Five Skills Top Recruiters Must Have

I don’t write about recruiting much, even though I managed a corporate staffing department for several years and worked with recruiters for several additional years. I don’t write about recruiting because I don’t like it and I don’t think I’m very good at it.

Nevertheless, I believe that recruiting is critical to a company’s success. In fact, I think that the people hired into an organization and the way that they are onboarded does as much to contribute to the profitability of a business as how much employees are paid or how their performance is managed.

But I don’t think I possess the some of the talents that good recruiters need. What are those talents?

1. Sales Ability and Persistence

A good recruiter must be able to sell top candidates on the merits of working for the employer and in the value of accepting the particular position for which the candidate is under consideration. Sometimes this is easy—after all, the candidate probably applied for the job in question. However, often, especially in executive searches, recruiters must convince top candidates to leave positions where they are doing well to take on the risk of a new role and probably a new company.

This is an area where I know I fall short. I do not like to sell. I am too introverted. If people are happy where they are, who am I to tell them they should move?

By contrast, one of the best recruiters I worked with had an outgoing, engaging personality and also had the ability to read people quickly. She vigorously pursued people she thought fit our needs, and she didn’t back down until convinced she couldn’t budge them.

2. Focus

The best recruiters keep a laser focus on what the job in question requires. They assess every candidate against these skills and competencies, and they don’t let themselves get talked into hiring based on the candidate’s charming personality.

Good recruiters also probe until they are satisfied with the candidates’ answers. Often, candidates can bluff their way through an initial response, and it is important for recruiters to push to be sure the candidates have sufficient depth to get beyond a cursory answer to a question.

It takes tenacity to continue to probe on every competency that is important for the role. That is difficult to do in today’s fast-paced environment, where an interview may only last thirty minutes. The best recruiters can balance speed with depth, maintaining control over the interview throughout the process. They can quickly determine which candidates are not qualified, so they can spend more time with those who are.

The recruiter I mentioned above was dogged in her questioning. She didn’t let an issue drop until she understood the candidate’s abilities. And she could pack a lot into a thirty-minute interview.

3. Open-mindedness

The other side of focus is open-mindedness. While quick judgments are important in recruiting, it is equally important that those judgments be based on competencies, and not on the expected profile of the ideal candidate. Thus, receptivity to candidates with diverse experiences and backgrounds is just as important as making a quick decision.

Good recruiters are good at outreach into minority communities and other groups where strong candidates might get overlooked. They spend their discretionary time developing relationships that might turn into good hiring leads.

Again, as a strong introvert, relationship-building is not my strength. I could see a good candidate that might not have a traditional background, but I didn’t spend time in outreach efforts.

4. Listening

By now it should be obvious that listening skills are critical during recruiting. The best recruiters listen to the candidates more than they talk. They don’t just run through a checklist of questions. They follow up on initial answers and push until they feel comfortable that they understand a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses in each critical competency and skill area.

Most recruiters who are any good can listen or develop the skills to listen. But it takes practice and it takes time.

5. Customer Service

Ideally, recruiters are good at serving their clients, who are the hiring managers. They understand the client’s business well enough to help identify critical skills and competencies.

They also act as if the person they are hiring will be working for them—they don’t hire someone who can’t get along in the organization or who would be a pain to work with.

And they are sensitive to costs, both during the recruiting process and in negotiating the employment offer with the successful candidate. Another excellent recruiter I worked with treated his corporate staffing department like it was his own business and managed his costs as well as his clients’ costs. He could relate well with executives across the company, because they knew he appreciated their problems and would work with them to meet their needs.

* * * * *

Where I fell short was primarily in sales skills and outreach. I wasn’t pushy enough to find the best candidates. I also tended to let candidates’ initial answers slide, rather than delve deeper into their answers.

Fortunately, I had recruiters who worked for me who excelled in these areas, as well as in the client service needed to find exactly the person the hiring manager needed for their assignments. Well, almost exactly—no candidate is ever perfect. At least I staffed my own department well, because I hired people who had the skills I lacked.

Are there any other skills that you think top recruiters should have?

Leadership 101: An Oldie, But Goodie

In 1999, when I began managed a staffing department, I started following ERE.net. ERE.net was created in 1998 as an online gathering place for recruiters to network and share best practices. I quit following ERE.net when I quit handling our company’s staffing function, but in recent years I’ve been following its sister site, TLNT.com, which provides human resource professionals with news and analysis across the whole HR profession.

