI and how it’s utilised. It’s not going to replace recruiters, and if you use AI in the right way, it’ll help you get more things done properly. There’s a lot you can do with it. The market is moving fast, so it’s just a matter of understanding the different types of things that people are doing with AI—whether that’s creating an enterprise, software, or platform—and whether it’s being utilized in start-ups or scale-ups.
I’m fortunate to never have really had the same challenges in terms of my recruitment pool that other recruiters face. I set up a number of user groups and forums on LinkedIn when I initially got into Recruitment to bolster myself and gain some credibility, and I ended up building a community around my specialism in AI and Big Data that I’m still drawing on even now. A lot of the people I work with have stayed in touch and become friends—in fact, I still know the first person I placed in my first ever Recruitment job—which has really helped to further my career as well as theirs. My last three jobs, including my current role, have all come about as a result of recommendations made by former clients, and they’ve all said that my technical knowledge and network has been hugely beneficial in understanding an organisation’s needs, finding the right people to fill those needs, and helping organisations understand the calibre they need to hire.
I’ve created initiatives to advertise jobs in the field that aim to unite people with those positions, and my communities on LinkedIn bring together candidates and managers with no need for recruiters. Sometimes those discussions are about jobs, but it’s also just about giving people a platform to discuss a common interest together and giving back to the candidates and clients that I either was working with or wanted to work with.
One challenge I think we’re all facing in the sector is finding a way to keep your pipeline of candidates moving and developing. For me, Recruitment is about finding out what it is that candidates want to get into or learn and matching them with not just jobs, but opportunities to learn and expand their knowledge. There is an element of sales in terms of selling yourself as a recruiter with an opportunity to a candidate initially, but once that connection is made, if you focus on building the relationship between you even if they don’t take up an opportunity you offer them, you already have an understanding of what they offer and what they’re looking for should something else arise later on.
How would you say you have been affected by the current COVID-19 crisis, and what does 2020 look like for you and your organisation as a result?
Well, I managed to secure my current role at Databricks on the recommendation of a couple of clients who I actually work with now when the crisis was just taking hold, and since then I have been consistently recruiting candidates and onboarding remotely. Within the past two months of getting a remote system set up, I have managed to bring two people all the way through that process and into the business. From my side of things, we’re still hiring and growing massively throughout the crisis, and I’m still conducting 20-30 interviews a week on average.
If you have the right brand, you get a lot of interest from people looking to work with your organisation, and Databricks is very well-known in the market. Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and MLflow, Databricks brings together data engineering, science, and analytics on an open, unified platform so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. If you have the right talent brand, people want to join you, and that gives you a huge advantage when you’re looking to expand the whole business.
I think the biggest thing that anybody’s learned it the current situation is being able to work remotely while still integrating and collaborating with their team. We’re still having conferences and people checking in and interacting with each other all the time, and that’s great.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their Recruitment or Data career?
You don’t have to be a techie to work in technology and data recruitment, but you definitely need an understanding of the field you’re recruiting within. Building a network and community around you so that people know who you are, trust you, and can come to you to ask for help or information is invaluable. As long as you don’t shy away from it and are happy to help and give back, that’s really going to help your career in the long term.
If you can build your career around yourself and your own credibility rather than on your ability to match keywords to a candidate or a role, you’ll find that you’re able to have discussions with clients and candidates where you can pinpoint their needs and strengths and give something back as well as take something from them. You’re going to learn something new every day that way.
You also need to be confident enough to be honest with candidates when they may not be the best fit for the job, but always keep the line of communication open. They may return six months later having followed your advice and upskilled, and you might have the ideal role for them.
Having that approach and following my interest in technology has really paid off for me. I was recently included in SocialMicole.com’s list of Most Inclusive HR Influencers, and it was quite nice to receive that recognition. If I can give back to the community, I’m more than happy to do so as much as I can.
Adam has been working as EMEA Senior Technical Recruiter in AI, Engineering, Machine Learning, Big Data & Data Science at Databricks since April 2020, and enables Databricks’ hiring management function to select skilled candidates for a range of technical roles within the organisation using his expertise in the AI, Data Science & Big Data arena.
In addition, Adam is actively working to enhance the use of AI in the Talent sector through his work as Advisor with AI-Adam, to match candidates with AI, Machine Learning and Data Science opportunities across the sector via his work with his leading job boards AI Community Jobs and Spark Jobs.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.