So You Want To Recruit

WHAT RECRUITES DO

At the core, recruiters find people to fill jobs for their clients. This would entail working with their colleagues on the sales side, understanding the client’s requirements, sourcing candidates, engaging candidates, qualifying, submitting candidates to clients, coordinating and managing the interview process, prepping, debriefing, presenting offers, closing and managing pipelines.

WORKING WITH THEIR SALES COLLEAGUES

Recruiters represent half of the staffing model. Their peers are client facing – often referred to as Account Managers, Account Executives, Business Development or simply, Sales. We’ll refer to the sales function as AEs for the sake of brevity. An AE’s job is to develop relationships with companies and, ultimately consult with those companies to help them fill open and critical job openings. They spend their days chasing down leads and making calls to develop new relationships, managing existing accounts and bringing job orders into the agency. They work closely with clients to get a thorough understanding of the client’s culture and the required skills for open jobs. They then package that up into a Job Order so the recruiters can accurately find the right match.

SOURCING CANDIDATES

Finding people – how hard can that be? Harder than it sounds! Great recruiters are great sourcers. They learn where candidates are hiding and they use both sophisticated tools and old fashioned networking to find candidates who may be interested in making a change. As opposed to an employment agency trying to help unemployed people find work, most agency recruiters work in fields where market conditions are good where there are more open jobs than available candidates. As a result, candidates are very hard to find. Recruiters use many tools to help locate candidates to include social media sights like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Most companies also have their own database that houses candidates previously engaged by other recruiters and career sites such as Monster, DICE, CareerBuilder and the preferred LinkedIn. Many companies have training programs to teach new recruiters the tools required to be innovative recruiters. Souring is a skill. It can be taught.

ENGAGING CANDIDATES

Finding candidates is one thing – getting them engaged in a conversation is another. What’s the perfect email or voice message look like to compel a happily employed candidate to call you back? And when they do call you back, how do you lead them down the trail to open their mind to other career opportunities? The act of engagement is a mix of technique, skill, magic and art! It can be taught, but it helps to be creative and innovative to capture the attention of a passive candidate. Speaking of passive candidates, let’s take a quick detour to descript the different types of candidates in relationship to their willingness to explore changes:

ACTIVE – looking for work or looking to make a change. Active candidates will be interviewing. They will have their updated resumes posted on the career sites. They are easy to find and therein is the rub – someone usually finds them before you find them. They aren’t bad candidates, but they are not available for long.

PASSIVE – happy where they are and not looking to change…….yet! Difficult to locate and hard to engage. They are skeptical, but everyone is curious about that perfect role. They will listen, but building trust is essential.

ACTIVELY PASSIVE – this is the largest population. Essentially a passively active candidate is open to listening about any opportunity that might upgrade their career financially or culturally, but they may not be broadcasting that to the world.

QUALIFYING

This is the skill of determining fit for either active job openings of openings that reoccur frequently. Fit is two dimensional. First, is the candidate qualified to perform the essential roles of the job? Do they have the competencies to carry out the tasks required by your client? Simply put, has the candidate successfully performed the role currently or with previous employers? Are their required skills current and up to date? The second dimension is qualifying to the Model. The Model refers to several variables to include Compensation, Commute, Hours, Benefits, Company Culture, Turnover Rate, Career Advancement, Reporting Structure and more. Some of the variables in the Model may carry more weight than others. For example, a candidate may be eminently qualified to perform in the role and the pay may be a 25% salary increase, but the company location would double the commute time. All of these scenarios must be determined during the qualifying stage.

SUBMITTING

After the candidate has been qualified they are then submitted formally to the client. In most agencies, the AE will review the submittal and then forward to the client. The submittal includes the formatted resume. Most agencies have their own specific way of presenting resumes that usually requires a reformatting. Along with the resume the recruiter will also include a “write up” or a sell that articulates why this candidate is a great fit. This “sell” statement, along with the resume is the what goes to the client.

COORDINATING INTERVIEWS

Hiring managers are always excited to see qualified candidates and interview requests usually come quickly. It’s the recruiter’s responsibility to schedule interview times to meet with clients.

PREPPING AND DEBRIEFING

This is a  very critical part of the process. Recruiters never send a candidate into an interview without preparing for the interview. Giving good fundamental interview advice (what to wear, techniques, Do’s and Don’ts) as well as insight into the interviewer and the company equips the candidate to do well in the interview. Debriefing gives the recruiter insight into just how interested the candidate is in the new role AND it gives you great data to use to prep the next candidate interviewing for the job! Debriefing also gives you great insight closing the candidate. Most concerns a candidate may have about a role are usually discovered during the debrief. Not prepping and not debriefing is a recipe for a poor experience for all parties – the candidate, the client and the recruiter!

