There are a million blog posts describing all the characteristics of bad recruiters - trust me, I'm well aware. I constantly battle this perspective when working with candidates for the first time. So what does it take to be great? I mean really great, not just above average. Let's face it - average is still not a place any recruiter wants to be.
The TL;DR of it is this:
Create a great experience from start to finish.
We all know that exceptional talent within any domain, particularly within tech, is hard to come by. As a recruiter, the focus should always be on making sure your candidates walk away regardless of the outcome thinking "Wow, I'm glad I pursued that." From first contact, the conversation should be genuine and customized. A great recruiter will share as much information as they're asking you to share. It's our responsibility to make sure candidates feel comfortable with what they're getting into and are equipped with all the information they need to make the right decision for themselves, even if that means withdrawing from the process. A declined offer should never be the result of a lack of information. If you pay close attention all along the way to what piques a candidate's interests, what their concerns are, and what's important to them, closing the deal is just a formality. Compensation is always going to be a factor, but if you do your job right and the candidate is in it for the right reasons, it won't be the deciding factor, especially if your company has a fair compensation strategy in place. Does this mean you'll never have another declined offer? Of course not. But remember that candidates are people, and for many people, what makes or breaks the decision to accept a new job is a sense of belonging and being excited about the work they'll be doing. We spend half of our time at work and much of the rest of it thinking about work and planning around it. Big life changes are stressful. Most people are not excited to experience a job change. Fear of the unknown is a major factor in our stress levels. It's incredibly important to remember that while it's your day job to fill jobs, it's is a huge life change for every candidate you work with. Don't forget to empathize with them. Genuinely care about their concerns and address them. Make sure they feel connected to the team they'll be working with. This means being their confidant and building trust. The more honest the conversations are between you and your candidates, the more likely it is that you'll understand what drives them and can ultimately determine if you're aligning them with the right role at your company early on.
Do what's best for the candidate and your teams.
There's a delicate balance between being an advocate for your candidates and doing the right thing for the teams you support. As important as it is to really understand your candidates, it's equally as important to understand your hiring teams and be able to coach them through the hiring process. Great teams don't need to see mountains of candidates in order to decide who they want to hire. Being a great recruiter means asking tough questions of the teams you support and remembering that timing is everything, particularly when it comes to recruiting. There will always be the possibility of someone better coming along, so the decision at the end of a full round of interviews should never be, "Well, they were great, but I want to see more candidates before I make a decision." It's important to coach your hiring managers through this and help them look at each candidate individually and assess their strengths and weaknesses against the role. Where are their strengths? Where are the gaps? Can we accommodate the gaps? Do they have the drive and desire to learn quickly? There is no perfect candidate and passing on an amazing first candidate out of fear of pulling the trigger can be a costly mistake. In the same ways we need to empathize with candidates, we also need to empathize with managers and understand what drives their decisions. Seasoned hiring managers are much more receptive to this approach, while those managing a team for the first time are going to be more afraid of making a bad hire and err on the safe side. You're the expert. Listen to their concerns and ask them questions that will help them come to the right conclusion. Asking something as simple as, "What is your biggest fear if we hire this person?" and "If we hired this person and a year from now had to fire them, what do you think the reason would be for that?" These questions can help managers think through their fears and decide whether or not those fears are valid or if they're simply afraid of committing.
Be honest and responsive.
