As the credit crunch bites, I have deceided that I need to get out of mortgage brokering and into something else for the meantime, so I have been looking into various roles that use the “transferrable skills” I have from working in financial services.

One of the areas I have been looking at is working as a recruitment consultant. It’s essentially a sales job, so uses the skills I’ve picked up over the past few years working as a mortgage broker.

So I went to an interview the other day for a firm that recruit IT professionals and contractors. I didn’t expect the recruiters themselves to be IT people, but I wasn’t expecting the guy who interviewed me to be an english version of Gordon Geko! The guy didn’t look like him, but the way he acted and conducted himself was very reminiscent of Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

He really was quite a personality, and definitely thought a lot of himself. At one point, he was bragging to me about what the earning potential within the industry, and more importantly his firm was. He was telling me that a guy that started last year earned £85,000 in his first year. He then asked me what car I drove. I told him, and he then proceeded to tell me that he drove a Porsche Cayenne and the other two directors in the business drove Range Rover’s.

Great I thought, they must cost a lot in petrol each month… I couldn’t help but think that it was such a waste of money. If you’re earning six figures, then you only really need to work for a few years then you can take early retirement. Instead, the guys there probably blow most of their money each month on car payments, champagne and whatever the latest “must have” gadget/phone/tv is that month.

If I do get a job in recruitment, and I earn that sort of money, I will be getting my mortgage cleared as quickly as possible, so that I can live a nice stress free life sipping rum cocktails on a beach!