PRESENTING OFFERS and CLOSING

Have you heard that the most critical part of flying a plane is the takeoff and landing? The offer and closing stage of the recruiting process is like landing a plane and requires teamwork and precision. If you have thoroughly debriefed your candidates after each interview, presenting the right offer and closing is an extension of that process and usually goes as expected.

BUILDING AND MANAGING PIPELINES aka Relationship Management

Every candidate you meet becomes a part of your pipeline. As you meet potential candidates, you take notes on their competencies as well as their model. The job you called them on may not be a match, but the next job may! Your pipeline becomes your first call with new job orders – even before you start looking on LinkedIn. You already know them, and you know how to reach them! Making regular scheduled calls to check in, sending informative industry articles, updating them on market conditions, sending salary surveys, notating any significant changes in the model – all these touchpoints allows you to maintain the relationship and gives you a competitive edge over other recruiters.

TYPES OF RECRUITERS

There are generally two types of recruiters – Agency or Corporate. Agency recruiters work for a staffing agency. The agency typically has many clients across a variety of industries. Most agency recruiters have a recruiting specialty – Technology, Telecom, HR, Clerical and Administrative, Finance and Accounting, Health Care are all examples of recruiting specialties.

Corporate recruiters work for a specific company and help to fill cooperate roles within that company alone. As an example, if you are a corporate Recruiter for The Home Depot, you work to fill various roles for THD.

TYPES OR PLACEMENTS – DIRECT HIRE VS CONTRACT

Direct hire, sometimes referred to as perm is when you recruit someone to fill a full time role with a company. For example, Delta may need a full time, direct hire web developer. As a recruiter, your job is to source, qualify (all the responsibilities listed earlier) and find candidates for Delta to interview for a perm role. In this scenario, when a placement is made, the agency has an agreement with Delta to pay a fee based upon the salary offered the candidate. For example, if the salary offered and accepted is $100,000 per year, the agency has an agreed upon fee (usually in the 20-25% range) that they charge the client. In this case, lets’ say the fee is 22%. Delta pays agency $22,000 for the placement.

Contract placement are for a defined period of time, usually 6-9 months on a full time basis. Contracts  sometimes renew and go longer. It’s not unusual for a contract employee to be on the job for over a year. On the other hand, they can be cut short. Using the Delta example above, the recruiting techniques are the same. Instead of negotiating a salary with your candidate, contractors are paid on an hourly basis. In this case, you may agree to pay a web developer $60 per hour. The agency would them bill Delta $90 per hour for every hour that the candidate works. This cycle continues until the client no longer needs the services of the contractor.

HOW RECRUITERS MAKE MONEY

Most agencies pay a market competitive salary for recruiters. Junior recruiter salaries range from $35,000-45,000. On top of the salary, lucrative commission plans will add another $30,000 t0 35,000. First year earnings for a junior recruiter should to $60,000, and recruiters who apply a solid work ethic and master the techniques should earn double their salary. Most agencies also offer competitive health care plans, bonuses on top of commissions and 401K retirement benefits.

WHAT DO GOOD RECRUITERS HAVE IN COMMON

They have GRIT. Recruiting in simple, but it’s not easy. It takes hard work and there is a lot of rejection. You have to be able to move on.

They are curious. They want to learn more about their craft as well as develop subject expertise around the skills they recruit. Technology recruiters don’t have be technologists – they just have to understand enough about technology to have intelligent conversations with candidates.

They are conscientious. Good recruiters want to do the right thing under all circumstances. Recruiters are working with people and impacting their ability to earn money and care for their family. It is serious business and good recruiters understand the impact of their actions.

They act with a sense of urgency. Good recruiters do not procrastinate and they work with a sense of urgency.

They are great teammates. Recruiting requires coordination and collaboration with Account Executives, clients and candidates. Making a placement requires exceptional teamwork.

They are great communicators. Recruiters have to communicate clearly, concisely and frequently to assure all parties are aligned and equipped with the information needed to move the process along.

In summary, recruiting is a great career choice and a very rewarding profession. You literally change lives for the better every day by helping people navigate their careers. The intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are greater than you could ever imagine! My experience as a recruiter has given great insight into human behaviors and decision making processes. It has made me a better listener and a better sales professional. Even as a football coach, I use lessons learned as a recruiter every single day working with athletes, peers and administration. If you are interested in a career as a recruiter, we should talk. SetGo!