Recruiting or Headhunting has always been a fast-paced industry and with the rising popularity of the profession recruiters are now struggling more and more to stand out among their competition. But what does truly make you a great recruiter? What would be the differentiation between you and your competition? Join me on a journey where we will look into the top 6 assets which will help you place more candidates.
Strong Relationships with Clients
Someone within your company has to be responsible for building long lasting, strong relationships with Clients. It could be either a Sales Rep, Business Development Manager, CEO or you as a full desk recruiter if the company is small. Without a solid foundation of trust and constant communication between you and your Clients you won’t be able to place candidates efficiently. Let’s say you have a Client with several vendors. Now, imagine how many submitted candidates that Client receives per day/week from all the vendors. Which email/submission do you think they will open first? That’s right, the one that came from the vendor they trust the most. How do you build that trust? Let’s take a look at the qualities you need to have in order to be the top choice for your Clients.
Quality
You can be the fastest submitting vendor, yet if you don’t understand the needs of your Clients and you’re candidates are constantly getting rejected then you’re in trouble. Before searching for candidates make sure you understand the requirements really well. Not only reading the job description, but having a call or an in-person meeting with the Hiring Manager to get in-depth about the project, company, the personality they’re looking for, their culture, etc. Once you truly understand who you’re looking for you now need to have a set of interview questions that will help you qualify the candidate. If you can’t ask technical questions that will truly expose the candidate’s experience then you have no idea of who you are actually submitting and as a result you’re just wasting your Client’s time. Simply taking the candidate’s word that they are good at something is not enough, you need to challenge them with technical interview questions just like your Client would.
Speed is essential
You may be competing with another preferred vendor of the Client and if they submit first then their candidate might end up being placed first. Getting to the best available candidates on the market first will also increase the chances that those candidates will go with you and not your competitor.
Consistency
If your Client sees a submission from you less than once per week – you’re risking a chance of being forgotten. Even if you weren’t able to find a decent candidate for the week at least providing an update on the amount interviews you’ve done is better than nothing. Ideally, your Clients should hear from you once per day either with a status update or a submission.
Volume
Volume is tied to consistency. You may submit a lot of candidates but if it was only once per month then the value of that is low since within that timeframe your competitors were submitting daily/weekly and the Client was conducting interviews and even may ended up giving someone an offer.
Automation Tools
We are no longer in the Rolodex Era. Recruiters should invest more into automation tools that help them make more placements. While making more placements and building relationships with candidates and Clients recruiters should also aim to reduce repetitive, manual work that could be done by recruiting tools. The top tools that any recruiter should have is an Applicant Tracking System that suits their business needs, access to an online databases/resource (Linkedin, Monster, Dice, CareerBuilder, Indeed, SimplyHired, etc.) and automation tools that help connect their Applicant Tracking System with those resources.
As of now, Linkedin is the #1 source for most of recruiting companies, so it makes a lot of sense to integrate your Applicant Tracking System with Linkedin as much as possible. That’s why we created LinkMatch. LinkMatch is a Google Chrome Extension that lets you know which Linkedin profiles are already in your Applicant Tracking System and which are not.
You can edit Linkedin profiles while staying on the Linkedin page. See how LinkMatch works:
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