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What makes a great corporate recruiter?
- Rating:
5 after 1 vote
I’m wondering exactly what traits, personality, skills, and experiences would make a great corporate recruiter. Some of the key things that come to mind are customer service mentality, excellent organizational skills, great at working with people, exceptional at assessing people, smart, strong administrative skills, hard and smart worker, inquisitive, perceptive, business oriented, more extraverted than introverted, and technically savvy. Any other ideas?
Tags: characteristics, corporate, experience, great, personality, recruiter, skills, traits
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Simon Meth on -
Hi Sandra,
Wow! That's a really positive take.
Thanks!
Simon
Sandra McCartt said:Simon,
As a TPR, i work with some world class corporate recruiters. I think it must be the toughest job in the world. The ones i love to work with have: The patience of Jobe, company knowledge of the marketing dept, negotiating skills to settle a nuclear threat, risk management ability of the legal department, communication skills and selling ability of a politician, benefits/salary/budgeting knowledge of accounting, payroll and insurance departments. They can herd cats, say no with a smile, settle staffing reorganization problems, close deals with hiring managers, TPR's, ad vendors, ats vendors, initiate the onboarding process, babysit a candidate, a hiring manager and the administrative staff, while at the same time recruiting top candidates when everybody is moving the goal posts. They do it under the pressure of "it needed to be done yesterday "and then have to get up tomorrow and do it again...and love it or act like they do.
Kudos my friend, a great corporate recruiter is a "pressure player" who at least 50% of the time is the first contact the rest of the world has with the company and the last person to leave the office at night.
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Permalink Reply by Nick Leslie-Miller on -
The problem with internal recruiters is that they are raely strategic in their approach. Most of them are ex recruitment agents who have only ever worked in a "short term" target driven environment. They see recruitment only through the prism of their own experiences. So first off they want a "process" in place. They want software, they want to develop a corporate brand. They also set up preffered supplier arrangements etc etc. they may even have a budget to subscribe to monster. The best that many of them achieve is to capture the active job seeker without needing to use a recruitment agency.
Which corporate recruiters actually bother to find the finite ends to their market? Surely if you are to be responsible for recruiting you should know exactly where the type of people you are looking for are working? you should then understand the working environment of those workers and how your rival employers go about hiring their staff. You should be building a knowledge base of your skills market in my view above anything else.
The next task is to find the means by which you can best approach those workers with your own job offers.
I am asking whether in house recruiters have any sort of "top down" strategic approach to finding the people that they need? Those that do would in my view make the best in house recruiters, however I doubt there are any as most of these people would probably be making a fortune working as recruitment agents.
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Permalink Reply by Claudia J. Samuelson on -
I believe that a good corporate recruiter has to be willing to accept and embrace the concept of not being able to control anything.
What I mean by this, is that this role is a complete role of advisor but not decision maker. All recruiters need to be comfortable relinquishing control and embracing servitude. Recruiters must recognize that they are like seeing eye dogs to help guide a process. The ability to nudge and not be pushy, counsel without reward, recommend but not decide - are all challenges for all people. But the ability to do this effectively to be seen as someone who's opinions matter, rather than someone who has to be in charge, is a great gift.
While being competitive certainly isn't a bad trait, the desire to outperform an agency versus work strategically together doing research, sourcing or other types of unbundled search is what I believe makes a good corporate recruiter. If the focus is too much on beating out an agency, your mindset isn't truly serving your customer, it's winning or control.
The additional traits of flexibility, creative thought, hard working, ability to multi-task (ADD comes in handy - also known to me as "the shiny ball" syndrome), listening skills, deductive reasoning, compassionate, ability to spot ability versus only looking at skills are also key characteristics of being a good corporate recruiter.
I think this is a great topic when taking our value for granted, thinking "anyone can do this" and it's easy. For those of us who love it, it is hard and also easy. Luck, skill and raw ability are what it takes to be successful and highly regarded.
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