Before making a career of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ magic, headline entertainer Ben Hanlin was a recruiter, a line of work in which he said performing his magic tricks was sometimes a calling card for him to get in front of clients.

In recruiting accounting & finance professionals for the NHS, Hanlin told Recruiter: “I was 22 or 23 at the time – I looked about 12 – and I was trying to convince 60-year-old finance directors in the NHS that they should work with me. And they didn’t really buy into that, but they did like the magic tricks that I showed them. They’d remember my name because they’d be like, ‘Oh he’s the guy that showed me the magic’. It got to where they might want to take a meeting with me because they knew that I would probably make them smile at some point.”

Hanlin entertained the 300-strong audience with a variety of magic tricks at Recruiter’s Investing in Talent Awards (RITAs), which he hosted on 1 February. A former recruiter at SThree in Birmingham, he praised the company’s training and meritocratic culture, as well as giving him tools to pursue his show business career.

“There were people in the company that had been there six months, a year, two years, that had real career progression and were making amazing money. And it seemed like the kind of career you got out of it what you put in really, so I was up for that challenge,” he said.

“I will definitely say that their ability to train salespeople was brilliant, and I had no sales background. But they taught me the basics of sales,” Hanlin went on to say. “And then I realised I loved magic, and I understood how to sell something. If I put that together, I could go and start my own little path and business, and sell what I love, which was magic.”

Recruiting turned out to be Hanlin’s last full-time job.

In addition to working his magic onstage, on TV and more recently, on Zoom, Hanlin has co-founded a digital marketing agency, which he said he hopes will serve recruitment clients in the future.

Image credit | Carmen-Valino