Top Tips on How to Be a Successful Recruiter
I’ve hired recruiters from every background, education level, and walk of life. It’s one of the things I love about this industry: there’s no arbitrary box you have to fit into to be successful. With ambition, commitment, flexibility, and creativity, you can take the job as far as you want to.
And yet, there are certain characteristics every great recruiter shares, like a passion for people and creative problem-solving. Whether you’re looking to break into the recruiting field or to become a more successful recruiter, these tips will help. I’ve been in the field a long time, and these are the best pieces of advice for excelling.
Develop a Strong Understanding of Your Industry
What are the top three most in-demand skills in your field right now? Who are the two biggest competitors in your market, and how are you different from them? What are the industry’s most noteworthy events of the year? Where do professionals in the field turn to learn about new developments?
These are all questions a good recruiter can answer with ease. Industry-specific knowledge is what allows you to “talk the talk” with top candidates and keeps you from sounding like you’re a robot reading from a script.
Subscribe to and read industry-specific publications, websites, and blogs. Use tools like Google Alerts to stay abreast of trends. Conduct market research to learn about salaries, benefits, perks, and policies of similar employers in your area. Regularly attend industry events to become a familiar face and build relationships in person.
When you take the time actually to understand the field and the roles within it, you build trust with candidates. That trust makes the difference between them seriously considering your openings and them blowing off your calls.
Master Communication Skills
Recruiting is about relationships, and relationships are built through communication. As such, your written and verbal communication skills need to be on point. Strong communication helps you say what you mean, which is essential for establishing rapport with both candidates and clients.
Whether you’re talking to a candidate on the phone, drafting an email, or sending a message on LinkedIn, be concise. You want to get your point across quickly in plain language that’s easy to understand. Don’t use gimmicks to try to get their attention or use vague language that forces them to probe for more details.
Practice active listening. This means giving the speaker your full attention and listening with the intent to understand rather than merely waiting for your chance to speak. Simply listening with attention to what a candidate or client is telling you can make a world of difference in uncovering their true needs and achieving more successful placements.
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Build and Nurture Relationships
One of the most successful recruiters I ever met sent me a text every year on my birthday. Every. Year. And this was before technology made this an activity you could automate.
His annual text would inevitably lead to a follow-up conversation filled with “How’ve you been?” and “What are you up to now?” It was his way of keeping in touch and having genuine conversations with the people he met long after the initial interaction. It’s no surprise to me that this guy has placed hundreds of people over his career.
The best recruiters think in terms of relationships rather than prospects.
Instead of focusing on a potential transaction–“Is this person a viable candidate to place in a job?”–when you meet someone new, emphasize developing a meaningful connection with them.
This mindset changes the way you approach not only your professional interactions but your work itself. It’s much easier to devote an hour each day to answering emails or to spend the extra time to make a phone call instead of sending a text when you’re focused on building lasting relationships.
Cultivating the deep, extensive professional networks that the best recruiters have takes years. It doesn’t come from one-off interactions or automated emails. Instead, it comes from approaching interactions as a chance to get to know someone.
Use a combination of channels, including phone, email, text, and social media, to follow up with candidates and learn where they’re at in their career path, even when there’s no immediate upside for you. It makes all the difference in the comfort level and trust your professional connections will have in you.
Utilize Technology and Tools Effectively
There are seemingly endless pieces of software, apps, and websites out there that are marketed toward recruiters, and your inbox is probably full of messages from sales reps wanting to pitch you on the latest tech tool that will solve all your problems. I personally get a few sales pitches every day.
But instead of sending those emails to spam, stay at the top of your game by building time into your schedule to sample new technology regularly. You’ll discover new capabilities for saving time, automating tasks, finding candidates, streamlining the recruiting funnel, and more.
Even if you don’t use a certain piece of software, demoing different tools can show you new hacks that will make you better at your job. Plus, you’ll make new contacts in the field that might be beneficial down the road.
What’s more, if there’s a problem you’re looking to solve and a tool isn’t available for it, many tech companies are chomping at the bit to build new features that will set their software apart. You might discover your next can’t-live-without-it app in the process.
Related: Recruiting Apps You Can Use to Improve Your Sourcing Efforts
Some essential pieces of recruiting technology to familiarize yourself with include:
- Applicant tracking systems (ATS): streamline applicant tracking, schedule interviews, sort and rank candidates, automate candidate communication
- Chatbots: answer candidate questions, pre-qualify applicants
- Video interview platforms: facilitate one-way and two-way video interviews, recording, sharing, and playback
- Pre-employment assessments: aid in verifying skills and assessing personality
- AI tools: ChatGPT can assist with tasks like writing job descriptions, developing interview questions, and creating email sequences. Don’t limit yourself to just the most well-known names; AI tools are developing at an amazing rate and new ones are constantly coming on the market.
- Analytics tools: track and optimize important recruiting metrics like time to hire, cost per hire, application completion rate, and offer acceptance rate
Hone Your Sourcing Skills
A fifth grader can post a job to Indeed or ZipRecruiter. In today’s competitive market, a successful recruiter needs creative sourcing techniques to reach candidates who aren’t looking at those job boards. This means taking advantage of all sourcing channels and tools available.
First, make sure you’re making the most of LinkedIn by using a LinkedIn Recruiter account to surface candidates that meet your needs. With LinkedIn Recruiter, you can leverage advanced filtering capabilities to identify candidates based on skills, years of experience, company size, and more.
Next, tap into innovative AI tools to comb the internet, including social media and various databases, to find candidates that fit your requirements. New tools in this arena are emerging daily; Seekout and Hiretual are two promising options to try.