It's not easy attracting great talent. But it's also just as difficult for great talent to stand out unless they know someone internal to the company they're interested in. When a candidate submits their resume for consideration, try to remember how it felt to be in their situation. It's an awful feeling knowing how much you really believe you can contribute to an organization, only to be overlooked, ignored, and eventually sent a canned rejection message. For the people who go out of their way to contact me on LinkedIn or email me directly, I always respond. Always. It might take me a few days or even a week to get back to them, depending on how many other priorities I'm juggling, but it's incredibly important that I give that person a few minutes of my time. I look over their resume, share it with the appropriate recruiter internally if they look solid, and reply back to let them know I've passed their info along for consideration. Or, if I know for a fact they're not a fit, it's just as important to have the common decency to let them know why and offer to keep in touch. I can't tell you how many new grads I get contacted by every week, but I can only imagine how stressful it is to be searching for a company that's willing to take a chance on you, teach you, give you the experience you need to build a foundation for yourself, and receive rejection after rejection - or even worse, no response. A quick and genuine reply is huge! And you know what? That new grad might be the CEO of an incredible company one day. Or your boss. The world is only getting smaller. Just last week I met a homeless man on the streets of NYC. We started chatting and I learned he was from Austin, TX. It turned out that a software engineer I had recruited to my previous company from Boulder, Colorado, who went to school in Austin, knew the homeless man I had just met. What are the odds? I've had so many encounters like that in my professional life - it's amazing how quickly your reputation can be shared behind the scenes without you ever realizing it. That reputation can easily make you the trusted advisor or a leper, depending on how you treat people. Something else I also do is go out of my way to connect exceptional talent that reaches out to me with other people in my network if I know we don't currently have the right opportunity for them. I can't count how many times this has turned into a thank you email because they were hired, or they sent me a referral for someone in their network that I ended up hiring, or they become a friend of mine. I don't network with people for any self-serving purposes, to be honest. I do it because I genuinely care and they can sense that. It's amazing what the domino effect can be when you care enough to give people a little bit of your time. You never know where those relationships will lead. It might be tomorrow, a year from now, even five years from now, but as recruiters, we should never underestimate the power of networking and relationship building. I've actually hired several people I kept in touch with on numerous occasions and have had many people want to join me on my next adventure when I join a new company. It's a great feeling when people trust you and come to you first before opening up their search for a new job. It can present a great opportunity for you to share insight on your current company before they're snatched up by a competitor.
Understand the role and team you're recruiting for.
Maintaining strong relationships with people and stepping up as a talent acquisition expert is important. Quality should always trump quantity. Rather than presenting 10 candidates and interviewing five or six of them so the team can compare the "top picks" against each other, reinforce the importance of due diligence upfront. Help your team understand their own needs. Oftentimes hiring is not done proactively. But there needs to be a balance of having the right types and amounts of work for a new hire and having too much work for the current team. As soon as a manager is approved to open a requisition, the need is burning and that person has to be hired yesterday. Bringing the team out of that panicked state and back to reality is key to everyone's success - yours, the team's, and the right candidate's success. Sit down and understand what brought on the need, what gaps the successful candidate needs to fill now, six months from now, and over a year from now. If there's flexibility, understand what the high priority needs are for the role so you can focus on those first. Interviewing should never be an exploratory process to figure out what a team needs. That should be known before the search is kicked off, otherwise you'll be spinning your wheels and wasting everyone's time - including your own. Part of ensuring your time is allocated wisely is by only reaching out to candidates that fit the description. Putting in more time up front to understand the team's needs, the job description, and what profiles will have the highest rate of success, will only make your job moving those few candidates through the process 10x easier - not to mention more enjoyable for you and them. The majority of your time should not be spent screening candidates or juggling them through a process. Your focus should be on creating the best experience possible for your top candidates so they want to join the team. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but in general, you shouldn't be talking to more than ten candidates for every hire and there shouldn't be more than three candidates interviewed onsite before the right hire is made. By reallocating time to understanding the role and the candidates instead of spending time pushing people through a process, you'll establish strong relationships with strong candidates and ultimately land many more offer accepts with a much lower rate of declines, while ultimately save time for everyone.
In a nutshell.
At the end of the day, it's easy to fall into the comfort that comes with using the same tactics we've always defaulted to, whether or not they're efficient or even work. To be a great recruiter, we need to start holding ourselves accountable for coaching our hiring managers, creating a great experience from start to finish, doing what's best for our candidates and teams, being honest and responsive, and understanding the roles and teams we're recruiting for. If we can begin to change these behaviors consistently over time, we can begin to change the dynamic of our work and influence a shift in the perspective many people have of recruiters. With sites like Glassdoor and social media making it easier for candidates and employees to share candid feedback about various companies, we're on the hook to make every encounter the best it can be. To be a trusted partner to your candidates and the businesses you support - to truly be a great recruiter - we have to accept that traditional recruiting practices don't produce the best results and recognize the value of focusing on quality over quantity.
**This post is reflective of my personal views and does not necessarily reflect that of my current of past employers**
The TL;DR of it is this:
- Create a great experience from start to finish. This should apply to the way you work with candidates and the teams you support.
- Do what's best for the candidate and your teams. Changing jobs is one of the most stressful events of a person's life. Don't forget that this is a matchmaking process meant to find the right person for the long run.
