As a perfect recruiter, your job is to get the best talent and provide your company or client with suitable candidates to make an impact. Although each recruiter has different specific powers, there are several common characteristics among effective recruiters.
So what shapes a good recruiter? Good recruiters don’t just do their daily tasks well. They make sure that their company consistently attracts and retains good people. However, recruiters do not necessarily have to come from human resources. Experience in sales, design, marketing, customer service, coding, and many other areas can foster good recruiting skills. Despite their varied experience, there are many qualities that all decent employees should share.
We will also talk about what it takes to become a perfect recruiter, so stick with this piece till the end.
Qualities to Become a Great Recruiter
As we are willing to be excellent recruiters, we need to explore three main areas: characteristics, skills, and habits. And you have to master all three if you want to get where you want.
You may have great habits, but greatness will slip away from you if you don’t work hard to improve in other areas. Also, remember becoming a great recruiter is a process. You don’t just take a few classes and presto!
Therefore, here are a few qualities that can make you a good, if not a great, recruiter.
- Answer/return the Call
The most successful recruiters will always connect with people, either good or bad, and offer full feedback or a quick update call. Don’t be that elusive recruiter who doesn’t get back to their candidates or clients.
Suppose you work at an organization, and they decide to fire you without reason one day. Would you ever find a way to improve your work?
- Think Ahead
Recruiters who add value to their organization don’t wait for a job opening to look for candidates. Instead, they remain in contact with past candidates and start building pipelines. To do so, they have to think ahead and take action.
Here’s what you should do to think ahead and become a perfect recruiter;
- Engage with inactive candidates often and build a strong network
- Identify where to look for experienced candidates and how to find new talent in the most unexpected places (like Slack’s obscure channel).
- Don’t be afraid to explore and take advantage of social media channels.
- Work with managers to anticipate their hiring needs if you see a department growing.
- Participate in HR events to keep up with the recruitment trends.
- Track Metrics
Here’s another saying you’ve probably heard: “If you don’t track it, you can’t improve it.” And once again, this is absolutely true.
Industry coach John Bartos has been tracking recruitment metrics and has written several articles on the topic for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog.
You must pay attention to hiring metrics such as Time to Fill, Time to Hire, Quality of Hire, Cost per Hire, etc., to estimate the ROI of your recruitment strategy and identify the areas to improve.
- Improve Your Sourcing Skills
The basics of talent sourcing are easy to learn but challenging to master. You can visit Sourcing Games at www.sourcing.games. It is an entertaining way to test your sourcing and recruiting skills. You can also join some LinkedIn or Facebook Groups, such as the Sourcecon Group on LinkedIn, to learn more about sourcing and acquisition.
You can use tools like LinkedIn Recruiter to contact passive candidates. But if you have a specific requirement, you can use other specialized networks like GitHub for software engineers or ArtStation for video game artists. Many of these networks are free to register and help you find others more easily.
- Explore New Tools & Systems and Improve
The way you work and what you use can constantly be improved. It’s all too easy to deny the approach of those aiming to sell recruiting tools, but we maintain that it can’t hurt performance.
It’s a great way to get in touch with the tools in the industry and hopefully find something better than what you’re used to. Sometimes changing the system can seem impossible, mainly when many people in your company rely on it regularly. But if you give constructive feedback, explore alternatives, and ask others to do the same, then you can make significant changes.
- Shadow Other Interviewers to Pick New Techniques
It is so easy for recruiters to fall into a repetitive pattern when screening or interviewing candidates. But we’ve found that just suggestions about the ways to choose new interview techniques, how to sell a position, or even how to start a conversation can overwhelm other interviewers. It can feel a little uncomfortable. But if you manage to pass, you’ll reap the bounty.
You can job shadow professional recruiters to gain their experience and pick up new techniques. Internships are one of the best methods of job shadowing. However, you must make sure to focus on details, processes’ outcomes, making connections with people, and asking enough questions.
- Take an Online Course
Thanks to resources like Lynda, Coursera, and Udemy, there are many ways to kickstart your recruitment career and learn from professionals. But, perhaps you may wonder what course to take?
Recruiter roles are diverse and require many different skills. Therefore, try looking for courses in online marketing, negotiation strategy, leadership, diversity, presentation skills, process management, or sales.
Another idea is to try to be more aware of the sector you hire for often.
- Work on Self-Improvement
Mistakes are valuable lessons to be learned. When you don’t get the expected results, you must understand what went wrong and how to avoid it next time.
Victories have the same role in improvement as much as mistakes do. Therefore, irrespective of how small or big, you must celebrate victories, such as celebrating quick hiring or landing a candidate for a challenging role. But you also have to look for ways to improve constantly.
To stay ahead of the competition, you must monitor all the current developments in human resources. Identify:
- How can HR technologies improve their performance?
- What are the latest recruitment trends?
- What are the best practices for social media recruiting?
- How are new laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) changing?
Successful recruiters ask themselves these questions and demand answers, which is the key to self-improvement.
If you’re an aspiring recruiter and looking for an opportunity to kickstart your career, Empowers Staffing Inc. can help you.
Join our talent pool by signing up at www.empowersstaffing.com/work-for-empowers-staffing.
