Connecting and finding recruiters can help propel your business growth and development. But the question is: how do you find the right recruiter?
Rectxt was founded by actual recruiters (Brad and Brian), and we’ve spent the majority of our recruitment careers in leadership roles. As a result, we’ve learned a lot from our experience building and developing Recruitment teams so we wanted to share our top 10 tips for recruiting recruiters.
Here are our 10 tips for recruiting recruiters:
#1: Hire on potential (not experience).
Only hiring recruiters with ‘out of the box’ domain expertise is tricky and will take you a long time. Instead, we recommend hiring a recruiter who has strong recruitment fundamentals and that you teach them the industry or business that you recruit in.
#2: Hire recruiters who recruit themselves into your job.
In our experience those recruiters who reach out actively to inquire about an open position (vs passively applying to a job posting) practice what they preach and stick out from the rest.
#3: Don't give your recruiters an antiquated ATS and expect success.
Instead, give them a great tech stack (beyond the ATS). List your recruitment technology stack on the job posting - recruiters will know what to expect with the interface and capabilities.
#4: Look for an agency background.
Good recruiters with agency backgrounds come with a sense of urgency drilled into them. They understand that hiring is a timely matter and will commit to delivering within that time frame.
#5: Pay for quality.
You pay for what you get. If you pay a below-market wage, you’ll get below-market quality.
#6: Offer a simple and motivating compensation structure.
Especially for our agency friends or internal teams with commission/bonus components: Your compensation structure should be simple and transparent - if you need a spreadsheet to figure it out, you’re doing it wrong (and don’t move the goalposts every year!)
#7: Don't hire HR "generalists" to be recruiters.
Recruitment today requires a specialist skill set and a narrow focus to be successful. Because HR is such a broad landscape and HR ‘generalists’ do a bit of everything, they typically don’t make the best recruiters. Of course, there are always exceptions but for the most part you’ll want to hire a specialist to fill the recruiter seat.
#8: Use sourcing assignments.
Similarly to developers taking a coding challenge during the interview process, give your shortlisted recruiter candidates a real job requirement and allow them 24 - 48 hours to present their candidate list and walk through how they tackled the search. During this presentation you can assess how they are able to take your feedback. We like to deliberately leave out important information which gives them the opportunity to ask any questions about the role to mine for information that they need to be successful.
#9: Involve your entire recruitment team in the hiring process.
Arrange a short ‘meet and greet’ with your hiring team and afterwards get their individual feedback about how they feel the person would fit into the hiring team. After all, the people who know your team best are your team.
And last but not least, #10: Always trust your gut.
Finally, if you feel something ‘off’ or ‘fishy’ about the candidate, even if they have all the credentials and experience you are looking for, then always trust your gut and move on with your search.