Recruiters are a critical part of the hiring process for many companies – offering scale and network connections outside of any particular business. But how do you find the recruiters that are right for you – and why is that so important?
You can have the best job description in the world, but if you don’t have a good pool of candidates to choose from, well, that’s a problem. This is where recruiters come in. If you’ve had a freeze on hiring over the past couple of months, you might have lost touch with your recruitment network, so what’s the best way to build a new one – or even build an in-house team?
What Internal Recruiters Need
Your internal teams should be focused on branding, managing sourcing channels (both internally and externally), carrying out interviews, and handling day-to-day HR work. Your external recruiters should be ready to focus completely on finding you the candidates you need.
Also, if you think your internal teams aren’t using the ATS to the best of their ability – offer them support. Whether that’s training, more educational resources on how to use it, whatever it takes to help your teams do their best.
What External Recruiters Need
If you want to partner with great recruiters or hire them, you need to enable them to do what they do best – find great people. You need to remove any barriers that stand in the way of recruiters being able to access the information they need to sell a role to a potential candidate. That way, you’ll quickly show them you’re serious about using them as an avenue for hiring.
How Can Internal and External Recruiters Work Better Together?
If you hire external recruiters, make sure they have clear lines of communication with your internal teams so that things like your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can be easily kept up to date and candidates can be moved through the hiring process quickly and efficiently if they’re a potential hire.
Focus on the right people. Your goal is to hire recruiters who are passionate about serving others through their work. You want recruiters who are keen to build their own brand around making your business better. This means they must be able to empathize with the people they’re trying to help find jobs – and must care about seeing them succeed as much as you do.
Beyond the right people, you also need to keep an eye on the right processes. Once you know who you want as part of your recruiting team, you need to establish clear hiring processes that set expectations for everyone involved. That includes every person and their role and responsibilities from interviewers all the way up the hiring chain in your business management.
Topping up your internal teams with external recruiters will give you both the processes within your business to successfully onboard as well as extend your reach using a wider recruitment network.
Removing Barriers To Recruitment
The job market is, in general, highly competitive right now – particularly in tech. The cost of employing people has risen in line with this competition. Not having access to the right candidates is holding companies back. This is why access to great external recruiters is so important – they can find you what you need and help your internal teams focus on what they do best.
The bottom line is that it’s important to build a recruiting team that works for you. You can’t do this without understanding what makes your company unique, how you want to work with candidates and other stakeholders in the process, and why your company culture is so important to your business.
Once you know all that, it’ll be much easier for your external recruiters to find candidates who fit your culture and mission and who will help make your company better in the long run.
