My Journey from Law to e-Commerce to Recruitment: curiosity and the search of making impact

Sara Choi
Sara Choi
Jul 25, 2017 · 6 min read

“How did you become a recruiter?” I think I answer this questions at least 3–4 times a week (on an uneventful week) ever since I founded foldtree and later co-founder Terminal 1.

As a recruiter/working in tech recruitment startups, I always talk to people and ask them about their dreams and aspiration, and I always get questioned the same. I am not one of those who have quitted their super high paying job and jump into a doing charity work or someone who became ultra rich by being very good at something (yet, hopefully). However, I do believe that my story can resonate with some, and is inspiring to those who are looking for a push.

This transition may not seem natural to anyone. Unfortunately, this is not an extraordinary story about how I woke up one day and then somehow discover that technical recruitment is the calling of my life. I’d say that’s what my belief in making an impact and my curiosity led me to this path.

Starting with my first job…

Lawyering “happened” naturally. What could be a more obvious choice after law school and PCLL?

My first job was actually really easy. It paid much less than what people would thing, but job was (to me) much easier than what people would have expected either. (My principal (and his secretary) actually said I was his best trainee — and possibly the biggest disappointment when I left them.).

However, since day 1, I knew being a solicitor is not my thing since day 1. First thing, I hate processes. second thing, I hate processes that do not create any value (as in make things faster/have some valuable output). Third thing, I hate wasting my time on helping people with petty argument/unworthy cause.*

I was super disengaged at work, and spent a lot of time on Wikipedia and Facebook, that was when I started to follow Business Insider, TechCrunch, etc.. It was like discovering a whole new world of startups and technology, a new world of people doing thing that are innovative,have real value and real impact. I was so inspired, and decided that I need to get into the startup scene.

Back then, the startup scene was much less vibrant, but it was not bad. I found my first job at S Loyalty as the Customer Success Manager via CoCoon. At that time, I did not even have any idea on what customer success is about (I would say I know that pretty well now, happy to talk about that if you are passionate about that :)). It was not even a thing here, and I would say the S Loyalty team is one of the first to hire customer success manager in Hong Kong (their users were mostly not here though).

It was a great journey with S Loyalty, I love my team there, and I was so happy with the amount of new things that I can learn there (I love Goolging). For the most of my time there, I actually looked forward to going to work and to working with my team. However, it still felt like something was missing. I decided to work in startup/tech because I wanted to do something that made a different, something that had impact. While it definitely felt good to be part of the team that built one of the best marketing tools on Shopify, it is far from what I had wished for myself.

I was on the search again, and started engaging my more entrepreneurial friends in conversations. One of them is my now co-founder. (People always asked how we met, we just met randomly in Sham Shui Po when he was a few months new here in Hong Kong.)

He has been super passionate about building team since his first startup, and suggested recruiting. Thinking about the difficulty in recruitment I observed in my team, about how frequently my friends complained about their jobs, and about the lifestyle my recruiter friends led, I thought that might not be a bad idea.

I started to look more into recruitment and started an agency. The recruitment, especially technical recruitment, field was and is very broken. The industry is still highly manual and most recruiting firms are not tech savvy, and many recruiters just compete by tossing many CVs in without caring about the candidate/company’s need.

I see the role of the agent should be to reduce the search costs, but the existing model was definitely sub-optimal to say the least. Most agents succeed by hiding information. (I suspect that they actually made/make search more difficult for the whole society as a whole.)

That’s why I believe that if I can do a good job in relieving the problem, and in creating a community to facilitate information exchange, I could make an impact on those life. Also, recruiting is quite fun as you get to learn a lot about different people’s business ideas and information that are not publicly available.

As much as I trust that my effort can help to a certain extend, I still believe that building products to operate in scale or work on bigger solution would be the way to go.

Around then, my co-founder started to feel too comfortable about his corporate job, and was looking to do something. That was how we ended up working together.

With this added capability to develop products/technologies, our vision has become broader — we are here to provide affordable, fast and good recruitment solutions that help visionary leaders achieve their goal faster. We believe that by solving the metaproblem of human resources allocation, a lot of the world’d problems can be solved much faster.

Apart from recruitment, my co-founder is also very into machine learning / AI. With supervised learning a pretty much solved problem, we decided to work on applying machine learning on recruitment (see my other post, how to train your dragon... I mean machine for details) and making recruitment more fun/painless. It puzzled us that why dating apps can be so much fun, but job matching apps is so boring while they are essentially the same (Interestingly, there is a new trend suggesting that Linkedin is the new dating site).

There are many ways where we could have built towards our goal. However, we believed that many startup dies because of the lack of understanding in the market and we did not want to be dependent on funding, that’s why we decided to operate both as an agency and a product company. We would dogfood on our own product and only sell it when we (as recruiters) like to use our own products.

Fast forward a few months, we are now a team of 6, with some good clients on our service, a clearer roadmap, some products that (IMO) are helping candidates and companies to make better decision, and attended our first RISEConf.

Recruiting is not always rainbow and unicorn, people do still give you sh*t from time to time. However, to me there is more up time than down time. It is very rewarding every time when people told us what we build/are building is what they need, and every time when someone appreciate our effort to really to learn/understand them and to find them a job that is in line with their interest/career goal.

That’s my story on how my career story for now. I am so thankful to have the chance to make an impact and to learn more everyday. This journey has made me braver and a better person in many way.

As with many people asked me why I chose to become a recruiter, many asked if I regret leaving the legal industry. My answer is no, never did, never will. While I may be doing something else that is more impactful (or interesting) in the future, I have no regret in making a move and following my heart (and researches). If you are also looking to make a move, but lack the courage, just take a leap of faith (but be prepared), you will never regret it.

*I would say there are actually a lot of worthwhile argument/issues that get heard/settled through the legal system, but just that I was probably not good enough for those.

Sara Choi

Written by

Sara Choi

A lawyer-turned-entrepreneur with strong passion in growing communities. Avid reader, knowledge and experience seeker.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade