Hiring Recruiters? Ask yourself these 3 questions first!

More and more job ads for recruiters and talent acquisition managers are finding their way into job boards lately, signaling that the hiring engines are being fired up again. Makes sense: it’s the start of the year. A traditional time for New Years’ resolutions centered around growth and doing better than last year. Onwards and upwards, right?

But are we forgetting the reasons why we were so keen to put 2022 behind us in the first place?

Financially and economically speaking, 2022 showed us that even big companies (aka: “the safe ones”) could stumble over leadership takeovers, stock dumps, and mass layoffs. Those stumbles become devastating earthquakes to small companies or start- and scale-ups.

Yet, there’s always one common victim: recruiting teams. They are the first ones to join, and the first ones to (be let) go.

What if companies’ New Years’ resolutions had to do more with growing responsibly than “fueling their rocket ships” with finite and volatile funding? I call on every company to ask itself the 3 essential questions below before taking on new recruiters (or entire recruiting teams!) to un-freeze their hiring in 2023.

1???Do you really need a recruiter?

Before anything, make sure it’s reasonable to hire a full-time recruiter. Stop considering the best-case scenario hiring plan that's giving your investors googly eyes. What does a more conservative version — or even a worst-scenario — of your hiring plan look like? Once you have an idea of what that looks like, run your numbers again.

Because having a full-time recruiter on board only makes sense when they are appropriately challenged: either by a minimum number of headcount they need to fill, or by side projects. If your recruiter doesn’t have enough of a challenge to sink their teeth into, it’s problematic for them, and no financially sound for you.

How do you know your recruiter will be appropriately challenged? If set up with the right tooling, your average recruiter can easily hire between 30-40 mid-level (non-niche) profiles a year. Those numbers can drastically increase if the individual is more experienced and/or specializes through hiring the same profiles on a recurring basis.

Of course, you shouldn't take this as an established hard number. You'll most certainly have to consider your own situation to correctly estimate potential recruiter productivity. A good way to start would be to get an overview of headcount numbers, domain, seniority, talent availability, and tooling setup.

If you need a more concrete place to start, check out the table on your right, which I drew up from my own empirical data as a recruiter and talent acquisition leader for companies like Amazon, Facebook, and start-ups. In almost all of those cases, the recruiters were domain specialists and had access and training on both passive and active candidate generation (aka sourcing).

2???Are you SURE you really need a recruiter?

Yep, I’m asking you to double-check again. I’m just making sure you’re not a victim of the “bigger hiring plan = bigger recruiting team” fallacy.

Sometimes it’s possible to achieve more with the same amount of individuals. I’m not saying that you should slave-drive your existing recruiters, but oftentimes they can improve their hiring productivity by simply auditing their processes. Figure out if there is an opportunity to improve processes and/or tooling on the sourcing, scheduling, interviewing or closing stages. Those improvements will almost always result in a higher number of hires per recruiter. You will not just want to audit your recruiter(s)'s work, but also the contribution made by the business in the form of networking, sell-calls, interviews and hiring notes. Remember: recruiters are not service providers.

Hiring is only efficient when it's done as a team and everyone works towards the same goal. Unfortunately, not every hiring team understands that and leaves the recruiters fully accountable for the process and candidate experience.

Adding more passengers to a car that isn’t running properly is only going to make it perform worse. Just go and get the thing serviced, okay?

(Totally made that metaphor up, but I like it, so I’m leaving it…)

It’s also worth mentioning that leaders outside of Talent Acquisition often do simple (but terribly wrong) maths. They assume that if a recruiter makes 3 hires a month, then in order to achieve 9 hires a month (3 times as much), he team needs 3 recruiters. Sounds logically sound, but not quite true.

This simple calculation does not take into consideration the bell curve in hiring productivity, by which adding another helping hand can considerably multiply the output. Conversely, having too many recruiters can have detrimental consequences and drive productivity down. Why? There are many reasons. but the main ones would be talent pool cannibalization; lack of defined responsibilities; competition; and the pressure to achieve quantity as opposed to quality hires.

3???Can you set them up for success and security?

Recruiters are not service providers with an on/off toggle. I should probably mention that no employee is! But recruiters are usually the first to be discarded when times are tough because one of the primary defense mechanisms for companies in such situations is to freeze hiring. Hiring freezes render recruiters useless, hence the decision to let go of them.

To prevent this from happening, make sure you enable the recruiter to have a “side gig” within the company. Allow them to actively work towards it, and make sure their contribution is meaningful and recognized, and not just a vanity project. Recruiters possess a broad toolbox of skills that can easily be applied to a wide range of areas such as employee experience, employer branding, content, sales, and user research — so there's a lot to choose from.

Why does this matter? This very side gig can eventually become their main gig. Or it could become something they can temporarily fall back on when it’s quiet on the hiring front. They will have built up the required credibility in that domain beforehand, making it really hard for you to see them as expendable headcount when times are getting tough again.

???So you figured out it’s too risky to hire a recruiter?

If you came to the conclusion that hiring a recruiter (the sustainable way) is quite a commitment — first of all: I commend you for having thoroughly reflected on this topic. But that doesn't mean you can't grow your company. In fact, there are a couple of alternative options for you to consider.

If you only have a few hires to make, you have the option to work with recruitment agencies/headhunters who will charge you a fee for every successful hire. This fee is usually an agreed-upon percentage of the candidate's base salary and sits somewhere between 18-25%. This means spending between €12k and €25k per hire, depending on the profile and seniority. Since the fee is based on placement success, you could technically brief several agencies to get a steady flow of candidates. As an in-house recruiting lead with an ex-agency background, this is not a method I favour (more on this in a future post), but it's a good alternative when the situation calls for it.

If you're looking to hire for more than just a few roles, you should explore the option of embedded recruiters (RPOs) for about €10-20k a month. The embedded recruiter will be fully dedicated to your "account" and produce any (reasonable) number of hires during their time under contract. They are usually very agile and have experience plugging in and out of various types of businesses. This model is especially helpful when you have several of the same profiles to hire for.

It’s also worth noting that both agencies and embedded recruiters already come with a database of candidates and a license to all the tools you would have to arrange for an in-house recruiter. The cost of job postings, applicant tracking systems, LinkedIn Recruiter, and various sourcing and outreach plugins should not be underestimated when building an in-house recruitment team. So before you can afford those, agency or embedded recruiters are definitely the way to go for you.

But no matter which situation you're in, remember that hiring a lot (and hiring fast) is not a badge of honor anymore. Hiring and growing your organization sustainably will not only be the best strategy for your business in 2023 and beyond — but also a sure way to earn the trust of current and future employees.

Happy hiring!