A Decade of Talent Acquisition : 10 Things I Learnt

Confession: I disliked recruitment as a profession when I first started doing it.

I used to constantly try to worm my way into an HR generalist role — till date I haven’t been able to identify what it was about talent acquisition that I was averse to.

But, ‘one often meets his destiny on the road to avoid it’ — and the rest is history.

Fortunately for me, I grew to love the work that I do. I love to recruit. Period.

There is a high, an adrenaline rush, when you successfully close an offer (blessings from the candidate notwithstanding), that only my fellow recruiters would understand. I strongly believe that being on the hiring side provides you with great insights into the company’s business(es).

And in my perspective (albeit, a selfish one), its noble work — you’re helping someone get their dream job!

Through 10 years of hiring (and trying to run away from it in the initial years), I thought I’d pen down a few learnings gathered along the way. Hopefully, most experienced recruiters would read this and go, “I know, right?”. And to those still trying to find their footing in this role, may you come to love it as have I.

1. You can’t be an ace recruiter if you aren’t passionate about it. To be good at anything, you need to like it, you need to love it and you need to WANT to do it. You might know the basics of recruitment, how the process works, and you might even have been doing it for a couple of years, but if you don’t like it you’re not doing justice to the role. And I can guarantee that there will come a time when you’ll find that you’re unable to close open roles in your kitty. Not because you can’t find the right candidate, but because you won’t be making that extra effort or going that extra mile to find that elusive one who’ll fit the bill. Because you just won’t want to. Recruitment much like sales, requires a passion, to hire — to close an offer, to match the right candidate to an open position. A desire to take things to completion.
2. You’re a salesperson. Period. Identifying great candidates, creating an exciting, just-can’t-refuse, job pitch for them, speaking the candidate’s language, understanding what they’re looking for in their prospective new jobs and filling in those blanks, to making and closing an offer — its what a sales professional is skilled at. And if you’re in Talent Acquisition, so are you. There’s a very thin line, almost negligible one, between sales and recruitment. The difference comes down to what you’re selling.
3. If its akin to sales, its also about relationships. If you’re a recruiter trying to close positions within a certain deadline (read manic pressure), you will most definitely, at some point, want to lose your sh*t when things don’t go your way — interviewer-candidate schedules don’t match, negotiation goes to an extreme or you’re just having trouble finding the right fit. There are multiple relationships to handle when you’re hiring — the stakeholder, the hiring manager, the candidate, the interviewers. It requires immense rapport building on behalf of the recruiter, with all these people, to ensure a successful offer roll-out. If you thought recruitment was just simply about hiring a good candidate, you were so wrong. But stress is superfluous when you handle everyone with diplomacy and tact. The key is to understand and be sympathetic to the fact that every single person you’re dealing with is rushing to meet deadlines of their own — whether its the candidate trying to manage a half day out of his schedule for his interview with you, or its the interviewer handling his own meetings and KRAs and trying to fit in an interview in his crazy day. Be thoughtful, be diplomatic, be calm.
4. A resume doesn’t tell all. Summing up 10 years, 3650 days, of a person’s life and work experiences in 2 pages is a pretty big ask. But everyone does it. And one glaring learning from my experience is that not everyone is skilled at highlighting their talent / achievements as well as they should. Some ramble on for 8 pages, and some manage to do so elegantly and crisply in a one page resume. Most do deserve the benefit of doubt. I, for one, love reading unorthodox CVs — I remember reading one such profile which highlighted the candidate’s learnings and not their achievements. Refreshingly humble. For best results, I usually compare candidates’ linkedin profiles with their officially submitted resumes. To a large extent, it does help highlight what the candidate actually might be good at, as compared to what they want you to think they’re good at.
