Picture a growing company wanting to hire a lot of people to create and sustain that growth.
There are a few ways they could go about this:
- Put all the responsibility on the individual hiring managers and teams and let them find the solution.
- Work with an external recruitment agency for each placement with hiring managers managing the process internally.
- Build an in-house recruitment function.
- Combination of options 2 + 3.
Of the above, option 4 is the most likely but, for reasons I’ll go into, with a strong emphasis on building an internal recruitment team.
As someone who’s hired many an external and internal recruiter in my time, and built recruitment functions from scratch, I’ll share my knowledge to help ensure you hire the right recruiter for your business.
What Is A Recruiter?
Recruiters or talent acquisition specialists are responsible for finding and placing candidates in vacant positions at a given company. Depending on the company and the particular set-up, a recruiter may also support developing the interviews and assessments.
Recruiters either work for the company they’re placing people in (in-house) or in a recruitment agency where they work with multiple companies (external).
Overall, the skills across both categories are similar, but there are some slight differences.
For example, agency recruiters may need to be more commercial and business development-savvy to develop clients and engage candidates.
Recruiter responsibilities
Typically, recruiters are responsible for managing the recruitment process from start to finish This includes:
- Ensuring there are enough applicants through activities such as recruitment marketing and sourcing
- Screening applicants and pushing them through to interviews where appropriate
- Designing interviews and assessments
- Helping hiring managers assess candidates and moving them through the pipeline
- Keeping candidates informed and engaged
- Making job offers.
Why Hire A Recruiter?
One of the major decisions for every company is when and if they should build an in-house talent acquisitions org, which is usually part of the People function.
Most recently, I’ve seen hyper-growth startups prioritizing building an internal talent acquisition function even before a fully-fledged people function.
Such is the importance of finding good recruiters for your org.
Building an in-house talent acquisition function will help:
- Build an employer brand to attract talent in the longer term.
- Ensure that a persona is created for each role outlining what the ideal candidate looks like and the aim for those candidates.
- Support designing and testing interviews and assessments.
- Help candidates have a great experience throughout the interview process.
This is not to say you should never use agency partners in recruiting. Sometimes you’ll need to tap into agency recruiters for their expertise in specific areas or for senior/executive roles.
However, relying solely on recruiters can often be a very short-term and expensive solution because:
- The org isn’t building an employer brand or a presence in the labor market making it more reliant on agencies going forward.
- On average, for a single placement, the fees are equivalent to about 20% of the base salary. A good recruiter can place upwards of 25 people per year in-house which is a lot less than the agency fees per placement.
How To Find A Recruiter
There are two major sources of experienced recruiters:
- Other companies that have talent acquisition functions
- Recruitment agency recruiters looking to go in-house.
Some salespeople have successfully transitioned into recruitment, but it’s not guaranteed that every salesperson can do recruitment and vice-versa.
If you’re hiring the first recruiter for your team, hiring an experienced recruiter is important.
Recruitment in general can be picked up fairly easily, but to know it well enough to create a full function requires experience and expertise.
Some sources and methods to look for experienced recruiters:
- Jobs boards: You can always post the role as good recruiters are usually very plugged into job boards (especially LinkedIn).
- Network: Ask people managers and senior leaders in your network about a good recruiter they’ve worked with.
- Recruiters: There are specialist recruitment-to-recruitment agencies that can help you find a talent acquisition specialist. Make sure to check that they have placed in-house recruiters.
- Communities: Places like People Managing People, Recruitment Brainfood, and some sourcing communities will have some of the more active recruiters.
- Headhunting: Check some of the companies that are in your industry or a company that has undergone a lot of growth.
- Agency partners: Have you worked with a particularly good recruiter? Would they be interested in working with you exclusively? Also, keep in mind that there are new models like the “embedded” recruiter which straddles the in-house and agency model meaning that they might have an easier time getting used to in-house recruitment.
