Do you need to understand tech to be a Technical Recruiter?

If you're in the tech space, you KNOW it is one the hottest markets right now. This massive wave of demand for tech talent has led to technical recruitment teams needing to expand at rates never seen before. If I searched on LinkedIn right now, there are over 31,000 technical recruiter job postings world wide. According to Indeed, the % growth of job postings in Human Resources has outpaced the % growth in postings in Software Development since February 2020.

Selfishly, I love this shift in the market because technical recruitment is now seen as a high priority function in any company and I hope all recruiting leaders are investing into their technical recruiting teams! With such a huge demand in the market for technical recruiters, I was reflecting and it brought up the age old question: do you need to be technical to be a technical recruiter?

For folks that may not know me: I'm a Tech Recruiter who recruits by day and codes by night! I started my tech recruiting career years ago at a bank and slowly transitioned to global, leadership & experienced hiring at software product companies. By this point in my career, I've supported all sort of recruitment searches across Security, Design, Data & Engineering from co-ops & New Grads to Director level roles. Ultimately, along the way, I developed a deep fascination with development and I ended up slowly picking up programming through PluralSight, Bootcamp courses, various engineering books and random chats at meet-ups. Before you get too excited, I am way more "Hello World" or "FizzBuzz", but I'm proud of the progress I've made over the last couple of years. PS (shameless plug). If you're a newer tech recruiter, I've pulled together some of the resources I used over the years to learn more about development, check It out here !

Benefits of understanding tech as a tech recruiter?

• First and foremost - technical recruiting enables great product. You can't build a great product if you don't have the Product, Design, Data & Engineering folks needed to ideate, build, test, ship and maintain the product. To draw in the right folks to your company, you need strong technical recruiters that can build and iterate on hiring systems that work for your company. It's also a tough competition for talent and one key differentiator is the quality of the recruiters on your team.
• Technical Recruiting is a craft. I draw parallels to tech recruiting to product design, product management & tech writing. Ultimately, none of these professions ship code, but they work day in and day out with talented engineers to build a product. When you understand the process of how development works and what good engineering practices look like, it helps you have more enriching conversations with your interview teams and candidates. Tech recruiters don't code as part of their job, but knowing what tools are used & what processes occur in each part of the SDLC will open the doors to really interesting, valuable conversations and just empathy for the folks you work with day to day. You can build FOR your stakeholders.
• Recruitment admin tasks will be automated, the deep knowledge of a domain will not be. The world is looking to automate. Recruitment is no different, you see tons of new tools to automate recruiting workflows from interview schedulers, boolean generation tools, apps that can action processes in bulk, etc. The value of a recruiter isn't a process pusher anymore, it's being able to be an advisor to the teams you support and the candidates you interview and I think this requires fundamental understanding of technology/space you recruit for.
• Your intake sessions get better and your recruiting process becomes more effective. When you understand the domain of software development, I find you're able to provide much better insights in your intake conversations with hiring managers - you can have discussions on each requirement of the job description (ie. the feasibility of finding someone with knowledge in "X" language or tool) in a 2-way, constructive manner. When you identify a key criteria that doesn't make sense (ie. 10+ years of React), you can have that the discussion from the get go rather than wasting valuable time on a search. I'm sure your hiring managers will appreciate this as well!
• As a recruiter, you should always aim for the "right company, right team and right manager" for any candidate. One thing that I always tell my candidates is that as much as I'm advocating for the company I recruit for, I am an advocate for him/her. We spend most of our waking hours at work and my wish for anyone is to find a job they like, with a manager that can support their growth, in a company that is a good fit. Naturally, the engineering space is so vast and evolves so quickly, without understanding of engineering, I find it's so hard to have genuine career conversations (ie. It's critical to have conversations about the tools they want to use, the technical challenges they're interested in and even the parts of development they enjoy the most). I find that being able to talk to someone and figure out if a person is a good fit for a front-end feature team working on payments vs. a backend platform team with a dev tooling mandate is a critical part of our jobs as recruiters, but it's something that can't be done without engineering knowledge or deep knowledge of your technical teams you hire for.

Final verdict on whether you need to be technical to be a technical recruiter? I would say YES, but to an extent. I don't think you need to be technical enough to be doing code reviews for your candidates, BUT deep curiosity for the tech space & empathy for all of the folks you support will make you a very successful technical recruiter.

P.S. I'm always evolving my technical recruiting approach and welcome any feedback! It'll be interesting to hear perspectives from fellow recruiting peers and folks from the engineering, design & product spaces!