5. How you conclude the hiring discussion, matters. Each team member of a company is a brand manager for it. So is each candidate. How you approach them and engage with them during the course of their interviews with the company go a long way in ensuring that they’ll join at the end. Even if you see no fitment for the candidate, there’s an empathetic yet professional way to part ways. Let them know that even though you won’t be able to take their candidature forward at that point in time, you would like to remain connected to speak about possible future opportunities incase they arise. Even if its clear that you won’t be hiring them (just basically be a good homo sapien), conduct and close their discussions with the same kind of attention and respect that you would give to a sure-shot hire. Its also imperative to know what drives the person you’re hiring (and this will be different for each candidate) — getting to the bottom of this will help you offer them exactly what they’ve been missing in their current jobs.
6. Its ok to compromise on hiring timelines, sometimes, but never on the quality of the candidate. The company will, most likely, recover from a hiring delay of a few days / weeks when there’s a superstar candidate joining in at the end of it. They will perform well enough to negate the time it took for them to come onboard. But its a substantial dent to the company in terms of money, time, resources and training when they’re invested in a wrong hire. Take a stand and stay true to hiring the best, even if its taking just slightly longer than anticipated.
7. Culture fit, first. Skill fit, second: I’m aware I’m entering dangerous territory when I speak of something as unquantifiable and ambiguous as ‘company culture’, but here goes, nevertheless: Your candidate could be ticking all the boxes in terms of skillset versus role fit, he might be doing the exact job that you’d want him to do for you, but if he isn’t a great culture fit, do not hire. A candidate might feel uncomfortable with various things at the organization that have nothing to do with his role— it could be inflexible work timings, or management style or ability to perform in ambiguity. You’d be surprised at the extent, of which these seemingly innocuous things could interfere with your newly joined candidate’s ability to perform his best. You could hire consultants to create customized questionnaires to assess a candidate’s culture fitment for the company, but IMHO, the recruiter knows best! When you’ve been hiring long enough and understand the company’s general ethos and ways of working, you’ll be able to identify the tell-tale signs of someone not being a culture-fit. Additionally, you’ll want to ensure that the person you’re hiring won’t blend in, but will instead add value to the existing culture of the organization. You’re not looking at creating a glorified cult of ‘yes-men’ whom you wouldn’t want to acknowledge outside of the work premises or hours. You want to create a ‘lit’ tribe of doers, who challenge the status quo, whom you grow with and learn from and want to identify with. What’s essential, however, is that you first ascertain what is important to your company in terms of a ‘culture’. Then, identify critical personality attributes that you’d want your ideal candidate to exhibit, and move towards determining a set of key questions to ask, which will help you establish behaviors / responses that separate an awesome culture value-add from the others.
8. Your role will never really culminate with the candidate joining in. If you’ve invested your time, energy and attention on his/her hiring, you will intrinsically feel responsible for his successes and failures with the company. And so you should. They’re an indirect reflection of how well you did your job, in terms of understanding what the stakeholder wanted, what the role required and how well (or not) you assessed the candidate for overall fitment.
9. Hiring isn’t rocket science. This statement isn’t meant to demean or belittle my chosen career path, quite the opposite, in fact. Talent Acquisition cannot be everyone’s cup of tea. You could possibly learn rocket science. But you can’t learn the intangible stuff that awesome recruiters are made of. You cannot learn how to persuade-these are traits of a born negotiator. You cannot learn congeniality. You cannot learn the ability to spot human characteristics or ‘tells’ that others would, most likely, miss.
10. There will be wrong hires, regardless of how amazing you are at Talent Acquisition or no matter how loophole-free your hiring process is. Its ok, forgive yourself. None of us are mind readers and everyone can be guilty of judgement errors in a process as subjective as recruitment. The more you hire, the more you interact with different people. The more the interaction with diverse candidates, the better you’ll be able to tell the faff from the substance. Identifying non verbal gestures, knowing when to deep dive into the candidate’s statements, recognizing key words used by the candidate — will all become second to breathing, the more frequently you do it. It’ll become easier to read between the lines of what candidates say, in their interviews with you, as you recruit and meet them frequently, and you will hire the best fit.