'Closing a deal gives me energy'

Thomas Boerefijn works in the Rotterdam office. There he can put his experience as an athlete to excellent use in his work as a recruitment consultant. And in playing sports with his colleagues. 

In 2018, I was approached on LinkedIn by someone from Robert Walters. As such, I was in a good place as an account manager at a large health insurance company, but I was missing the wow factor, that yes feeling. It itched somewhere and I decided to answer that message.

Before that, I had never really considered recruitment as a career. I didn't realize there was also a big sales component to the job. What I did know: closing a deal and being of real value to your contacts, that's what gives me energy. The fact that I get to do that all day long makes this work so much fun for me.

Recruitment is a competitive business. Maybe that is why I feel at home in this work. I played top-level sports, volleyball in the premier league, and the will to win is necessary both in sports and in recruitment to be successful. Perhaps more importantly, top-level sports require you to be analytical about your own performance. What can you do well, what can you not do well and what can you improve. And by extension, you also need to be able to dissect the team; who is good at what and how should you deal with them? This also comes back to the shop floor on a daily basis. 

Since January 2022, I have been finance recruitment manager for the Rotterdam region. I particularly enjoy taking steps together with my team. We are already doing great, but there are still many opportunities. On a personal level, I want to become a good manager in the short term in order to later manage the business from a more helicopter view. Within my finance specialism, we now work with a team of about five people, but I want there to soon be twenty of us.  

What makes our Rotterdam office so much fun? It is a very close group of colleagues, all the teams are mixed together and work intensively together. Many people are also friends. I often find myself playing padel with colleagues at the weekend or we meet up for parties. I think that says a lot about the atmosphere, that you meet up with colleagues on weekends. 

Besides paddling, I relax outside of work by playing many other sports, think volleyball, squash, fitness and winter sports. I also like to eat out luxuriously and then recreate it in my own kitchen. And I like to travel. In the past when I played sports at the top level, I didn't always have the chance to go away a lot, so I want to work on that now. Several trips are already in the planning!