In-house Recruiters: Your Role is Changing and I’ve Got Good News

It’s 2020, and thanks to technology, the in-house recruiter has a very different role.

When talking with our clients I sometimes get the impression they feel as though they are seen as little more than well-paid PAs. This is not to belittle what a good PA does (they are life savers), but what I mean is that the in-house recruiter seems to be seen as a ‘go between’ from agency to candidate, from hiring manager to candidate, and from hiring manager to job board.

Most of the in-house recruiters we work with are bright, highly capable people, and dare I say it, probably not stretched enough. Too often they are bogged down by some admin heavy duties instead of being unleashed to exploit their full potential. Ok, enough waffle; here’s what I’m getting at.

Picking up on Bill Boorman’s excellent blog post, we are also seeing a trend and are adjusting our product accordingly. So here is what is happening:

The increasing adoption of easy-to-use, low-cost recruitment software means that so much of the time consuming administration can now be done by the hiring manager in just seconds.

1. Post jobs to careers site— 1 -click and it’s live on your ATS powered careers portal. What’s stopping the hiring manager from doing that his or herself?

2. Sourcing candidates—any decent ATS will allow you to post to leading job board aggregators, your social media sites, paid job boards and to your own employees to tap into their network of possible applicants. Just a few clicks and any hiring manager with virtually no training can do this.

3. Screening—just add some killer questions into your ATS to filter the obvious duffers then for the rest, ask them to complete a brief video profile so you can easily identify the stand out candidates. No need for the in-house recruiter to act as a first screening layer with a telephone or first interview.

Once hiring managers have identified the one or two that are the obvious standout candidates, they can arrange their own interviewing. One of the things that bogs down an in-house recruiter is going back and forth between candidates and hiring manager strying to match up interview times. Why? Let the hiring manager and candidate liaise directly. Any decent ATS will have an inbuilt interview scheduler.

4. Rejecting/communicating with candidates—again, any decent ATS will let the hiring manager reject one or 100 candidates with a couple of clicks with whatever email they choose to create and store. Does the in-house recruiter really need to do that?

5. Offer management—store a template offer letter and contract in your ATS, adjust for the job/candidate and email it out through your ATS. As for collecting references, well that’s easily done through any decent ATS.

6. Onboarding—sorry to sound like a broken record, but all decent applicant tracking systems will have an onboarding module by 2020 making it effortlessly easy to get the new recruit onboarded.

So, what exactly does that leave our in-house recruiter to do? Well, I see the role moving away from relatively mundane admin work to a higher level consulting position. The in-house recruiter is finally going to be stretched to do the type of role he or she is more than capable of doing but don’t do enough of now.

Examples of “stretched” roles include:

Role: The in-house recruiter will become a facilitator of best practice throughout the company.

Task:Best practice

• Assessment of the success of job boards and staffing agencies; assessment of why one department is hiring more quickly/more cheaply than another.

Role: a recruitment troubleshooter.

Task:Bottleneck prevention

• Providing emergency assistance to hiring managers if they have trouble filling a role.

Role:Recruitment marketing specialist

Task:Marketing

• The creation of a careers site to directly attract the best applicants to lessen dependency on job boards or agencies. Constant content uploading to maintain interest from prospective employees. Thus the in-house recruiter will develop expertise in SEO, Google analytics, copywriting and online advertising techniques. They will also need a detailed understanding of how to use social media to create a talent pipeline of candidates logging their details into the talent pool as possible future hires.

Role: Analyst

Task:Analysis

• The in-house recruiter will focus on the analysis of the types of people applying to the company and being hired not just for basic EEO compliance reporting purposes but to ascertain trends where superstar performers are being sourced. Retargeting recruitment efforts to exploit only the best sources of top candidates.

• The role will also include detailed analysis of actual cost per hire vs. monetary cost per hire (time spent reading applications and interviewing is a major cost to a business).

Role: in-house executive search consultant

Task:Sourcing

• Acting almost like an old fashioned research consultant at a search firm on senior roles, the in-house recruiter will be tasked with supplementing applications sourced from ‘normal’ channels through the identification of talent typically via LinkedIn networks and industry referrals.

• The in-house recruiter will also spend a lot of time identifying potential future hires, i.e. ‘persons of interest’ for roles that are likely to arise in the next 18 months. The market place of available talent will be mapped so that suitable candidates can be contacted immediately should an expected vacancy arise. The recruiter will be expected to establish a relationship with the potential applicants long before any vacancy is signed off so the candidate is ‘warm’ when formal contact begins.

Role: hiring process development consultant

Task:Superstar identification screening

• The in-house recruiter will be tasked with profiling superstars in all departments. What exactly do they have in common? Do they come from the same university, previous employer or maybe they did well in a particular psychometric test? How can the company build a screening system to identify these potential superstars at the application stage so hiring managers hire brilliant and not mediocre talent?

Role: business evangelist

Task:PR

• For bigger companies, you will be tasked with getting the word out that XYZ Inc. is an amazing place to work. Tapping up journalists, conference producers to get speaking engagements and generally getting yourself out there in order to let people know the amazing things your company does to hire great people and keep them happy. The more buzz you create about the company, not even necessarily talking about recruitment, the more people will want to work for you. Does the staff have pool tables in the middle of the office and ride around on roller skates? Cool…….now go tell everyone about it.

So, the role of in-house recruiters is changing and will continue to evolve. The good news is that you won’t have to the mundane stuff you get bogged down in now as technology (and those nice hiring managers) will do it for you in the future.