Hiring great recruiters is a challenge every company faces today. This is the first in a 
series of posts on how to hire great recruiters. I have written on this subject on ERE in the past but I believe it merits revisiting. Over the course of 8 or so posts I will introduce the 8 behavioral competencies I have found best predict after hire performance of great recruiters. In a talent economy that has become increasingly demanding, hiring for the right recruiting behaviors and then equipping recruiters with the best skill training available must be a priority of any recruiting leader and company. Recruiter training should not only include how to source, one aspect of the recruiting life cycle that seems to get the most attention, but also how to actually execute great recruiting (often overlooked in most training curriculum).
Anyone who has participated in one of our many recruiter training programs, seen me speak or been on one of the recruiting teams I have led is well aware of my feelings about technology in the recruiting space. Essentially I believe that all the technology, job boards, social media, blogs and recruiting software in the world will never replace or generate the kind of results a great recruiter can deliver. If there is a war for talent, which I believe there is, then the next great weapon is the well trained, skilled and artful recruiter.
While activities like name generation and sourcing are made a bit easier thanks to well established and emerging technologies, really great recruiting results can only happen because of the hard work and effort of skilled and artful recruiters who make the right calls, execute a great recruiting call, develop centers of influence with a personal touch, build relationships, interact with suspects, prospects and candidates, maintain candidate and client control, understand the opportunity gap in a candidate's current situation, determine the decision-making criteria a candidate will use to make a change, work with a candidate really help their career, and navigate the delicate offer and notice-giving minefield. All of that merely scratches the surface of the many things a great recruiter must do well in order to add value to their company or client.
Recruiting industry thought leaders, discussion groups, and blogs all around the recruiting landscape extol the advantages of hiring sales and marketing types as recruiters. I couldn't agree more but with a few caveats. While it is true that recruiting is seemingly a sales and marketing role, simply stating this obvious fact and then hiring people from these spaces really misses the deeper behaviors and skills that must exist in a recruiter in order to generate better results and higher performance. The very best recruiters are not sales people but, rather have some of the same behavioral competencies as sales professionals. Great recruiting is not always selling nor is it always buying. Hiring a candidate with proven and verifiable results from a sales and marketing background does not necessarily mean you have hired the next great recruiter.
So what should you look for in a recruiter? What critical behaviors and skills should you identify and then hire for? How will you know the talent can be coached and developed? How can you more accurately predict how well they will perform in the future?
In my 14 years of experience recruiting and recruiting leadership (search firm and corporate) on teams of very high-performing recruiting talent and having to hire and lead recruiting teams I have discovered eight key behavioral and skill competencies that exist in great recruiters. Not so creatively I call them "The Great Eight."
These eight key recruiting skills and behaviors must be part of your identification, selection, and hiring strategy if you want to hire great recruiters. If you aren't in a position to lead and hire recruiters, these eight key factors should be areas where you strive to develop and improve in your daily recruiting behavior. (Or they may send a message that you are in the wrong profession.)
Though I have performed some analysis on these behaviors in my recruiting teams and tied them to performance outcomes, The Great Eight are derived from my experience in working with great recruiters as well as hiring and leading high performing and award winning recruiting teams (FirstMerit and Quicken Loans). I do not claim these eight items are the end-all be-all for hiring great recruiters. I believe they represent a great place to start if you haven't already developed your recruiter hiring model or they are something to shift to if you find yourself hiring many recruiters who just don't work out. Here we go!
Interaction: The ideal recruiter is able to communicate with others in a warm and helpful manner while building credibility, rapport and maintaining situational control.
I have raged on and on about the importance of relationships in recruiting. Talent relationship management (TRM) is another critical function of a great recruiter. In order to truly be successful, a recruiter must possess this interaction skill or behavior. There is a difference between managing relationships with candidates and managing relationships with talent. There is not a recruiter alive who can have relationships with every candidate. In order to have the most success in recruiting you have to identify the best talent and then develop and sustain relationships with them. They will become the next great hire or they will refer you to the very best talent. Winners hang out with winners and losers hang out with losers.
I have yet to meet a great recruiter who wasn't exceptional at building rapport quickly when executing the recruiting call. When contacting a talent suspect or prospect for the first time, a recruiter has a few limited moments during which they must establish credibility and, at the very least, a surface-level rapport. The recruiting call is also used to validate there is a need for a relationship in the first place. Once the talent suspect or prospect becomes engaged (shows some buying signs) it becomes the recruiters responsibility to further strengthen their credibility, deepen the relationship and begin to uncover whether or not the prospect is positioned for growth and has a valid reason to consider new opportunities.
Great recruiters get this. They work hard at carefully scripting their calls to very deliberately gain instant credibility and lay the groundwork for a firm relationship. This is primarily done by focusing more on the talent suspect or prospect than talking about actual opportunities. Executing the recruiting call well and in congruence with the talent you are calling is critical.
This is also the point where gaining situational control is critical. The best recruiters exercise candidate and hiring leader control by demonstrating a level of expertise, professionalism and savvy that clearly establishes them as the leader of the engagement. Control, among other things, is critical to eliminating surprises, reducing moving job specification syndrome, stopping changing decision making criteria syndrome and preventing negotiations from getting out of hand.
In the next post on this topic we will talk about Spoken Communication.
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