Skills And Competencies To Look For
In general, recruitment skills are a mix of hard and soft skills balancing a slightly sales-y approach with data knowledge and commercial focus.
I’ve previously written an article about recruitment skills, traits, and competencies that outlines the skills that set apart excellent recruiters.
However, there are a few I’d like to highlight that in-house recruiters need to have, especially if you are hiring recruiters from agencies:
- Long-term thinking. Depending on the agency, some agency recruiters may not have developed that kind of thinking.
- Problem-solving. Especially solving things in such a way that won’t cause problems down the line unexpectedly.
- Knowing when to walk away. Not getting too attached to candidates or knowing when placing someone won’t be a good fit (e.g. someone who may be technically talented but the wrong culture fit).
- Versatility in roles. Often in smaller organizations, in-house recruiters have to hire for all roles so it’s beneficial if they have previous experience hiring a variety of roles.
Questions To Ask When Interviewing Recruiters
When hiring a recruiter, it’s important to see how they will fit into the overall goals and test the skills you would be looking for in a recruiter.
The questions will need to cover the nuts and bolts of recruitment and the particularities of hiring in-house.
Hard recruitment skills questions
- What kind of roles have they covered?
- What is their offer/close rate?
- What’s the time to hire they’ve maintained?
- What’s the first 6-month attrition rate for their placements?
- What are your favorite roles to hire for and why?
Strategy and soft skills questions
- Tell me about a time when you had to push back on a candidate or a hiring manager- how and why did you push back and what was the outcome?
- Talk about the most challenging role that you had to fill or the role that took the longest? Why was this the case? What did you try? How did you break the stalemate in the end?
- What are the most useful questions you ask when screening candidates?
- How do you verify that candidates have the expertise beyond what’s on paper?
Situational questions
I also recommend that you discuss your company’s current situation to understand how they would approach problem-solving the issues at your company.
For example, if you are a company that already has issues with hiring, what would they recommend?
Market Trends
One thing to note is that the wave of layoffs which started in 2022 have impacted recruitment severely. At one point it was widely reported that the recruitment function was disproportionately affected by the layoffs.
This means that there are more recruiters available for each recruitment job to follow the ebb of the talent market.
For the companies hiring recruiters, this means that they will need to go through a lot more candidates to find the right person for them.
At some point, there will again be a shortage of good recruiters once the market recovers as recruitment is a role really impacted by the ups and downs of hiring.
What To Look Out For In A Recruitment Firm
Let’s say you’re not ready for a full-time recruitment hire or want to use an external agency for certain positions.
First of all, there are three main models of partnering with an agency:
- Contingency model (also known as no win no fee) where you only pay for candidates they place with you.
- Retained model. A partial sum is paid upfront to “retain” the agency to work on a role. Sometimes the % fee is lower vs contingency.
- Embedded model. An agency recruiter who works as a part of your team. They work more closely with your team to work on your hiring needs and they work potentially exclusively on your roles.
Whichever model you go for make sure that you check at least the following:
- They have a track record of placing top talent at the level you need in similar businesses to yours.
- They are not trying to secure your business by racing to the bottom on price. There is such a thing as suspiciously low fees in recruitment!
- You get to know the recruiter you’re going to be working with and what they will do to support you.
- If an agency offers multiple of the above models, they’re not pressuring you into one or the other.
Good Recruiters Help You Build For The Future
Hiring an in-house recruiter can be a great first step to showing your employees, clients, and the world that you’re serious about hiring and about your organization as an employer.
If anyone tells you that “only the bad recruiters, or the ones who didn’t make it in-agency go in-house” then tell them to go back to the 80s.
Finding the right person can be challenging, but having a dedicated in-house talent acquisition function has become commonplace so you can find some great recruiters who have made the jump.
For further advice on hiring recruiters and recruitment in general, join our supportive community of HR and business leaders sharing knowledge and best practices to help you grow in your career and make a greater impact in your org.
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