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Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you’d like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
Today’s Question: We’re looking for some easy things recruiters can start doing right now in order to become better recruiters. Share your tips and insights!
1. Treat Recruiting Like a Sales Role
Take on the role as you would a sales role and pay attention to your numbers. The more prospects you talk to, the better chance you have of finding quality employer/employee matches.
Just as you would in your personal daily life, a successful recruiter should prioritize their workdays. This can mean anything from simply dedicating a few minutes to catching up on emails to having a power candidate search session. Organizing and streamlining your tasks will give you more time to focus on recruiting and expanding your network.
Never recruit or hire when you’re in a panic. Remember: The job need is not going away. Always make decisions in a professional and detailed manner. Emotional decisions are tend to lead to bad results.
Start by treating candidates like people instead of bodies. Too many recruiters treat candidates like commodities and dispose of them when they don’t make the cut for a position. By cultivating a positive relationship with candidates, you can build a candidate pipeline for future placements. You also set yourself up for a referral stream. This will make your placement process more efficient in the future.
5. Ask Candidates How They Spent Their Summer Vacation
An easy trick I used during my recruiting days was something I learned from Peter Drucker, the father of modern management: Ask the person to choose any subject (where they spent their last holiday, their hobbies, their favorite movie, etc.) and ask them to speak about it for ten minutes.
Believe me, it works well. Listening to the person, your learn a lot about the way they think, their attitudes, their values, and so on.
Use LinkedIn as your dashboard to message your network and followers simultaneously. Post a list of open jobs with application links on your LinkedIn profile. Answer questions in LinkedIn groups about your company. Tweet job openings for other recruiters.
Run your job descriptions through Textio.com to make sure your job description language is gender neutral. Subtle wording differences can affect who applies for a job. And no references to ninjas, please!
It is crucial to maintain relationships with your candidates, since you may want to hire them in the future. The best way to do that is to tell candidates why they didn’t get the job and what they could do better. Not many recruiters actually do this, but candidates are hungry for this advice. These appreciated tips will help the company, you, and your candidates. Everyone wins!
The key for massive improvement is to take an active role in your skill development. Each call you have with a potential candidate is a reference experience, but most recruiters learn very little from these calls. To learn as much as possible from each reference experience, you must:
1. Record your phone calls. 2. At the end of every day, review select recorded calls. 3. Dissect the calls. Write out what you did well and what you can improve upon. 4. Before making calls the next day, review your prior day’s notes so they are fresh in your mind 5. Review your notes over time, keeping an eye out for any areas in need of improvement that seem to pop up repeatedly. These are your sticking points. 6. Seek outside help from other recruiters, mentors, or trainers. Tackle your sticking points one by one.
Ask every candidate you talk to for at least two referrals of people just like them (assuming you want more people like them) – this will increase your talent pool organically and strengthen your talent bench.
