Enlisting a Recruiter ...

In my recruiting career, I have worked with some of the wonderful as well as average Recruiters.

Over here I will share what differentiates an average recruiter from the star recruiters? Through this article I am trying to emphasize on few of my observations and traits of people who are successful in recruitment profession which may help some of the Recruiters to move to the club of star recruiters.

Making these traits/observations as hypothesis I tried to evaluate potential team members and most of the time it clicked.

So who are these successful recruiters?

Part time Salesman, Career Counselor, Consultant, Adviser, Fact finder, Archaeologist, and “Shrink.”

What do they do differently?

They are sharp shooters, excellent sources, they are balanced in their advice. They present both sides of the story, ask candidates a multitude of questions geared directly toward their professional needs and wants, and work to build relationships based on trust with candidates. The tools may have changed, and in some case improved, but the skills required?? The important skills may remain the same.

My ex-boss taught me one of the basic difference between people who just work in Recruitment and people who are Recruitment professionals. There are “Resume Presenter or Just a Postman” and there are someone called “Resume Generators” and end up as a “Revenue Generators”.

So what should you look for in a recruiter? What critical behaviors and skills should you identify and then hire for? How will you know the talent can be coached and developed? How can you more accurately predict how well they will perform in the future? I have discovered seven key skill and behavioral competencies that exist in great recruiters with my limited creativity I call them “Seven Wonders of a Recruitment Professional.”

1. Recruiting is nothing more than selling: Recruitment can be highly correlated with Sales. The art of negotiation in this current market where candidates are coming back to recruiters with multiple offers is a muscle that great recruiters use on a weekly or even a daily basis. Your product is opportunity, your potential buyer is every person qualified to perform better than anyone else available, and your competition is every company in the world that might also hire that same person. You are not even limited by the term “available.” Available is a state of mind, not a physical reality (I recruit, therefore I am).

Have you read any good Job descriptions for recruiting professionals lately? The preferred candidate will have previous experience recruiting “Senior Java Developer who has worked on Data Structures, Mulithreading, Angular JS etc. etc.” for the “Large IT Company” using abundant Social Media tools and working on “Good for nothing(Pun Intended)” Recruitment ATS.  The increased credence on technology within the recruiting profession has placed less emphasis on the people skills of potential recruiter candidates and greater emphasis on the “cut and paste, objective skill matching” school of recruiting. In essence, we place the greatest emphasis on those skills that are relatively easy to teach and ignore the skills that often are the most critical and, consequently, the most difficult and most risky to attempt to train.

2. Resilience: Hiring managers change their mind, Job specs changed in middle of search, candidates change their mind, expectations change, job requirements change, and candidate didn't turn up on day of joining. Sounds Familiar? But great recruiters are flexible and capable of changing with the business. There are good and bad days in life of a recruiter but the ones who move ahead after a set-back quickly are the ones who are likely to succeed. Recruiters are strong. We are stubborn. We are survivors and because of that we don’t accept no for an answer when we’re talking to our best candidate prospect or when we’re following up with our networks. Resilience develops through experience, flexibility and the commitment to continuous learning and growing. I think this competency is the biggest differentiator between HR practitioners and recruiting. It’s a skill that can be learned but I believe it’s often an in-born quality. Recruiting is tricky and recruiters are willing to take the risk to deliver and that starts with commitment to resilience.

3. Hunter and Farmer mentality: This goes back to evolutionary psychology wherein these were the two prominent professions and that's how humankind behavior to situations have evolved. In a nutshell hunting is instant gratification and farming in nurturing. A great recruiter is mix of hunter and farmer, Recruiters are generally hunters, and having the mindset to hunt and be relentless until the hunt is done. This is a priceless skill set. If a recruiter is going to sit at a desk, log in to Job Site and keyword search all day — that is not the hunter mentality you want. You want someone who will use cold calling, social media, Boolean searches, networks, etc. in order to find the strongest and most-qualified individuals. Also to succeed in reaching out to passive talent and people who are passive job seekers and also growing your network. So farming or building your contacts and database is equally important.

4. Presence: Recruiters are the face of the Organization and before person joins recruiters are the touch point to candidates. While much have been talked about candidate experience and how organizations are changing their approach to provide good candidate experience it's the recruiter who can provide first impression and this can be a long lasting impression. It’s the old “shined shoes, clean nails” approach to good first impressions. Even if your industry is “blue jeans and sneakers,” they should be clean sneakers (if the jeans is dithering, then they should be stylish that costs extra.)

5. Seeing the Big Picture: Sourcing the right candidate is important but having the ability to see how candidates can fit into an organization, the potential value they can bring, or even knowing where a superstar candidate could fit in, even if there is no immediate position available. It gives immense pleasure to great recruiters to see how the employees they have brought in perform, get rewarded, do a ice breaking work. Great recruiters thinks that it is an opportunity for him/her to bring in best talent when the positions are open to them. Also it's not always telling the JD to the candidate but appraising him about the holistic picture and what will be incumbent's contribution in designing a product/service/ solution.

6. Number Driven: One of the quality I really value in recruiters is their ability to drive results. Keep key metrics in check and do the analysis. Personally a person should go through the extent in evaluating potential candidates on solving puzzles, mathematical questions, probability questions and even how they fared in mathematics in high school or university. Lot of time recruiters’ work on multiple positions interacting with multiple candidates and lot of data to juggle on. Sound Analytics comes handy and this is one of the most common trait of Ace recruiters.

7. Extrovert and High Energy: Recruiting is tough and often thankless job. Even if you fill 99/100 positions you still can be reprimanded for not filling the one position and that one position happens to be the most critical position :-). Efforts behind on-boarding every resource by a recruiter is highly commendable in such situations which hardly and stakeholders do.

Great recruiters are motivated and driven to succeed by a fire that burns inside them rather than a fire that is lit under them. Recruiters requires very few “pep talks” or motivation by any external factor. They have the energy to drive results and make numerous calls and often make many friends among candidates they talk to. “If you always sit with friends and current peers at networking diners, then you are not networking?? You are just having dinner.”

You may have noticed a something about the above list. Most of these skills require meeting people and knowing people. The only person who can recruit a great recruiter is another great recruiter. The next time you are reviewing your recruitment performance and tracking key metrics which matters to business, put the brakes on and see if what you really need to do is re-calibrate your recruiting skills and team. Get the right people on board first.

Happy Recruiting … !!!