Any body CANNOT be a Recruiter

Seeing the last year’s trend, 2016 has raised a new debate on whether any layman person could take recruitment as his/her career. The big answer is NO. Recruitment is a very specialized field. Just like organisations look for core Marketing, Finance & Operation professionals, similar is the need to have trained recruiter.

Here are 6 things, Senior HR Leaders of organisations need to look at, when it comes to hiring trained recruiters, before they think anybody can take care of their recruitment process.

1. Recruiters are best at Networking

Networking is an art. And a most crucial part of the job role of recruiters. Depending on the type of business, recruiters are always keen to build connected community with a wide demography. Well known recruiters are always important for hiring events, brand awareness and spreading the word that the organisation is hiring. Not just offline, well trained recruiters are able to connect with candidates through social networks, which most other professionals fail to even utilise, let alone untrained hands.

2. Recruiters maintain coordination with all the teams

Keeping a healthy communication and coordination with all the teams within the organization are traits of trained professional recruiters only. Recruiters are able to connect well with co-workers to pass along referrals. They are able to coordinate with team managers to gather new requirements, understand the need and roll out job profiles accordingly. Trained recruiters take numbers seriously in terms of right inflow of candidates, number of interviewers required and correct estimation of time required to close a position.

3. Recruiters are trained to be patient

Not anybody can carry a good level of patience. Specially when it comes to calling hundreds of candidates in a single day, explain them about the current job openings. Though the temptation may be to cut-short the conversation or avoid conversation totally but it’s important to sit back and listen to the client requirements and candidates needs first, before taking an action. Recruiters need to be a good listener to be able to source good fit candidates, and close the positions accurately.

4. Recruiters are also branding the company

Recruiters are playing the double role of hiring as well as promoting the business name and its products & services. Recruiters are conducting hiring events, releasing press coverage for the hiring needs, preparing ad content and posters etc. They are promoting company’s hiring requirements through social media campaigns as well. Untrained minds can easily jeopardise the brand name of the company through mismatched communication. This will not only fend-off the prospective candidates but can also impact target audience of the business in negative way.

5. Recruiters are best at adapting Technology

A layman can take more time to get used to the technology or tools used in recruitment. This can easily delay the hiring process, causing substantial losses in the business. Infact, most of other departments are still bundled up with papers and files. It is the recruiters who have made their work more automated and technology driven to bring more accurate results in lesser time. An online recruitment management tool is what they are able to bring into their organisation.

6. Recruiters’ patience level makes them Superior

Things often don’t go as per plans. In such situations untrained professional might not carry the desired patience level to re-think on the strategy or wait for sometime to see the results. Haphazard actions can further affect future plans of recruitment process. Recruiters need to have patience if sourced in candidates are lesser than expected, candidates do not turn-up for interview or interviews need to be rescheduled.

Comment by Katrina Kibben on January 18, 2016 at 10:13am: So, while I agree that the *good* recruiters have all these skills, there's nothing particularly challenging about finding people who can learn this. It's not like finding someone who has the mind to code or the elusive combination of skills that make a great physician. I could also cross hire someone from marketing to do recruitment marketing without a ton of training.

Thoughts?

Comment by Mukul Agarwal on January 19, 2016 at 12:01am: Agree Katrina. The essence of writing this article is to

a) Stop generalising Recruitment/HR as a profession. So that any layman person should not think that he/she fits in this role.

b) Letting know the Senior leaders, what they should look for when they want to hire a recruiter/HR. Even if you want to cross hire, make sure the candidate carries all these qualities.

Regarding ur point on cross hiring of a marketing person. Again there are few things to look at. A marketing person is creative and knows how to make brand visible. He can sure be helpful in 'Recruitment Marketing', but not recruitment as a whole. Calling upto 100 candidates in a day, might not be his/her cup of tea.

What say?

Comment by Katrina Kibben on January 19, 2016 at 11:12am: I'm not saying that the marketing person will like it, I'm saying they could do it. I can't pull Joe Smith from the street to come in and do an engineer or doctor's job.

Anyone can be a recruiter, however success is elusive.

Comment by Nicholas Meyler on January 28, 2016 at 8:20pm: Interesting thoughts, Katrina, but I beg to differ. The idea that "anyone can be a recruiter" is not realistic (in my humble opinion, although you are welcome to yours, and it's healthy to have different opinions, in my opinion). I've seen 300+ people try to become recruiters in my career, and only a handful of them succeeded. I wouldn't call most of them really recruiters, in any case, even in some of the cases where they became Corporate HR people -- and most wouldn't disagree with me, either. Recruiting is a brutal profession that most people shouldn't try and couldn't succeed at, even if they made great efforts. The sheer volume of phone calls required is one of the first barriers... I've seen plenty of "qualified" people try to make more than nine calls in a day, and find they just couldn't do it... I averaged over 100 calls a day for my first several years, and we kept records of all of them to review...

Most people don't have the tenacity, or the will-power, or the skills at research to do this job. I am defining the ability to earn a living at this type of work "success", here. Also, I want to make a big distinction between HR and Recruiters. They are very different roles. It's a whole lot easier to be an HR person than it is to be a recruiter. I seriously think that it takes as much talent or skill to be a recruiter as it does to be a lawyer or doctor. I know plenty of people who have siblings that are attorneys who are just barely keeping their heads above water as a recruiter... and I've seen an attorney who switched to recruiting work out -- for about six months until he decided he couldn't take it anymore.

I will stick my neck out and say that I think that identifying anyone who has the skills and personality to become a successful recruiter is about as hard a search as there is... despite what ignorant software engineers might tell you.

Comment by Mukul Agarwal on January 29, 2016 at 12:29am: Hey Katrina, some strong and applicable points given here by Nicholas. Looks like I have got a strong supporter ;)

@Katrina & @Nicholas... My another part of discussion would be, let's say organisations are ready to take a layman for this position rather than an expert recruiter. Aren't they going to loose some valuable time in getting new hires on-board? Will it not cost their business?

Comment by Nicholas Meyler on January 29, 2016 at 5:13pm: I don't even think training a person to be a recruiter is remotely feasible unless they have already proven that they are one... so yes, they will lose time... enormous amounts.

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