How to be a good recruiter?
Whether you’re looking into a career as a recruiter or simply want to get better at your job, this post will feed your curiosity. For starters, a recruiter’s job translates to more than just actively recruiting people for the organization. While this definitely falls under their main objectives, it also deals with the way potential candidates view the company.
Think of it as employee marketing, but we’ll get into that later. Furthermore, the role requires quite a deep understanding of all the departments in a company. Therefore, in order to answer the question of how to be a good recruiter, we have selected a series of skills needed to master this position.
Table of Contents
What skills do you need to excel as a recruiter?
Problem-solving mindset
In this situation, problem-solving refers to the company’s difficulty in finding a qualified employee to fit a position they need. This criterion also refers to the ability of the recruiter to be goal-oriented and understand exactly what is needed from the vacant position.
For a better understanding of what the company needs, we recommend setting goals or objectives. Firstly, because it will make the objective’s assessment much easier to organise and, in the process, help you have a better overview. Secondly, because it will help you prioritise the skills needed from the candidate. In most situations, candidates will rarely be able to fill all the requirements for a position. Especially for industries that operate in specific market nieces and have obscure requirements.
In these situations, it’s best to divide the requirements list into “must-have” skills and “nice-to-have” skills. Unmistakably, the first one represents abilities that are mandatory to have, without which employment is not possible. The “nice-to-have” skills represent those abilities that would surely esteem one candidate over another, but if not possessed, would not represent a deal-breaker. It could be a good idea to group up with HR members to assess better what goals should be tracked and the expectations from a potential employee. HR’s department skills are invaluable in these situations.
Networking guru
Not at all surprising, a lot of potential prospects come from the digital medium – employment-oriented online services, such as LinkedIn. From a statistical point of view, as a recruiter, you will have to reject more candidates than you hire. But that doesn’t mean the relationship has to end there.
Sending a rejection assessment after the interview should be a given because it can enable recruiters to continue the correspondence with the candidates for the longer run. Creating personalized evaluations can be a meaningful way to stand out from the other recruiters as it will convince people that you and the company are willing to go the extra mile.
Highlighting candidate strengths can also help them understand better what they are good at and where they should improve. Even more, chances are they will be perfecting their skills until another position is open and reapply.
As a general tip, it can be useful to allocate one hour a day to respond to inquiries and personal messages to nurture these contacts. Doing this will boost their perception of the company and the brand, making them come back at every opportunity they get.
Marketing oriented
This section seeks to build upon what we previously discussed as HR marketing or employee marketing. Knowing how to promote the work you do and what the company is all about also falls under your responsibility as a recruiter. Therefore, it is often the case that you have to highlight why your company should be the one that deserves the best employees. Shortly, the aim is to create powerful and positive candidate experiences. As a result, organizations will be able to reach the right target group of potential employees by communicating more efficiently what they stand for. This process also generates organic recruitment by building a large pool of followers that would constantly like to be part of the team.
To do so, one must question how the employer brand is perceived by the public. By developing employee programs that seek to build meaningful experiences and good knowledge generation for the new recruits. Another example would be to focus on perfecting the beginning journey of new recruits – onboarding, task management, the way to company operates. Oftentimes, these phases are overwhelming for new employees, especially because they have to get acquainted with the organization’s culture. Prioritizing on making these processes as easiest as possible should be a top priority.
Another helpful idea might be integrating a talent pool pipeline. Such a platform enables businesses to keep track of interested candidates within a database. Therefore, it simplifies the hiring process by having a pipeline of qualified candidates for future openings.
Unbiased decision-making
It’s in our nature to make biased decisions when making decisions in everyday situations. Simply because of being comfortable or not willing to deal with new situations. However, in a recruiting representative position, your job is to be as objective as possible and eliminate any hiring bias. As the old saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover” – make sure you give all the candidates equal chances to prove themselves, regardless of their differences. Our studies show that diverse teams are on a scale more creative and innovative than homogenous teams.
An efficient method to prevent this from happening would be to set diversity goals for recruitment. Keep in mind that you are acting as the company’s ambassador and represent it with all means. A recruiter is a front liner and probably the first person to have contact with someone from the outside world. Treating your candidates well or poorly directly reflects your company’s culture.
Good understanding of all departments
It goes without saying that in order to fully grasp what the company needs from a candidate, he or she needs to know the specialization really well. For example, if you’re recruiting for an IT company, you should master most aspects of coding – both frontend and backend. In this way, it will be easier to pinpoint specific requirements and determine whether it’s a good fit or not. Additionally, being aware of the company’s pain points and its products can also prove helpful to ask a potential employee how they would deal with solving it. Creating company cases to test interviewees’ knowledge could be an efficient way to determine how well prepared they would be for a real-life situation.
Having said that, it’s the recruiter’s job to organize meetings with representatives from all departments to ensure having a constant overview of what’s going on in the company, the workload, and what works or doesn’t. These meetings, held regularly, will help the recruiter get familiar with each department’s work ethic. After, they will be able to judge whether or not a candidate can fit, regardless of their skills.
We strongly believe that in order to be a good recruiter, one must possess these skills, or at least be able to build upon them and learn. These tips will give recruiters the ability to think ahead and organize themselves better in how they should prioritize the job’s requirements.
Also, staying informed about how the industry is progressing and what is demanded of recruiters is a “must-have”. Check our whitepaper, “The HR Recruiter’s Survival Guide 2021” for more insights.
See how Whaii Match can take objective hiring to a whole new level
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