Have you ever wondered what makes a good recruiter? Or, what the recruitment skills every great member of an HR team share that makes them so effective?
Most recruiters share common skills that make them effective at their jobs. These include a combination of hard and soft skills that are either innate to the recruiter’s personality or are learned and honed over time.
If you’re trying to discover how to become a successful recruiter, but don’t know where to start, then you’ve come to the right place.
Soft recruitment skills
This family of recruitment skills is closely related to your personality. They’re skills that are part of who you are and those you can leverage to your advantage in a recruitment environment. Many can also be honed and improved over time with the right effort.
Here are some of the soft recruiter skills that most great recruiters share:
1. Strong communication skills
Being able to communicate through a variety of different channels is an essential skill for recruiters. You will be expected to write effective job and social media posts, correspond with candidates and hiring managers via email, on the phone, and in person. You are expected to act as the face of the company to candidates, the point person for hiring managers, and a liaison between the two parties throughout the hiring process.
As a result of these responsibilities, recruiters should be able to communicate clearly and concisely, both to individual candidates and co-workers but also to the public.
2. Confidence
Recruitment involves a lot of networking and interacting with a variety of people. You are expected to speak confidently to candidates, hiring managers, your co-workers, and experts in many different industries. Because of this, recruiters need to have a certain amount of confidence in their communication abilities.
Confidence is also a valuable recruitment skill when it comes to hiring for position or industries you know little about. Recruiters need to be confident in their own abilities and experience to make the right choice for the job and able to back up their decision-making process if questioned.
3. A natural curiosity
Recruiters should strive to learn more about a candidate than what's written on their resume or cover letter. There’s no way to know a candidate and how they will perform on the job if you don’t have the curiosity and proactiveness to ask the right questions.
Understanding people is a huge advantage when trying to become a successful recruiter. So is a curiosity about trying new tactics and channels to find new and different candidates. Never stop being curious or trying new things, and you will never stop improving as a recruiter.
4. Good listening skills
Listening goes hand-in-hand with being curious. Taking the time to really hear your candidates, hiring managers, and co-workers will give you more valuable information than any other tactic you can find.
By listening intently to what your candidates and co-workers say, you get to know exactly what they want. You can then use this information to craft your recruitment and negotiation strategies. The more you listen, the more valuable information you will get to guide your decision-making.
5. Ability to read and display positive body language
Most people wouldn’t think of body language as a particularly useful staffing skill, but it is. Often, and especially in a hiring situation, people don’t communicate precisely what they are thinking. Being able to read someone’s body language will give you great insight into what their actual thoughts or intentions are.
Body language also goes the other way for recruiters. Being able to control and display positive body language during in-person interviews is a valuable negotiating tactic. It can help you control the overall direction and sentiment of the conversation.
6. Reliability
Above all else, a recruiter needs to be reliable; this links back to the importance of good communication.
Recruiters act as the primary point of contact between a candidate and a hiring manager. One relies on you as the point of contact for the company that they are trying to join. The other is relying on you to fill a mission-critical position on their team. Both parties are dealing with high stakes situations, and both need a reliable person to advocate for them.
Being reliable means:
- Diligence in your communication and follow-up.
- Accuracy in the information you give.
- A willingness to work with both parties to reach the best salary or terms for everyone.
7. Big picture thinking
Recruiters should have the ability to focus on the candidate or vacancy in front of them, as well as the company’s big picture. That means thinking of your hiring strategy and individual recruits as part of a larger engine that is driving your company forward.
This can include basing your hiring decision in the context of longer-term talent management processes that will help develop your candidate. Or, you can work with and advise hiring managers about how they should staff and build their teams for success. Finally, this could include a longer-term strategy of connecting with high-potential candidates to fill your talent pipeline.
One sure-fire way to become a successful recruiter is to think beyond your current task and always be looking at the big picture in the context of hiring.
8. Patience
Anyone who has recruited a candidate for a competitive position knows that it can take time.
Hiring the right person can sometimes mean many rounds of job ads and interviews before finding the right person. It can also mean finding the right person, only to have them scooped up by a competitor.
Patience is often one of the leading recruiter skills and will usually pay off with persistence and quick thinking.
9. Strong networking and relationship-building skills
Recruitment is, first and foremost, a people business. It’s about meeting and networking with as many qualified people as possible to make connections that may one day lead to a great hire.
Networking, therefore, is an invaluable skill for recruiters. It helps build industry connections to leverage for advice and meet potential candidates to either pursue immediately or add to your talent pipeline.
10. Empathy
The last and often forgotten soft recruitment skill you should have is empathy. Job hunting can be a very stressful and emotional exercise, especially if there’s a level of desperation or urgency involved.
Recruiters should never forget this side of the job. Be empathetic of the emotional rollercoaster that comes with applying and interviewing for a new job.
Hard recruitment skills
Now, let’s take a look at some of the hard recruiting skills you should have to be successful in your career.
11. Data-driven mentality
With the rise of complex HR technologies, recruitment has become a data-driven game. An important, modern recruitment skill you should develop is the ability to analyze and use data to your advantage.
Take the time to learn which key performance indicators (KPIs) or recruitment metrics are most important to your company. Embrace data-driven recruitment to find ways to make your hiring better and more efficient.
