Recruitment and Selection Strategy: What Skills Do I Need to Be a Good Recruiter?

This is an extract from my book - A Career in HR - The Good and the Bod;


These are the skills you need to have or to develop in order to be a good recruiter:

Intelligence level over the average.

Highly responsible person – will be taking the initial decision concerning a candidate being rejected or selected for next stage. Someone’s fate depends on his/her decision, experience, skills, mood sometimes or state of fatigue.

Great decision taking skills – will take decisions concerning candidates being selected or rejected, will change the strategy in a project if things don’t go well on the initial path, will take decisions concerning recruitment channels and will be responsible for the success of decisions taken, will take decisions concerning partnerships with recruiting agencies (if to use or not and when since costs are very high).

Very organized person – will manage hundreds of resumes (sometimes thousands!), hundreds of candidates, will give hundreds of feed backs – all on time and to the correct candidate; will prepare daily, weekly, monthly and yearly reports.

Good communication and presentation skills – will give information to candidates, will deliver presentations to general public, and will represent the company.

Pro activity – will have to come with solutions for problems that haven’t yet appeared; will always be searching for ways to improve and make work more efficient.

Mature person – closely connected to the amount of decisions to take; will be responsible for own actions.

Strong analytical skills – will have to analyze resumes, recruiting channels’ efficiency, market reports, recruiting agencies’ reports; will be carefully analyzing a candidate’s skills and if they fit to the job or in the new team;

Flexibility – will have to change recruitment strategy as often as necessary to meet targets and deadlines;

Great time management skills – must be aware that requested resources and reports must be delivered on time;

Highly sociable person – will be working daily with a lot of people; must be sociable and must like interacting with people since there will be days with 14 interviews (situation not recommended by theory books, but different and inevitable in reality).

Some project management skills – can be given a project to complete by himself/herself and will need to organize available resources. I.e. it’s not possible for a recruiter to recruit a large team of let’s say 30 people alone. Ability to organize and conduct own work and available resources without too much supervision.

Professional attitude – represents a first contact between candidates and the company, can influence negatively or positively the company’s image on the market;

Some telephone skills – will be conducting from time to time phone interviews;

Some technical skills – will need to setup some software alone; will need to prepare and conduct a presentation with a laptop and video equipment alone in a different location than the company headquarters where an IT representative is available; will need to use a laptop, smart phone sometimes, conference equipment, video equipment, USB sticks, headphones, some software. A recruiter must be ready to learn how to use all these and how to make work easier.

Great resilience to effort – will be reading sometimes resumes at 10 pm at home; will be carrying a large laptop around, will be carrying presentation materials around, flyers and others. Will be asked to work overtime from time to time, at work or at home; will be asked to give up vacation if a new project needs to start and reschedule own family time.

Great resilience to stress – will have tight deadlines and huge volume of work from time to time; will have stressed managers who will ask for fast results for projects.