- Be honest and responsive. Searching for a job can be as stressful as starting a new one. You're busy, I get it. So is everyone. But make it a priority to respond to anyone that reaches out to you, even if they're not a fit. And always - always - respond if you initiated the conversation.
- Understand the role and team you're recruiting for. Quality over quantity. You don't need more candidates, you just need the right ones. I'll explain this in more detail to follow.
Create a great experience from start to finish.
We all know that exceptional talent within any domain, particularly within tech, is hard to come by. As a recruiter, the focus should always be on making sure your candidates walk away regardless of the outcome thinking "Wow, I'm glad I pursued that." From first contact, the conversation should be genuine and customized. A great recruiter will share as much information as they're asking you to share. It's our responsibility to make sure candidates feel comfortable with what they're getting into and are equipped with all the information they need to make the right decision for themselves, even if that means withdrawing from the process. A declined offer should never be the result of a lack of information. If you pay close attention all along the way to what piques a candidate's interests, what their concerns are, and what's important to them, closing the deal is just a formality. Compensation is always going to be a factor, but if you do your job right and the candidate is in it for the right reasons, it won't be the deciding factor, especially if your company has a fair compensation strategy in place. Does this mean you'll never have another declined offer? Of course not. But remember that candidates are people, and for many people, what makes or breaks the decision to accept a new job is a sense of belonging and being excited about the work they'll be doing. We spend half of our time at work and much of the rest of it thinking about work and planning around it. Big life changes are stressful. Most people are not excited to experience a job change. Fear of the unknown is a major factor in our stress levels. It's incredibly important to remember that while it's your day job to fill jobs, it's is a huge life change for every candidate you work with. Don't forget to empathize with them. Genuinely care about their concerns and address them. Make sure they feel connected to the team they'll be working with. This means being their confidant and building trust. The more honest the conversations are between you and your candidates, the more likely it is that you'll understand what drives them and can ultimately determine if you're aligning them with the right role at your company early on.
Do what's best for the candidate and your teams.
There's a delicate balance between being an advocate for your candidates and doing the right thing for the teams you support. As important as it is to really understand your candidates, it's equally as important to understand your hiring teams and be able to coach them through the hiring process. Great teams don't need to see mountains of candidates in order to decide who they want to hire. Being a great recruiter means asking tough questions of the teams you support and remembering that timing is everything, particularly when it comes to recruiting. There will always be the possibility of someone better coming along, so the decision at the end of a full round of interviews should never be, "Well, they were great, but I want to see more candidates before I make a decision." It's important to coach your hiring managers through this and help them look at each candidate individually and assess their strengths and weaknesses against the role. Where are their strengths? Where are the gaps? Can we accommodate the gaps? Do they have the drive and desire to learn quickly? There is no perfect candidate and passing on an amazing first candidate out of fear of pulling the trigger can be a costly mistake. In the same ways we need to empathize with candidates, we also need to empathize with managers and understand what drives their decisions. Seasoned hiring managers are much more receptive to this approach, while those managing a team for the first time are going to be more afraid of making a bad hire and err on the safe side. You're the expert. Listen to their concerns and ask them questions that will help them come to the right conclusion. Asking something as simple as, "What is your biggest fear if we hire this person?" and "If we hired this person and a year from now had to fire them, what do you think the reason would be for that?" These questions can help managers think through their fears and decide whether or not those fears are valid or if they're simply afraid of committing.
Be honest and responsive.
