Recruitment Today: Out With the Old, In With the New

Introduction

Recruiting has drastically evolved/changed over the past year with professionals moving from the traditional post a job on job boards, waiting for applications to adopting a more intentional approach that involves sourcing using diverse strategies across diverse platforms, social media groups, crafting personalized outreach messages, and selling. It doesn’t matter if you’re an internal recruiter, part of an agency, or an independent contractor you’re selling the company, the culture, the position, career path, benefits, and much more.

In this article, I will be providing you with some skills that have proven to be relevant for me as a recruiter attracting candidates across multiple industries, countries and groups. 

Let’s begin with the key things you need to know as a recruiter:

1. What your role is as a recruiter and how your role addresses the short/long term goals of the company you work for

2. Knowledge of the industry, company culture, values, mission, and trends  

3. The core tools, skills and software you will need to succeed as a recruiter

4. The core business areas you will be focused on hiring for and how success is measured for those areas 

Is recruiting sales?

In this new era of the candidate’s market, you can’t afford to lose quality talent to your competition because your recruitment efforts don’t have a focus on selling the candidate on why they should pick YOU as the best place to work. You spend more time pitching roles, answering questions and following up these days versus a few years ago. Top talent leave jobs for a variety of reasons and with the pandemic, people have had enough time to think of what exactly they are looking for from a job and this goes way beyond just pay but the flexibility to work from anywhere and still have time to do things they love outside of work. 

What you need to excel as a Recruiter in this New Era

The first step to succeeding as a recruiter is adopting and improving the right set of skills and putting in daily practice. The core skills are as follows:

1. Communication Skills 

Communication goes beyond sending mass generic emails or LinkedIn messages but understanding the diversity of your audience and crafting more personalized outreach messages that put the human in humanity while addressing the needs of the candidates. This starts with memorable sales pitches, brief, concise messages that address your intent, the scope of the role, how this candidate’s expertise meets the needs of this role and the next steps. In summary, you should aim to attract their attention in the first few seconds, keep their interest, gauge their interest in the job, and then provide an action.

1. Networking Skill

Your most valuable resource as a recruiter is your network. Connect with as many professionals as possible, join online forums, share your opinion on trending topics online, ask for referrals from employees, clients etc Utilize social media (Twitter, IG, Tik Tok, Facebook, Snapchat) by using hashtags, and buzzwords on posts to make posts more discoverable. Take each connection you make a step further by building long-term and mutually beneficial relationships with those connections.

3. Project Management Skills

As a recruiter, you probably send out a zillion outreach messages and talk to over 5 people daily and this requires you to know exactly where each ‘candidate’ is in the recruitment process. Managing your candidate pipeline isn’t much different and just like salespeople who have CRM tools to manage leads. Having software to help you manage your pipeline is critical. Utilize your ATS, Asana, Trello, etc to carry the relevant stakeholders along, communicate promptly and avoid missing out on your stellar talent. 

4. Research Skills

I cannot overemphasize the relevance of research as a recruiter, this goes from knowing the job boards that work for each country, demographic, role, competitor brands that have candidates you can poach, the market rate for pay, trends, public opinions about your company, diverse titles for roles, understanding what your competitors are offering in benefits. Simply put you should prioritize gathering actionable data that would help formulate a stellar hiring strategy and make smart business decisions. 

5. Negotiation Skills 

One of the major concerns in hiring is getting the candidates to accept offers. While recruiters do their best to negotiate with the candidates should there be salary constraints, oftentimes there is a gap between offer and candidate expectations. This is where you have to listen to what is said and unsaid during the recruitment process, apply storytelling, emphasize benefits, culture, your product, company’s current/future projects, growth opportunity, pay and much more to buy in the interest of the candidate. Smile. be personable, give sincere feedback, share your personal story, make brief small talk and empathize with their frustrations. 

  6. Resiliency Skills

Success doesn’t happen overnight, and highs and lows abound in the world of the recruiter. You’ll most likely face more rejection versus acceptance, people will opt-out at the last minute and hiring managers will turn down candidates for multiple reasons.  Learning to be patient and persistent and not take these things personally when recruiting will help you handle rejection without falling apart or giving up. This skill would help you pick up and push through during tough times.

Other things to note:

• Be real even though you want to be a good salesperson. No one wants to be just “sold to,” especially those investing in your company. Be open and honest about all aspects of the role, company and current challenges.
• Make it clear what sets your company apart from the rest.
• Time is Money, know what you want and when to move on from a candidate who is not particularly interested in your opportunity. 
• Leave a lasting impression on that candidate, for what it’s worth, they may not be interested in changing jobs now but maybe in the future or know someone else who would be.

As a recruiter, you’re selling the job, the benefits, and the company, but you’re also selling yourself. You’re the face of the company. The face of what your candidate’s future will look like for many years to come. Recruitment requires a tremendous amount of skills but most importantly the tenacity, passion and genuine interest to keep learning.