Don’t neglect the most effective sourcing channel of all: referrals. In my experience, no piece of technology has yet to surpass the human capability for identifying and recommending strong-fitting candidates. Make it part of your regular routine to share job openings far and wide on your own personal social media channels and ask for referrals from people in your network.
Finally, perfect your approach. When targeting passive candidates, you can’t come to them with your hand out asking for their time and energy. You have to prove you have something worthy of their attention by crafting a tailored value proposition. Use what you know–their current employment, background, education, and mutual connections–to create an outreach message that establishes a connection and conveys why your opportunity is relevant to them.
Here are 7 effective candidate outreach messages for various situations, with templates you can borrow and use for each.
Perfect Your Interview Technique
Interviews are a pivotal step in the recruiting process. Not only are they your most significant chance to gather intel on a candidate, but they’re also a huge moment for making a good impression that will sell top candidates on the role. It takes most people years to become a great interviewer, and no matter how long you’ve been doing this, there’s almost always something you can improve upon.
Here are a few of my biggest pointers from over 20 years of experience.
- Craft tailored interview questions. Whatever you do, please don’t go in and wing it. Your questions should be thoughtful and created in keeping with the position’s requirements. Use a combination of skills, personality, behavioral, and situational questions to gain a holistic understanding of the candidate.
- Balance technical and cultural assessment. I always say you can teach an employee new skills but can’t teach them how to be a good person or a thoughtful coworker. In other words, it’s important to strike a balance between assessing hard skills and identifying whether this person is going to fit into the puzzle that is your team. Questions like “What do you value most in a workplace?” and “What role do you take when working on a team?” are helpful.
- Consider the candidate experience. As I mentioned a moment ago, the interview is the most important point for the candidate’s perception of an organization. Begin interviews with a warm introduction and an outline of what to expect. Actively listen to candidates’ responses and engage with thoughtful follow-up questions. Provide clear and constructive post-interview feedback, regardless of the outcome.
By refining your interview technique, you’ll not only place more candidates, but foster more lasting relationships.
Stay Organized and Detail-Oriented
Any good recruiter knows that a candidate is so much more than a list of skills on paper. If you focus on resumes alone, you’ll completely miss out on what makes a candidate unique–or, more importantly, what might make them the perfect fit for a job.
If you want to be the best in the business, you need to get to know candidates as people. This means focusing on the details. Remembering the small things about them, like how many kids they have and what college they went to, is what sets you apart.
Attention to detail will help you understand what’s important to a candidate so you can connect the dots on whether they fit a company’s culture and how likely they will ultimately succeed in a role. Taking the time to go deeper will increase your recruiting success and actually make your job easier.
Then, there’s the logistical side of being detail-oriented. It’s no secret that recruiting comes with a lot of tedious work. You have to schedule meetings, follow up with candidates (even when there’s nothing new to report), enter data into your ATS, track metrics, and so much more. Many tasks probably won’t be your favorite, but staying on top of them is essential to keeping your recruiting systems running smoothly.
Keeping the basic, sometimes tedious parts of the job organized is a simple factor separating the highest-performing recruiters from those who are just average–or worse, those who seem totally disorganized. Using the automation tools we’ve covered above will help, and you can find more ideas to help you stay organized and streamline tasks in this post.
Embrace a Growth Mindset
If you’ve been in the recruiting game for a while, it’s easy to get complacent. Why fix what’s not broken? But with the pace at which today’s world moves, this mindset will quickly leave you with outdated skills and stale contacts.
The most successful recruiters are constantly working on growing their skills, staying informed of trends, and adapting to the current market. This can be done by attending networking events, participating in professional organizations, attending conferences, completing online courses and certifications, and being active in the local community. These activities keep your skills sharp and yield new contacts that further strengthen your network.
Feedback is also an invaluable growth tool. As recruiters, we’re often the ones delivering feedback. It’s not as common for us to receive it. You may need to go out of your way to check in with your superior and ask for constructive criticism or work together to set new goals. A mentor can be an asset in objectively analyzing your strengths and weaknesses and identifying opportunities to improve.
Related: How to Find a Career Mentor
Maintain Ethical Standards
Ethical standards might not be at the top of your list when you think about what makes a successful recruiter, but here’s the hard truth: you won’t last long in this business if you develop a reputation for dishonesty or poor moral character.
Clients want to work with recruiters who can be trusted to handle sensitive information and conduct themselves with a high degree of professionalism. Candidates want to work with recruiters who are transparent and trustworthy. Developing strong ethical standards pays off in the long run.
To maintain a standard of integrity, actively avoid discrimination in your sourcing and assessment activities, taking steps to minimize hiring bias whenever possible. Focus on objective criteria like skills and qualifications rather than subjective qualities when considering candidates, and use structured interviews and scorecards to standardize the interview process.
If you’re recruiting for multiple clients or roles, avoid conflicts of interest in keeping with your company’s policies. Be mindful of the most important laws pertaining to recruiting, like regulations on pay transparency and hiring individuals with disabilities.
Have a Genuine Interest in Helping Candidates Grow
All too often, recruiters play the diplomatic intermediary. They give candidates bad news in a way that preserves their feelings. Still, they might not be 100% accurate, like “the company decided to go in a different direction” when the candidate totally flubbed their interview.
This might be the less awkward route, but it doesn’t do the prospect any favors and certainly doesn’t help them become a stronger candidate.
Top recruiters act as advocates for their candidates. They’re not just out to collect a commission but to serve as a long-term asset. This means delivering tactful but accurate feedback that helps people improve and being there to support them as they grow.
There’s no single path to becoming a successful recruiter. With passion, persistence, and genuine care for candidates, you can build a prolific network that produces great candidates and establish yourself as a highly effective recruiting professional.
Related: How to Give Your Candidate Interview Feedback (Positive or Negative)