12. Marketing and sales skills
Recruitment is all about marketing and selling your company to potential candidates. This means thinking and acting like you’re a marketer and salesperson rolled into one.
Recruiters should develop the same advertising and web analytics skills that marketers use to test and hone their lead generation programs. These will help you:
- Find the best channels
- Write convincing job posts
- Leverage technology to increase the reach of your job ads
- Find hidden pockets of highly engaged candidates
On the sales side, recruiters should focus on developing their ability to pitch the benefits of working for their company, as well as adapting on the fly to questions and push back from candidates. The better you are at promoting the company and job posting, the more effective you will be at landing the best candidates.
13. Ability to use technology
It’s critical for recruiters today to be tech-savvy. That means combining your recruitment skills with the ability to effectively use hiring technology like Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), Performance Management platforms, and HRIS. The better your tech skills are, the more effective you will be at leveraging these platforms to your advantage.
Technology skills also come in handy when hiring for highly technical positions. Communicating with candidates in their own language and screening them with confidence is a great way to become a successful niche recruiter.
14. Critical thinking
A huge factor in making a fair and successful hiring decision is thinking critically about the information presented to you. Recruiters need to take all the information available about a candidate, filter out what isn’t essential, and come to an unbiased conclusion about who to hire.
Critical thinking, therefore, is an incredibly important recruitment skill to ensure that you’re making decisions based on the facts rather than from the gut.
15. Social media
Social media has become one of the most significant and influential channels for recruitment. The variety of users and online communities that recruiters can interact with makes them invaluable platforms for finding niche candidates.
Recruiters, therefore, should incorporate social media into their arsenal of staffing skills to help spread the word about job vacancies and reach out directly to potential hires.
16. Multitasking and time management
Recruiters are often juggling multiple job openings at the same time. That means writing job ads, screening applicants, running backgrounds checks, scheduling interviews, and eventually completing job offers. That’s on top of communicating with the many candidates that apply for any single position plus their duties as the liaison with hiring managers and other recruitment team members. On top of that, their workload is multiplied for each job opening they are responsible for!
If you’re struggling in your current position and looking into ways to become a successful recruiter, then a good first step would be to improve your multitasking and time management skills.
Find out how Recruitee can help you automate daily tasks and collaborate with team members efficiently.
17. Ability to manage expectations
Candidates and hiring managers will always have high expectations. On the one hand, a candidate will likely have a vision in their mind about the level of responsibility, salary and culture they expect from the job. On the other hand, hiring managers will often have expectations about what skills and experiences the candidate needs to have to be successful.
A valuable recruitment skill to possess is the ability to manage the expectations of both parties. This comes with clear communication and being upfront with everyone early in the process. Lay out what each can expect, and keep the lines of communication open.
18. Strong aptitude for learning
Another recruitment skill that will serve you well in your career is a passion and aptitude for learning. Nobody knows everything, and most people will have to continue to evolve their skill sets to maintain peak performance.
Having the ability and willingness to learn quickly will allow you to adapt to new recruitment trends, take on new responsibilities, and venture into new industries. If you never stop learning, then you’ll never stop developing the recruitment skills you need to thrive.
19. Event networking
Understanding where your ideal candidates are and tracking them down is a big part of candidate identification. Yet, once you’re in a position to start luring them to your company, it’s imperative to not only make a good impression but to deliver a flawless sell of the available role.
Networking is far more than tracking down industry events and meet-ups. It’s about people. You’ll utilize many of your soft skills as part of your overall networking recruitment strategy, each of which could mean the difference between convincing a candidate that you’re the best move for them or not.
20. Negotiating skills
Giving a candidate what they need, even if you don’t have what they’re looking for, is a big part of candidate negotiations. If you haven’t got the resources they want, it’s up to you to find out what alternatives you can provide, keeping the role attractive and on the table. Negotiating plays a big part in all kinds of business transactions, and recruiting is no exception.
How to become a successful recruiter
If you read through that list of must-have recruiter skills and found yourself to be a bit lacking, don’t worry. There are always ways that you can learn new skills and expand on the ones you already have.
To help you become a more successful recruiter, here’s a list of tips you can use to continuously improve your skills.
- Write SMART goals(specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based) at the start of every quarter or year related to the recruiting skills you’d like to develop.
- Track your success in relation to those goals. Regularly achieving your goals translates well in developing and improving your skills.
- Discuss what works and what doesn’t with your co-workers. Get their feedback on how you’re doing, and work on any areas they flag as needing improvement.
- Focus on improving your weaknesses. Make a list of the skills you struggle with the most and focus on improving those.
- Get feedback from candidates and hiring managers.These are the people who see your recruitment abilities in action. Talk with them honestly about what you do well and what you don’t. Use that as a roadmap for where to improve.
- Invest in a solid recruitment tech stack that will help automate the manual tasks in recruitment and save you time to connect with candidates.
- Take online courses. If the skills you’re lacking require further education, then free online courses could be a great option to fill the gap.
Recruitment is an incredibly rewarding field to be a part of. You’re in a position to help your company thrive and to help people find their dream job. With the right recruiting skills and the willingness to continually learn and evolve, you can become a truly great addition to any HR team.
Additional reading: 7 tips for adopting skill-based hiring at your organization
