Recruitment and Selection Strategy: I Want to Work as a Recruiter. What Kind of Employer Should I Look For?

If you want to work as a recruiting specialist, you have 3 main types of employment you can look for. The final choice is yours.

Choice 1 - less risky and most comfortable - an ordinary company which has an HR Recruitment specialist position open. You will get a list of job openings and you will start recruiting. You will do mostly only recruitment tasks: posting ads, reading resumes, doing interviews. Maybe some presentations and recruiting events from time to time.

Choice 2 - medium risk and medium comfort - a recruiting agency. You will face 2 situations:
 - competitive, well-placed on the market agency where you will do mostly recruitment but at high volumes. You will work with multiple clients and a wide-range of positions. Great place to get lots of experience.
- smaller company, struggling to survive. Since agency recruitment fees are quite high, you will work for a company struggling to get clients. You will do recruitment but you may be involved in sales and searching for new clients. By client I mean - company in need of candidates to fill open positions.

Choice 3 - high risk and not much comfort, but great satisfactions in case of success - your own recruiting company. You will do part sales in search of new clients and part recruitment. If you are successful you may find someone in time to do the sales, the recruitment or both for you.

Good luck.

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.

Useful Job Description for the Position of Recruitment & Selection Specialist

Here's a JD that I created for one the the employees in my team.

You can use it. It is created for a medium - size company, but can be adapted to small and large companies:

Key Responsibilities:

§  Coordinating the recruiting process;

§  Covering all new job openings as well as back fill requests according to specified deadlines;

§  Maintaining a good relationship with Universities and student organizations;

§  Promoting the Company via Internet ads, Job Fairs, other recruiting related activities;

§  Developing the list of recruiting channels;

Typical Activities

§  Working closely with the managers in order to receive and update job descriptions for all open positions;

§  Discussing and selecting the best recruiting channels for each open position;

§  Creating and placing ads on all selected recruiting channels;

§  Developing the current recruiting channels;

§  Promoting the company in students’ organizations, Universities and making the company more visible on the market;

§  Selection and screening of CVs/resumes;

§  Keeping the CVs database up to date;

§  Organizing and holding initial face to face interviews and testing sessions;

§  Coordinating the recruiting and selection processes;

§  Creating recruiting reports;

§  Providing training for all collaborators involved in the phone screens process;

Key Relationships

• Internal clients – contract managers
• External clients
• Employees

Measures of Success

• Successful implementation of HR initiatives;
• All open positions and back fills covered within deadlines;

Person Specification

Essential

• Graduate caliber with minimum 2 years experience in human resources (recruiting);
• Ability to critically analyze status quo and propose creative solutions;
• Maturity, high personal standards;
• Strong analytical, organizational and project management skills;
• Ability to influence both internally with colleagues and externally with clients;
• Proactive and assertive;
• Communication and presentation skills (especially in front of large groups);
• Fluent in English;

A second language (French/Italian/Spanish/German) – great advantage

Recruitment and Selection: Are You a Recruiter?

Here are some questions and tasks you can give to candidates at the interview if you are selecting a person for the human resources department to perform the function of recruiter:

1.       Please write below what recruiting and selection means to you.

2.       Can be recruiting considered a motivation factor?

3.       What are the main tasks involved in the job of a recruiter?

4.       What recruiting channels do you know?

5.       Please describe in details the recruiting process for the following project:

You need to hire 10 German and English speakers (German fluent, English medium) and 5 English speakers (English fluent) for a new client on the following positions:

1 team leader – English speaker

2 senior agents – 1 German, 1 English

1 administrative support – German

11 agents – 8 German, 3 English

           What are the steps you take, the channels you use and the time frames you consider suitable.

6.       Please describe in details the recruiting process for the following project:

You have a team leader position that is filled in by somebody in the team - promotion. How do you back fill the open position remaining in the team after the promotion? 

7.       Please describe in details the recruiting process for the following project:

You need to hire 3 fluent Italian speakers (with medium English) and Linux/UNIX skills.

8.   You are interviewing a candidate that says he has team leader potential but no real team leader experience. What questions would you ask that person in order to see their real potential for a TL position?

9.   One of your colleagues from sales asks you the following question: we would like to see if Iyour city has potential for hiring 5 fluent Portuguese speakers; if yes, what would be the time frames and the salaries that the candidates might accept. What do you do in order to answer this question?

10.   You need to hire 5 great sales agents. What questions would you ask at the interview?

11.   You need to assess if a candidate has good attention to details skills. How do you do that?

I will come back with more...

Human Resources Mysteries: What Does a Recruitment and Selection Specialist Do?

As a recruitment and selection specialist you will be performing the following activities:

·           monitor open positions;

·          get involved in designing the recruitment plan for the following period together with the managers of each department in the company or the clients sometimes, plan which will include the number and type of positions to recruit;

·           help managers prepare job descriptions for the positions they have in their departments;

·           use the job descriptions to create and post ads on various recruitment channels;

·       select appropriate recruitment channel depending on positions open (skills needed, number of positions);

·           read the resumes received and compare to job requirements;

·           select candidates to be invited to interview;

·           invite and conduct a first interview with selected candidates;

·           prepare together with specialists and managers and set of practical tests to be given to candidates;

·           be part of the team assessing the candidates during these tests;

·           write down as much information as you can concerning candidate’s performance;

·           offer managers and initial list of best candidates for them to interview;

·         give feedback to selected and rejected candidates – type of feedback is chosen according to source of candidates – internal candidates will always receive face to face feedback, the external ones will receive phone or email feedback;

·         keep an updated database of all positions and feed-backs to use later during recruitment; this will help use previously rejected candidates on other positions or the same position after a while after skills have improved or most important of all, avoid embarrassing situations where the same candidate gets invited to a second interview, after being rejected after the first one the week before;

·         participate in public presentations at the University, conferences, student gatherings to introduce your company and recruit people;

·            participate in job fairs for students, fresh graduates or other skills workers;

·        get involved in the creation of promotional materials to be used for students and during official presentations, either alone or with the help of the marketing department;

·      manage relationships with recruiting partners like recruiting agencies, student organizations, University representatives, job portals contacts;

·         organize internal assessments either for an open position or for selecting candidates to be involved later on in development for a certain position – i.e. select internal candidates who have team leader potential, candidates who will be enrolled in leadership trainings;

·          prepare various recruiting reports;

·          prepare various recruiting estimations requested by managers – i.e. the total cost of recruitment for a team of 30 FTEs (FTE = full time employee), French speakers with Linux skills and the deadline for such a project;

·        prepare newsletters for candidates in database to keep them informed about new positions or changes in the organization that might interest them;

·             prepare recruitment policies and work instructions;

·             in some organizations contact the selected candidates for employment offers;

·           in some organizations conduct trainings of recruitment and selection with managers, internship students, other employees interested or required to participate (i.e. a technical agent who will be part of the final selection process for members of the IT team);