On burnout

One topic that kept coming up to my awareness during today's meditations was burnout. I had to talk about it. It's a popular topics with loads of articles in the past couple of years surrounding the problem of burnout in the workplace. Burnout is so real that the World Health Organization recently included burnout in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon.

But I wanted to share how real burnout was to me back in May of 2021 when I found myself typing an email response to a candidate and suddenly couldn't write even one sentence without making several spelling and grammar mistakes (I'm fairly confident in my typing skills and that was definitely an anomaly). I thought that was strange but persistent to try and complete the email, until I felt completely stuck and unable to type out the next word. At that point, I opened up my notes where I typically tend to jot down thoughts or ideas that I want to come back to and typed out what I had been feeling with increasing certainty for weeks and months before that moment it all imploded, "I'M BURNED OUT." It was like my body took over from my brain and finally and unequivocally showed me the truth about what was happening to me.

How did that happen? A combination of being a year into the pandemic which sent some pretty heavy shock waves through my life both professionally and personally and being about 6 months into a recruiting role at a rapidly scaling tech startup (basically doubling in size in a year) where I was tasked with doing all of the tech recruiting without a lot of the proper tools and support that I quickly found out were needed in order to pull off hiring at that scale. Regardless, I dove right in and put my best agency recruiting skills to work. I built strong relationships with all my hiring managers, worked with them as true partners in recruiting and tried to deeply understand their pain points and business needs and who we needed to hire in order to make the right impact. I then went on a sourcing spree and reached out to some of the most qualified, accomplished and sought after software engineers, data scientists, product managers and designers as well as engineering, growth and fintech leaders that were going to be leading all this growth and help scale the teams as fast as they needed to be scaled.

About five months into the role and by the end of my first full quarter, we had hired 28 people in our product engineering org which included a combination of new headcount and backfill for the considerable churn we saw towards the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021 which was putting more pressure on the teams and made hiring an even bigger and more urgent priority. As we began planning for the next quarter and to keep up with the company's aggressive growth plans, we were now looking at hiring an even higher number of people for our product engineering org while neglecting the hiring that we needed to do for our TA team in order to sustain this level of hiring long-term.

After a few more months of non-stop zoom meetings, 30 recruiter screen weeks and Sunday candidate closing calls more and more mistakes were creeping into the hiring process. I pride myself on providing a first-class candidate and hiring manager experience so this was extremely painful and embarrassing for me. But I couldn't help it, my brain was just shutting down in response to the immense workload and pressure that I had been under. I decided I had to speak with my manager about this and I needed to take some time off. So I took a week off (that's all the vacation I had at that time) and went away with my wife to try and recharge.

As anyone who has been through burnout will attest to, this is not something that you can fix in a week. Each person's experience is different, for me once I got back from that week off and jumped right back into work where I had left off only with what I perceived to be added pressure of feeling like we were now even more behind because of the time I was away and the reality that we actually decided to increase our hiring goals for the quarter. I knew that I was in trouble. I gave it all I had, but my brain was simply shut down. Now I feel like it was like a defence reaction in order to protect against what I just went through from happening again and also a signal that tells you to slow down, that something is broken, that you need to heal. What followed over the next 2 months was more mistakes, more frustration which was now spilling over to the rest of the team without any real solutions in sight to how we're going to build a more sustainable recruiting team and how I'm going to recover from this.

Finally, I think both sides realized that this was not going to work any longer and we parted ways... What followed was the most challenging year in my life and I learned that the length of process to recovering from burnout is somewhat proportionate with the amount of time it took to get burned out. It's been almost 2 years since I burned out and I can still feel some of the effects to this day. Like any trauma, burnout leaves a lasting mark on you and how you perceive the world.

To end on a positive note, burnout was the catalyst I needed to start seriously focusing on my health, my mental and emotional wellbeing. I am in a much better place now than I was before I burned out, so I hope this is hope for anyone who is going through that right now. If you are and you need someone to talk to who would understand, please reach out.

Until tomorrow...