Skills of effective Recruiters

In this posting, I am going to write about certain important skills required for a recruiter. Recruitment is often thought to be one of the easiest job but in reality, it’s one of the challenging and critical jobs.

As a recruiter, you don’t just forward job spec, get some CVs from your vendors and line up the candidates. If it’s just that, it’s a post-man’s job and there is no value addition from HR or recruitment perspective.

But it’s just not that and much more than that.

So what more an effective recruiter does or what more you need to know and do to be an effective recruiter?

Let us look at some of the important skills that any good recruiter should necessarily have and try to refine & hone such skills on an on-going basis.

# Business knowledge: This is the first and foremost skill that you need to have. You need to know the Business that you (your company) specializes in, Business specific skills required for various roles and at various levels across the Organization. You need to know your competitors, they hiring models & practices, comp & Ben policies etc., It’s not for copying for what they do but for you to know where you stand, ie., are you ahead of them or behind them.

#Network: Networking is all about knowing all the relevant stake holders that you need to know to get things done effectively and quickly. Wider and bigger the network, the easier it is to tap and identify that talent that you are looking for.

It’s another important skill that any recruiter should necessarily have. What a riffle is to a solder, networking is to a good recruiter. So if you don’t have a good network, you are like a soldier without a riffle.

For example, when you want to initiate campus connect programs with colleges, a recruiter who has good rapport with all the placement officers of your target colleges can drive your initiative much more effectively than someone with poor network.

With good network, you can easily accomplish what hundred follow-ups cannot do.

That’s why, as far as recruitment role goes, it’s always a good idea hire someone from the same region with good network rather than an out-station candidate

Expertise and Consulting role: When you get a job spec for a particular position, you just cannot immediately start sourcing or give it to your vendor.

You need to review it with the Manager concerned (the one who gives the job spec) and you should be able to evaluate it in terms of availability of such talent in the market, its demand in the market, cost range etc. and you should be able to refine the job specs. You may suggest to your Manager as to what needs to be defined as a mandatory skill and optional skills

This is the first step for effective sourcing and if the spec is incorrect, all the sourcing efforts will go waste and you would lose the precious time. Your sourcing effectiveness depends a lot on how clear

# Culture: No recruiter will look for the best candidate, rather he will look for the right candidate not just in terms of skills but in terms of cultural fitment and adaptability. The recruiter should understand the culture of his  organization in terms of certain behavioral traits and values required and look for such qualities in the prospective new hires. You should also know how to assess those qualities through effective behavioral interviews.

A good recruiter needs to have certain behavioral traits necessarily such as

Very good interpersonal skills and consulting skills - as you would have to work with many people probably at sr. levels and suggest changes without rubbing them on the wrong side,

Result-orientation since recruitment is also like marketing in a way that you need to close all the positions within the SLA. What matters more is the results than the efforts.

Very good co-ordination skills as you need to co-ordinate with many stake holders internally and externally as well.

Hope this posting was information. Do share your feedback and comments.

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