I hadn’t thought much about ERE.net for several years. But I recently came across a 2002 article from their newsletter I had saved. The article was titled Leadership 101: Beware of Bosses Bearing Platitudes, by Ken Gaffey, published on February 19, 2002. Amazingly, I was able to find the link to this article. Nothing ever dies on the Internet.

Mr. Gaffey’s wisdom is as true today as it was in 2002. He describes twelve traits that leaders must have:

1. Integrity
2. Fairness and impartiality
3. Loyalty to organization over self
4. Consistency—no moodiness
5. Setting a strong example
6. No whining or gossip
7. No favorites
8. Knowledge and intelligence
9. Resolutely following the course
10. Empathy
11. Volunteering—rising to the occasion
12. Courage

I might quibble with the wording and order of these leadership traits, but they are all important. Empathy would be higher on my list. “No favorites” says the same thing to me as “Fairness and impartiality.”

The point of Mr. Gaffey’s title about “platitudes” is that leaders must lead through their actions, not their words. We have all suffered through bosses who did not lead by example in one or more of these traits.

I suggest you read Mr. Gaffey’s full article, then think about how you and other leaders in your organization act.

How do you measure up as a leader, using these traits as a guidepost?

The Difficulty of Hiring For Fit

Even though I managed a staffing department for several years, I have never liked recruiting. There’s too much marketing involved for my taste.

But I do believe in the importance of hiring for organizational fit. A good staffing process assesses the candidate against the job and the organization to make sure there is a fit, and also lets the candidate get a clear picture of the organization, so that the candidate makes an informed decision about accepting the job.

Laurie Glover, Contributing Writer for The Business Journals, posted a good article on April 2, entitled How to structure a search for the “right” employee.   Ms. Glover offers three strategies for hiring the right employee:

• Look for someone who has the relevant skills and knowledge, not necessarily the most intelligent candidate,
• Assess the candidate’s motivation, and
• Select people who fit the culture of your organization.

Unfortunately, all three strategies are difficult to make happen during the “dating” that occurs during most selection processes.

1. Skills v. Intelligence—Both Are Important

I disagree in part with Ms. Glover on the role of intelligence. She advocates not necessarily hiring the best and the brightest, but looking instead for someone with the skills and knowledge to do the job. Yet she also says that skills and knowledge can be fixed, implicitly diminishing their importance in the hiring process.

I agree with her to the extent that when she says not to hire “the best and the brightest,” she means not to focus on candidates cut from the usual mold—those who come from the best universities and have the same stellar resumes. It is important to have a diversity of perspectives within an organization. Hiring all your employees on the basis of their alma maters or GPAs can easily get you a cookie cutter approach to the job.

However, a wise man I once worked for told me, “The way to tackle a hairy problem is to throw a bunch of your best people at it. They’ll come up with a solution.” On another occasion, this same manager said, “It’s never a risk to hire someone smart.”

I took both pieces of advice to heart, and tried to hire people who were not only intelligent, but also had proven successes in their past. Doing so required that I look for more than “book smarts.” The “best people” have more than intelligence. They have the motivation and cultural savvy that Ms. Glover describes in her other two strategies.

2. Motivation is Critical

I am in complete agreement with Ms. Glover that the best people are those who are independently motivated. As she states, you cannot motivate employees; they must motivate themselves.

All candidates will profess themselves to be self-motivated. It will probably take serious probing during interviews to find out how self-directed applicants have been in achieving results in their previous roles. Checking references is also important, as is reading between the lines, because prior managers may be reluctant to describe a former employee as unmotivated.

Look for candidates to display enthusiasm about earlier projects and to talk openly about why they liked their prior assignments.

3. Success Requires Cultural Fit

The final strategy that Ms. Glover recommends is also critical to hiring a strong candidate.  I love the way Ms. Glover articulates the importance of cultural fit: “Can I stand them while they’re doing the job (and can they stand us)?” We have all worked with someone who had the requisite skills and abilities, but who absolutely rubbed us the wrong way.

Yet cultural fit is difficult to assess during the normal recruiting process. Both candidate and organization are typically on their best behavior. It takes strong interviewing skills to assess the “how” of a candidate’s past performance, as well as the “what” of the results achieved.

Moreover, there are times when it is important to bring in someone with new skills or a new way of thinking into an organization. When that is the case, it is very important to do so carefully. Some candidates will be too much of a shock to the organization, or will be ineffective because they cannot communicate with internal partners and customers. That balance—diversity of thought and perspective on one hand, and cultural fit on the other—is delicate.

Often, it will boil down to “can I stand this person for 40+ hours per week?”

What has been your experience in hiring for fit?