14 Recruiting Skills You Need to Succeed
Recruiting has always remained a function within Human Resources, so why are recruiting skills more important now than ever? According to Gartner research, recruiting is one of the top 5 priorities for HR leaders in the upcoming year.
Let’s have a look at the top recruiting skills anyone in recruitment should be looking to enhance.
Contents
Top recruiting skills to enhance
1. Active listening
2. Clear communication
3. Technology aptitude
4. Networking and relationship building
5. Cultural awareness
6. Data literacy
7. Marketing skills
8. Sales skills
9. Negotiation skills
10. Time management
11. Organizational skills
12. Collaboration
13. Resilience
14. Self-motivation
Top recruiting skills to enhance
Recruiters have a vast array of tasks to focus on. They need to search, attract, and screen candidates for open positions. They are responsible for the entire recruiting process within the organization. Duties include advertising job openings, reviewing resumes, performing background checks, interviewing candidates, and collaborating with hiring managers to select the right person for the role.
Great recruiters have a mix of soft and hard skills that help them match the best candidates to fulfilling jobs.
Some of the skills that recruiters should continue to focus on and grow include:
1. Active listening
Listening is the most important skill you can develop as a recruiter.
When you listen closely to your hiring manager, you’ll better understand the role’s requirements and how it fits into the whole organization. You’ll also improve your ability to gauge candidates so you can address them adequately: Their knowledge and experience, their needs, wishes, and doubts.
Good listening skills can improve your relationships with hiring managers and candidates, resulting in more placements.
To develop your active listening skills, have an open mind. Be open to new ideas and feedback. Pay attention to what the applicants and hiring managers are saying. Observe body language. Paraphrase and summarize to make sure you understand what they said correctly. Ask questions for clarification.
2. Clear communication
According to Lever, a high percentage (80%) of job seekers say they would be discouraged from considering other relevant job openings at a company that failed to notify them of their application status. To deliver a good candidate experience, inform candidates about the status of their applications. Use email, SMS, and phone call to ensure that they get timely updates when you receive their applications, schedule job interviews, update them on the selection process and finally send the job offer or reject the application.
Additionally, establish regular communication with your hiring managers to help clarify what is needed when finding the right person for the role. Be prepared with market research about the position, the industry, and the lineup of potential candidates. Establish the must-haves and optional job qualifications. Together, commit to a timeline for reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews.
Use tools like ATS and recruitment CRM to keep track of your communications with candidates and hiring managers.
3. Technology aptitude
As technology becomes a key tool of recruitment, it’s essential for recruiters to know how to use different recruitment tools.
On a daily basis, recruiters access ATS, which manages the whole recruitment process, including job postings and job applications. They must know the latest social media platforms to source and engage applicants. It’s therefore important to comprehensively understand the ins and outs of recruitment CRM tools to better utilize the tech.
Recruiters should also keep up to date with new technologies that both their potential candidates might use, as well as that used within the recruiting function. This means embracing a continuous upskilling mindset when it comes to tech.
4. Networking and relationship building
Networking is an essential part of recruiting. And it’s more than just tracking candidates for meetups and interviews.
Building relationships with hiring managers you’re working with is just as necessary. And if you’re an independent recruiter or work at a recruiting agency, you also need to build connections with (potential) clients. Working closely with them can guide you in learning current staffing needs and future employment requirements to develop a talent pipeline proactively and ensure a steady stream of business opportunities.
And you can nurture those relationships by being a professional, reliable, knowledgeable, and friendly job expert. Research your industry and the day-to-day aspects of the role you’re recruiting for to gain the trust of your target candidate.
5. Cultural awareness
Targeting diverse candidates in your hiring process starts by developing cultural awareness. Having a diverse workforce enhances an organization’s creativity and innovation, which leads to increased profit.
Learn to appreciate other people’s values and beliefs and the differences between people of various backgrounds. Get to know the challenges that people of color, women, people of different religious traditions, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, immigrants, and those who served in the military experience in the workplace.
Join community events organized by groups from different cultural backgrounds than your own. Familiarize yourself with different traditions and customs. Learn the basic principles of diversity hiring and be aware of your own unconscious biases so you can adapt your communication styles accordingly.
6. Data literacy
One key element of being a great recruiter is being able to measure your success. And you can only do that if you have the data to understand and analyze where and when you’re spending most of your recruiting efforts.
Now more than ever, data-driven recruiting is crucial because it helps:
- Streamline your hiring process so you can find and eliminate the bottlenecks in your hiring process
- Cut down on your recruitment expenses by knowing the recruitment platforms where you get the most qualified candidates
- Remove biases, so you hire based on competencies and skills
- Improve on the quality of hire by gathering employee data like top performers, turnover rate, and productivity levels. Compare this data with different hiring sources (job boards, staffing agencies, social media) to determine the best recruitment channel that delivers the highest quality of candidates.
- Obtain approvals from managers when you have the necessary figures and data to support your additional budget or resource request.
Boost your data literacy by learning data analytics, fundamentals of statistics, data collection, reporting, and basic technology navigation via software and tools.
