Strategies to make recruitment your side hustle

According to a study by Bankrate, nearly a million of the working population involve themselves in a side hustle where 30% rely on that income for their regular expenditure, 34% spend that for luxury, and 27% save it for the future.

Further, in this era of evolving market trends and technology along with work from home culture, starting a side hustle job or a business is something that all of us can give it a try. According to a survey conducted by Harvard Business Review, people spent on an average of 13 hours per week on their side hustle, spread across four days.

What is a side hustle?

Side hustle refers to making money alongside one’s main source of income which is a full-time job by means of a part-time.

Difference between side hustle and passive income

Side hustles generally involve earning an active income on investing time and effort on a particular active job role. While passive income involves investing money and effort upfront which is similar to investing in the share market, property, etc. Sometimes a side hustle in due course of time can generate income in the future as well.

Advantages of getting involved in a side hustle
  • There is no upper limit for the income you can generate.
  • There are prospects to take up work from home.
  • Your endeavor can be as rewarding as your effort.
  • Your side hustle job will add on to your skills and experience.
  • You will have a back-up career path.
  • It enables easy career switch between your main-stream profession and side hustle.
Top reasons why recruitment could be your best side hustle

There are certain things to look for while choosing a side hustle. Look regarding work flexibility, scope for growth, return on investment, and last but not the least it is important to see whether the job interests you. Most importantly, recruitment as a side hustle offers flexibility and helps gain experience and offer immense opportunity to grow in the talent acquisition ecosystem. There are other benefits as well which we will be looking at one by one.

You can get started with minimal requirements

If you want to start your career as a recruiter you can get started with the following material requirements with or even without monetary investments.

A mobile phone, laptop, and a stable internet connection.

Now, let’s see what are the qualifications, skills, and experience-based required to become a recruiter. The good news is, unlike a full-time recruiter job role in an organization, for taking up recruitment as a side hustle it is not mandatory to have set of qualifications. Though having a good amount of experience as a recruiter is an added advantage, being a fresher and starting your career using a hiring side hustle job is undoubtedly promising.

Experts in the talent industry recommend freshers to start working with a recruitment agency or a hiring marketplace to learn the job and earn along the process. The main advantages of taking the support of a recruitment marketplace are that they offer training, tools and technology, and will do the paperwork and payment follow ups for you. This helps you get started as a recruiter right away.

Offers job flexibility

People looking for a side hustle will always expect flexibility. Here flexibility refers to both flexibility in terms of the mode of work as well as the work timings. This is mainly because being an employee who has to manage the time and effort between your main-stream job and the side-hustle you would not want to lose focus or under perform in their full-time job due to a side hustle. x

Recruitment offers immense flexibility, thanks to the development of recruitment tools and technology due to which most of the recruitment processes can be operated from remote and can also be automated. Starting from candidate sourcing, conducting assessments, interview rounds, till sending the offer letter all of these can be handled virtually.

Rewards are directly proportional to your efforts

Recruitment is a type of a work where you can expect rewards as much you perform. Also, your performance is easily measurable in terms of the number of candidate placements achieved. The payout will be based on a commission basis where you get your payment for every placement achieved by you.

Promising career growth

Recruitment bestows a promising career and business growth based on your performance. Here career growth can be achieved by means of your experience, exposure to different types of projects, specialization as a niche recruiter, and so on. Achieving business growth is straight forward where you can earn more on closing a greater number of hiring deals, by working on volume hiring projects, and by filling hard to fill job roles and top managerial roles where the pay structure is proportional to the annual salary package of the candidate placed.

Involves networking and professional brand building

The ability to develop strong professional connections is crucial for recruiters. Therefore, when you do hiring as your side hustle the main functionality would be talent hunt for each job vacancy you are working for. For this you will be expanding your existing network which would automatically strengthen your professional influence as a recruiter.

Further, personal branding also plays a role when you want to attract quality candidates. Therefore, you will have to work towards it and in the due course of time you might become an influencer in the talent acquisition ecosystem.

Involves networking and professional brand building

Recruitment is predominantly not a monotonous job. Each new recruitment project is different demanding a unique approach. Moreover, the recruitment industry is an evergreen pasture with constant demands. Thereby, every sector and industry require talent and when they look for talent through you, you can gain varied experience by working with different types of requirements.

As a recruiter you can choose to work across sectors and industries. Also, there are different steps in the recruitment process on which you can focus working on. For instance, there are several enterprises which outsource certain steps in the recruitment process such as job posting and JD calibration, candidate sourcing, CV screening, online skill assessment, conducting interview, and so on which gives part-time and project-based job opportunity for freelance recruiters.

Final Takeaways

Here it is important to note that starting a side hustle might seem easy but the real success in the line demands consistent effort and dedication. Moreover, your recruitment side hustle can be converted into a business that generates passive income by starting and investing on a recruitment agency.

Fill out this form and populate the Template Name field with “Recruitment tools” to access our recruitment repository, which has a set of handy hiring tools for nascent recruiters to get started with.

Written by:


Vidhya V,

8 December 2022

Reimagine recruitment with us

Schedule a Demo
Become a Recruiter