5 Tips for Hiring a Recruiter in Today’s Job Market

Finding talent is extremely challenging across all industries and job levels. And, to attract and retain top talent, you need a skilled recruiter to find the right people to fill your open positions.

However, your recruiters may be struggling to recruit a recruiter! And you’re not alone. 

Whether you’re hiring a recruiter in-house or partnering with a staffing agency, you should keep the following tips in mind when hiring these professionals in today’s job market.

Tip #1: Look for the skills and qualifications needed in your organization

When hiring a recruiter, you’ll need to identify a candidate with the right skills and qualifications for your organization. While your job description will identify several skills and qualifications – some required, some preferred – you’ll need to ultimately match up behaviors to your ideal candidate.

These behaviors include knowledge, aptitude, experience, attitude, emotional intelligence, consistent effort, self-direction, trust, and respect. 

One way to identify these behaviors is through pre-hire assessments, delivering instant feedback on a recruiting candidate’s core strengths and top motivations while identifying areas of improvement and growth. 

By identifying your best-fit candidates through pre-hire assessments, you can hire the right recruiter for your organization – the first time.

Tip #2: Ask compelling interview questions

Another tip when hiring a recruiter is to ask compelling – yet fair and unbiased – questions. When interviewing recruiter candidates, you want to identify hard and soft skills, behavioral intelligence, and cultural fit. 

At the same time, you want to establish a structured interview process, allowing you to reduce unwanted bias, hire stronger candidates, increase diversity, and improve your candidate experience, ultimately creating happier employees. 

Here are some interview questions to consider when hiring a qualified recruiter:

• Talk about one of your most successful placements. Could you walk me through your process?
• What is your average acceptance rate for job offers?
• Have you ever been asked to find the “perfect” candidate?  How did you handle that request?
• Describe a time you hired a job candidate that was not ultimately right for the role.  How would you handle this differently moving forward?

Through well-thought-out interview questions, you can listen for answers demonstrating self-reflection, accepting ownership of wins and losses, and taking advantage of career growth and learning opportunities. This allows you to better judge which candidates are not only right for the job but right for your organization.

Tip #3: Pinpoint account management skills

Recruiters may have different approaches to filling roles, but there’s one thing they all agree on – successful relationships with current and future candidates drive successful recruiting. And these relationships are reflected in a recruiter’s account management skills. 

When managing the candidate relationship, here are three best practices that top recruiters use:

• Before searching for job candidates, recruiters and hiring managers must be on the same page.  What candidate qualifications are needed? What successful attributes have employees in this role exhibited in the past? What are the must-haves and what are the nice-to-haves?
• Recruiters may rely upon talent screening and hiring solutions, such as pre-hire assessments, video interviews, or candidate tracking systems, enabling these professionals to find the best talent for the specific role.
• When interacting with job candidates, the best recruiters know that the more communication, the better.  The candidate experience is a two-way street. And recruiters should keep candidates in the loop at all times – preventing any feeling of the candidate being ghosted. Not only does focused communication improve the candidate experience through consistency and transparency, it also moves the recruiting timeline forward, a critical need in today’s competitive hiring environment.

Tip #4: Find a recruiter with a positive, resilient attitude

Like many other industries, recruiters have found themselves on quite the roller coaster over the last couple of years. However, with hiring trends continuing to evolve, you should pinpoint those recruiter candidates showcasing a positive, resilient attitude. 

Here are some soft skills you should look for when hiring a recruiter:

• Flexibility
• Ability to communicate
• Being realistic and proactive
• Capacity to problem solve
• Ability to control strong feelings, not being overly impacted by external factors
• Staying positive in the face of adversity, moving toward success

By integrating talent screening tools into your hiring process, such as pre-hire assessments, you can hire the best recruiting talent for your organization – shortening the recruiting time to – well – hire your recruiter!

Tip #5: Identify the recruiting candidate’s purpose and passion

Unlike hard skills, purpose and passion can’t be taught. Instead, these are innate qualities you hope to harness when hiring recruiters for your organization. According to a recent McKinsey survey, about 70 percent of employees define their sense of purpose through their daily work. Specifically, millennials are “likely to see their work as their life calling.”

Putting passionate people into jobs where they find purpose?  Well, that’s a win-win all around. Recent studies indicate that when employees find meaning in their work, they’re happier, more productive, more resilient, and healthier. Additionally, purpose and passion at work drive retention and loyalty. 

With recruiters often being the face of your organization, the benefits of passion and purpose extend beyond the employee experience. Simply, the right recruiter understands and conveys the voice and culture of your company – with excitement and conviction – selling you to top talent in the way you deserve. 

Hiring the right recruitment professional can not only speed up the hiring process, but they can eliminate staffing headaches while helping you get the edge on hiring top talent. Need help hiring a recruiter? Cangrade can help.

Contact us today to learn more about recruiting tools that make your hiring process efficient and effective.