It's not easy attracting great talent. But it's also just as difficult for great talent to stand out unless they know someone internal to the company they're interested in. When a candidate submits their resume for consideration, try to remember how it felt to be in their situation. It's an awful feeling knowing how much you really believe you can contribute to an organization, only to be overlooked, ignored, and eventually sent a canned rejection message. For the people who go out of their way to contact me on LinkedIn or email me directly, I always respond. Always. It might take me a few days or even a week to get back to them, depending on how many other priorities I'm juggling, but it's incredibly important that I give that person a few minutes of my time. I look over their resume, share it with the appropriate recruiter internally if they look solid, and reply back to let them know I've passed their info along for consideration. Or, if I know for a fact they're not a fit, it's just as important to have the common decency to let them know why and offer to keep in touch. I can't tell you how many new grads I get contacted by every week, but I can only imagine how stressful it is to be searching for a company that's willing to take a chance on you, teach you, give you the experience you need to build a foundation for yourself, and receive rejection after rejection - or even worse, no response. A quick and genuine reply is huge! And you know what? That new grad might be the CEO of an incredible company one day. Or your boss. The world is only getting smaller. Just last week I met a homeless man on the streets of NYC. We started chatting and I learned he was from Austin, TX. It turned out that a software engineer I had recruited to my previous company from Boulder, Colorado, who went to school in Austin, knew the homeless man I had just met. What are the odds? I've had so many encounters like that in my professional life - it's amazing how quickly your reputation can be shared behind the scenes without you ever realizing it. That reputation can easily make you the trusted advisor or a leper, depending on how you treat people. Something else I also do is go out of my way to connect exceptional talent that reaches out to me with other people in my network if I know we don't currently have the right opportunity for them. I can't count how many times this has turned into a thank you email because they were hired, or they sent me a referral for someone in their network that I ended up hiring, or they become a friend of mine. I don't network with people for any self-serving purposes, to be honest. I do it because I genuinely care and they can sense that. It's amazing what the domino effect can be when you care enough to give people a little bit of your time. You never know where those relationships will lead. It might be tomorrow, a year from now, even five years from now, but as recruiters, we should never underestimate the power of networking and relationship building. I've actually hired several people I kept in touch with on numerous occasions and have had many people want to join me on my next adventure when I join a new company. It's a great feeling when people trust you and come to you first before opening up their search for a new job. It can present a great opportunity for you to share insight on your current company before they're snatched up by a competitor.
Understand the role and team you're recruiting for.
Maintaining strong relationships with people and stepping up as a talent acquisition expert is important. Quality should always trump quantity. Rather than presenting 10 candidates and interviewing five or six of them so the team can compare the "top picks" against each other, reinforce the importance of due diligence upfront. Help your team understand their own needs. Oftentimes hiring is not done proactively. But there needs to be a balance of having the right types and amounts of work for a new hire and having too much work for the current team. As soon as a manager is approved to open a requisition, the need is burning and that person has to be hired yesterday. Bringing the team out of that panicked state and back to reality is key to everyone's success - yours, the team's, and the right candidate's success. Sit down and understand what brought on the need, what gaps the successful candidate needs to fill now, six months from now, and over a year from now. If there's flexibility, understand what the high priority needs are for the role so you can focus on those first. Interviewing should never be an exploratory process to figure out what a team needs. That should be known before the search is kicked off, otherwise you'll be spinning your wheels and wasting everyone's time - including your own. Part of ensuring your time is allocated wisely is by only reaching out to candidates that fit the description. Putting in more time up front to understand the team's needs, the job description, and what profiles will have the highest rate of success, will only make your job moving those few candidates through the process 10x easier - not to mention more enjoyable for you and them. The majority of your time should not be spent screening candidates or juggling them through a process. Your focus should be on creating the best experience possible for your top candidates so they want to join the team. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but in general, you shouldn't be talking to more than ten candidates for every hire and there shouldn't be more than three candidates interviewed onsite before the right hire is made. By reallocating time to understanding the role and the candidates instead of spending time pushing people through a process, you'll establish strong relationships with strong candidates and ultimately land many more offer accepts with a much lower rate of declines, while ultimately save time for everyone.
In a nutshell.
At the end of the day, it's easy to fall into the comfort that comes with using the same tactics we've always defaulted to, whether or not they're efficient or even work. To be a great recruiter, we need to start holding ourselves accountable for coaching our hiring managers, creating a great experience from start to finish, doing what's best for our candidates and teams, being honest and responsive, and understanding the roles and teams we're recruiting for. If we can begin to change these behaviors consistently over time, we can begin to change the dynamic of our work and influence a shift in the perspective many people have of recruiters. With sites like Glassdoor and social media making it easier for candidates and employees to share candid feedback about various companies, we're on the hook to make every encounter the best it can be. To be a trusted partner to your candidates and the businesses you support - to truly be a great recruiter - we have to accept that traditional recruiting practices don't produce the best results and recognize the value of focusing on quality over quantity.
**This post is reflective of my personal views and does not necessarily reflect that of my current of past employers**
Nice piece on recruiting. Caring and taking responsibility for your work always pays.
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