I'm a Candidate Support Administrator for an education recruitment specialist. I've done it for a couple of months now, since the summer. Though my induction isn't officially over until October ends. What this career involves is checking people who wish to work in schools as Teaching Assistants, Teachers, Nursery Nurses, Learning Support, hell even Caretakers or Mealtime Supervisors in rare cases in schools across the UK through the company I work for.

In detail, I essentially make sure these people are fit to work with children. This is of course incredibly intense and I can't afford to make mistakes, my team is targeted to clear candidates at a rate of 20 per administrator per week, with a 99.5% perfect clear rate expected on us for this. The great news however, is that once I leave the office I cannot affect my job or my work. I can't contact references or schools, or smurf up in any way. As such whilst my days can be pretty intense on occasion, I'm never actually stressed about it out of work. It is the definition of "leave it at the door, pick it up in the morning" work.

The process candidates go through that I perform on them involves detailed background checks for the last 2 - 6 years depending on their desired roles, obtaining references and verifying qualifications. If a candidate cannot explain what they were doing for a period of time longer than 3 months in their past 2 years, they cannot register simple. As people often lie about dates of study and employment I've got to be careful and check these dates match up at least to a degree which allows me to register the candidate.

The candidates I deal with can come from all over the world which can present many different and awesome issues for me to explore. To give an idea of just how diverse the people I deal with are; It was only yesterday I was on the phone to the Western New England University in Springfield MA, followed by the National Student Clearing House and the Louisiana State Department for Education to check a teacher's qualifications out. Today I was on the phone to Australia, France, Spain and Denmark briefly to speak to referees. (I have to try and plan these call times in to my daily schedule to make sure that the timezones match which is a fun little mini-challenge all by itself)

Of course dealing with a lot of candidates from Europe; particularly Spanish, French, German, Romanian and Greek teachers and teaching assistants. It's a big part of my job to identify if these people need a police check from those (or other) countries and let them know that they need to provide them. After they've provided the necessary documentations I then have to translate the police check (and sometimes references) wherever possible with nothing more at my disposal than Google Translate. Of course if it's perfectly unreasonable for me to be expected to understand the language (I.E. Arabic, Thai) and so forth where identifying the letters can be very hard if you do not know what you are looking for then we can insist the candidate pays a professional translator to do this for us, though the added time and reluctance of candidates to do so means this is a huge pain in the ass. I can therefore totally understand Yar's pain at how bad the English generated by Google Translate is, though thankfully due to my native knowledge of what should appear on my screen and a basic understanding of the grammatical rules in most European based languages, I've so far been pretty good. Whilst my boss does not expect perfect translations from us, I have learned how to translate perfectly from Spanish, French and Greek and I'm getting incredibly better with German, Danish, Swedish and Romanian.

With Greek I'm actually now "designated" to do them for the entire company (there are like 15 people including the international team who do my job so I do them for all 15 of us) as I can not only read most of what is on the original document at a glance (in the original Greek, using the Greek alphabet) to identify any potential issues, but can perfectly translate the document with 0 errors in about 15 - 20 minutes. I actually don't mind doing them either, as it took me 2 hours of slowly painfully typing in my first one to get it translated to something even close to English. So as I can now pretty much touch type with 90% accuracy in Greek, I'm enjoying the exercise of my new skills. Strangely, perhaps I don't speak Greek at all, and presented with anything other than one of the regular documents we deal with I'd probably struggle to understand what information I'm seeing at first without translating at least some of whats there. My colleagues all, perhaps very rightly have suggested and regularly stress to me that I ought to learn to speak Greek and qualify in doing so as an official translator, as it's clear I have some crazy kind of aptitude for the language.

People often call my job "pretty thankless" because in a recruitment company (which you have to remember is about sales, not helping people that's a side effect) you're a burden to the firm, necessary yes but ultimately my wages cost them whilst even if I clear 600 candidates; if the consultants cannot find them work, I've not made the company money but I have cost it. However, I do enjoy my job because it allows me to help so many people every day. I'm not just helping the candidates find work, I'm helping hundreds, perhaps thousands of children across the UK get a better education. That feels pretty damn awesome to me.

I doubt I will do this particular job forever, I may decide in a year or two to migrate in to the realm of consultations myself, but that's a ways off yet. I've a lot to learn about the education sector and I'm yet to be bored or troubled by my job.