7. Marketing skills
In today’s candidate-driven market, searching for high-quality candidates is difficult. The number of open roles is much higher than the number of job seekers. As such, recruiters must be proficient in using updated recruitment marketing strategies to capture top talent like:
- Developing candidate persona: Defining your candidate persona helps attract candidates with the right skills and culture fit for your company, which ultimately lessens your employee turnover rate.
- Employer branding: Directly impacts recruitment and the overall reputation of the organization in the market. With the popularity of Glassdoor, Indeed, and other employer review sites, what the organization has to offer plays a huge influence on a candidate’s decision to apply. So if you create a good employee experience, word gets around, and you’ll increase applications over time, which saves your organization money and resources.
- Copywriting: Use the right words to convince people to want to work for your company. In your email, newsletter, and email messages, convey the message that your company is a good place to work and that you offer the best possible career growth opportunities.
- Social media marketing: According to Sprout Social, 59% of companies found high-quality candidates using candidate sourcing on social media. To stand out on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, you need to customize your message to expand your candidate outreach. Not only do you share your latest vacancies, but you also offer a glimpse of what it’s like to work for your organization by sharing company news and employee testimonials so you’ll be able to know which applicants are genuinely interested in becoming your employee.
8. Sales skills
According to sales and recruiter trainer Barbara Bruno, recruiting is sales because you sell your candidates on your company and opportunity. You sell the candidate to your hiring manager to schedule an interview. And after the interview, you are selling the benefits of a potential offer to both employer and the candidate.
To develop your sales skills as a recruiter, focus on improving your cold calling and cold outreach techniques on Linkedin. Nail down your elevator pitch by knowing your employee value proposition. Familiarize yourself with different sales techniques like solution selling and consultative selling, and understand how you can apply them in your recruiting role.
9. Negotiation skills
Negotiating plays a vital role in all kinds of business transactions, even recruiting. Once you’ve made a job offer to a candidate, you are selling against a counteroffer or other job offers from other companies. Recruiters must negotiate a deal between a candidate and a company agreeable and satisfying to both parties.
And if you don’t have what the candidate desires, you have to find a way to offer an alternative and persuade the applicant to choose you over your competitors. Work with hiring managers to customize a competitive compensation package to increase your chances of getting selected by your shortlisted candidates.
10. Time management
On a typical day, recruiters juggle tasks like reviewing resumes, screening applications, scheduling interviews, performing background checks, and creating job offers. On top of that, they usually deal with multiple job requisitions from hiring managers.
To avoid missing hiring deadlines, recruiters must have time management skills. Recruiters can use software or create schedules to keep things on track. It is important to effectively organize the time to manage all tasks while communicating with stakeholders promptly.
11. Organizational skills
Recruiters need to establish priorities between job openings, which means determining which positions need to be filled fast because they’re critical to the company’s business goals.
Delayed response or overseeing tasks can lead to companies losing candidates. Organizational skills enable recruiters to keep track of the recruitment process and meet hiring targets.
Create a to-do list to understand what is urgent and not urgent clearly. Get a calendar and schedule daily tasks, meetings, interviews, and everything else to stay focused and productive every day.
12. Collaboration
Recruiters that work closely with hiring managers and team members make the best hiring decisions. With more people involved, you are more likely to get a complete picture of the applicants, the talent pipeline, the overall hiring process, and how it affects business goals and decisions.
With collaborative hiring, you increase your chances of hiring candidates who are a better fit for your company culture, create a more transparent hiring process, remove unconscious biases when recruiting, and cuts down on your time to fill. Moreover, you help to hire managers to gain a deeper understanding of the candidate market.
Use ATS, which allows everyone to view candidate information and where they are in the recruiting process. Create employee referral programs so everybody recruits, which reduces your time to hire while improving your quality of hire.
13. Resilience
Recruiting people is not an easy job. There are many challenges, like attracting the right talent, filling job openings quickly, and reducing the lengthy recruitment process.
When facing these challenges, recruiters need to be resilient and patient. They need to adapt to different situations and manage the expectations of both the candidates and the hiring managers.
And no matter how efficient the recruitment process is, they may still be unable to close the deal. For instance, a candidate may accept a job offer from another company. Or hiring managers cancel the hiring process because business goals have changed.
Develop resilience to overcome these obstacles and prepare for future recruitment challenges.
14. Self-motivation
Recruitment is a very competitive industry. In the current candidate-driven landscape, it’s essential to follow up with top talent. And since it’s a sales job, you have to be ambitious and hit your targets every month.
It’s normal to experience rejected job offers from candidates or declined business opportunities with employers and hiring managers. It can be demotivating; however, please remember that these situations are outside your control. What’s important is for you to learn the lessons. Be proactive in completing your tasks and achieving the goals you’ve set for yourself to achieve a successful career as a recruiter.
To conclude
Being a successful recruiter involves continuously learning and improving your skills, whether technical skills like working with new recruiting software or soft skills like active listening.
You must set your professional development goals and know what you want to improve.
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