How to hire a great recruiter

Last week, I was doing a presentation for a prospective customer and the question came up: how can we hire a great recruiter? I’ve been thinking about this topic for nearly 15 years. I’ve been a recruiter. I’ve hired and trained dozens of recruiters (agency and corporate). Today, my company builds applicant tracking software for corporate recruiters. Recruiting is a hugely popular profession and everyone has their own ideas on what makes a great recruiter (most of which I tend to agree with). Over the years, I’ve developed my own formula for what makes a great recruiter, and since the economy has shown clear signs of improvement, our customers are hiring recruiters again. So, I’ve decided to share my insights on what makes a great recruiter.

My formula was cemented 10 years ago, when I was running a high-end, technical recruiting agency in Silicon Valley. I wanted to hire people based on their potential vs. their actual experience. I knew I could teach a talented, motivated person to be a recruiter. And, I was tired of guessing if people were going to be successful. So, I tapped an industrial psychologist to develop a selection methodology for choosing recruiters with the greatest likelihood to succeed. First, we had to figure what qualities to look for. This proved to be one of the most enlightening processes of my entire career. The psychologist’s team conducted a series of tests to distill the traits that made our top performers tick. We learned that in our environment (fast-paced, high volume and technical) self-confidence, flexibility, and the ability to stay focused were the top three traits that all of our best recruiters had in common.

Self-Confidence

Flexibility

Focus

Working with the psychologist proved invaluable.  Together, we developed an agenda for our interview teams to follow and each person on the team knew their role. We created interview score cards and mapped behavioral interview questions to each of the traits making our roundtable sessions efficient and decisive.  In a matter of weeks, we improved our interviewing techniques and consequently started hiring people that stayed longer and produced more.

The system and the science worked. I still firmly believe that self-confidence, flexibility, and focus are the top measurable qualities that best predict the potential success of a professional recruiter. But, there’s something that’s always nagged at me, something that makes a great recruiter that I’m not sure you can learn from an interview or even a test. I’ve been trying to put “this” into words for a couple of years and last week during the meeting it came to me.

The best recruiters that I’ve worked with can empathize with the behavior, intentions, attitudes, and feelings of their contacts.  They have the ability to identify, assess, manage and control their own emotions and to use this information to guide their actions. Top performers develop a finely tuned heuristic engine that’s constantly processing information to find an optimal solution. And finally, they have the ability to empathize, control their emotions and solve problems while being bombarded with massive amounts of information.

Hiring a great recruiter is as important as ever. As the economy continues to gain strength, talent will increasingly become harder to attract and hire.  Hiring a recruiter for their network or because they have been a recruiter for decades should take a backseat to looking for the person with the right traits. A great recruiter will have the self-confidence to become productive almost immediately, the flexibility to be successful in a dynamic environment, and the ability to focus on getting the job done at all costs. And while it may be hard to determine whether or not a recruiter has an evolved heuristics engine that ultimately may improve their performance, it is well within reason to assume that you can determine whether they are empathetic and possess a fair amount of self control. Remember, great people attract great people. You have every reason to take the time to hire a great recruiter.

Interviewing the Newton Software Way

To say we think a lot about recruiting and hiring is an understatement. Before starting a company that builds recruiting software, we ran recruiting companies, consultancies and corporate recruiting departments for the last decade. In addition to helping countless other organizations hire, we’ve had to build a lot of our own teams along the way.

Ten years ago, when we were starting our first company, we were wisely advised to develop a selection process. We’ve always operated in very competitive markets and we needed a framework to evaluate our own applicants quickly and thoroughly. Over the years, with the help of an industrial psychologist, we’ve honed our interview and selection process. We’re still using the same process today at Newton. It works.

Interestingly, we’ve noticed that most, if not all of Newton’s customers, are in tough markets when it comes to hiring good people. Good information workers -techies, sales people, marketing folks, product people, etc., are hard to find. And, with the economy slowly starting to recover, the margin for error when recruiting A-players will continue to get smaller.

What can you do to make hiring run more smoothly? Well, aside from signing up to use our applicant tracking software, start interviewing smarter. Since finding the right people is becoming increasingly difficult, a modern workforce strategy should look not only to increase its hiring throughput, but also look to increase retention and develop lower-skilled employees into higher-skilled and more valuable ones. A well-run interview process won’t just reduce the risk of a bad hire it can also reduce the complexity and number of hires needed in the future.

When we interview we are trying to create a hypothetical environment to mimic a real-world situation.  This simulation will hopefully enable us to reduce the risk of making a bad hire by giving us a fair estimation of the candidate’s performance in our real-world environment.  What measurements will give us the best prediction of performance? The three critical measurements are:

Ability: “Can the person do the job they are interviewing for today?”
Talent: “How well does this person fit our long-term objectives?”
Character: “Do we want to work with this person?”

Ability First

Only after the interview process has determined the ability level of a candidate is adequate should we focus on the more costly measurements of talent and character.  If the person can’t do the job there is no reason to confirm whether they can grow with the job or if they fit the corporate culture. The interview is over. Perhaps this sounds strong.  But for both candidate and company alike, spending time in interviews that test for cultural fit and growth potential before we know if they can do what is required of them day-one is a waste of everyone’s time.  Thus, the first step in the interview process should be to gauge ability level; it is the easiest and cheapest to identify and a “must-have” requirement.

Talent Next

“How well does this person fit our long-term objectives?” This is an appropriate way to correlate talent’s importance to interviewing and hiring.  Every company has immediate needs, and those immediate needs, like tax preparation or Java coding, are what we look for in ability – skill set.  Talent optimizes these abilities and it should also map to long-term corporate objectives, like managing teams or launching an office. Talent is most accurately measured with behavioral and problem-solving questions.

Always Character, but last

Someone can be very skilled, but if they are difficult to manage then the value of their skill is reduced.  Character also maps to broader human capital objectives in that it closely aligns with employee retention.  If you hire disagreeable people your turnover is likely to be higher than average.

Character can be measured by behavioral interviewing questions and psychological testing.  It is often not just the response that’s important, but the way the response is given.  An answer that says “yes” but has associated body language that is contrary to the answer is a character “red flag”.

You can use the best candidate acquisition tools, systems, and process available, but recruiting will always fail if your interview process is broken or worse, non-existent. There’s a balance to strike with interviewing between thorough assessment and efficiency. Finding that balance is difficult. It requires a plan, a little training, feedback, and of course, some good advice.