Top Floor

Introduce yourself!
I’m Terence, and I’m a human trafficker. Kidding, I’m a headhunter working in recruitment for lawyers specifically.

Oh cool! Do you enjoy what you do?
I honestly don’t have any strong feelings about my job. I started having no strong feelings for it, and I still don’t, but I chose it because it allowed me to pick up a certain skillset, which is how to sell things and how to negotiate. So I went in and thought “Okay, if I’m going to learn how to negotiate, I might as well learn how to do it at the highest level.” Because lawyers negotiate for a living, right? So if I’m going to be negotiating with lawyers, it means that my level has to be there as well.

Wow, that’s quite a refreshing perspective! Is there anything you like to do outside of work?
Yeah, a lot of things. There always has to be something physical. For example, I do martial arts—Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So technically, I’m a headhunter on the mats as well (laughs). That, arts, and and I also make music. I’m pretty much working on a ton of other projects as well outside of my main job. In fact, even when I came into this job, I told my boss that this would be the last time I’m going to work for somebody, so I also started my own company, but it’s hard to sustain that amidst all of this.

Tell us more about this company of yours.
It’s a creative consultancy. A lot of my friends around me are tattoo artists, muralists, musicians, and even F&B people, but in Singapore, if you want to start something like that, the overhead is very heavy. So I realised that a lot of creatives, they like to be creative and have ideas, but they don’t like structure. But at the end of the day, if you want to run a business, that’s what you need—someone commercial, which is where I’ll come in lah. I mean, if somebody can’t even talk about their own project without being very awkward, then I’ll be front-of-house for them at fairs and all that. I realised, wah, this is very enjoyable.

We can imagine! Is it hard juggling this business on top of your day job and other hobbies?
It is, which is why I don’t have a lot of free time. I try to be hyper-efficient in everything that I do. I try to always get enough sleep, and make sure that during my waking hours, I’m functioning at 100% potential. That said, I think a lot of Gen Zs are also doing multiple businesses and projects at the same time, and honestly, that’s something that I feel we all have a lot to learn from.

Because I’m a recruiter, I look at the idea of a career as a whole, and I always think about how the world is going to change. So far, I’ve narrowed it down to four or five main skills that are never going to go out of fashion: how to speak, how to write, how to sell, how to market, and taste, which is an instinct and reflex of sorts.