5 Easy Ways You Can Turn a Corporate Recruiter Into Success

More and more, the success of a business comes down to good hiring. Knowing how to hire well is now a big deal for recruiters. Corporate recruiters need more than the ability to identify the right talent. They need to be able to communicate, implement technology, and perceive the needs of a company.

The good thing about this is that a lot of simple changes to how a recruiter does their job can improve the way the company performs. Corporate recruiters need to understand the company, use technology, and network to build talent pools. They also need to measure the right things to be valued by the company.

Why It is Important to be a Successful Corporate Recruiter

Recruitment is usually the first point of contact a potential employee has with a business. It is the first impression the business communicates through every interaction. An unprofessional recruitment process will lead to the business being unprofessional in the eyes of applicants, especially candidates with high potential. On the other hand, an organized recruitment process will communicate a high potential business to applicants.

Successful corporate recruiters target the right candidates for the business. This means looking for candidates whose experience and work style the business aligns with and candidates that have the same ambitions as the business.

The quality of a business' workforce is directly dependent on the quality of the relationships the business has with its candidates and the quality of the decisions the business makes on candidates.

1. Learn the Company Before You Start Looking for Employees

The first and most important step to successful recruiting is to understand the company.

A recruiter that only knows the job description will have a far more limited point of view than a recruiter that knows the company’s goals, culture, customers, position in the marketplace, and even what competitors the company will be dealing with in the future.

Learn What the Hiring Manager Really Wants

A job description may state that the company is looking for a product manager with five years of experience. But what does the person that is doing the hiring really want?

Maybe they will be managing different departments, researching customer feedback for the purpose of understanding what drives the customers, and dealing with executives.

• What are the most critical skills a candidate must have?
• What would success look like in six months to a year?
• What attributes are most important to the team balance?
• What is in it for top talent to come work for you?

Once you can answer these questions you will have a better candidate profile to work from.

Become a Business Partner

Once recruiters understand that hiring can impact revenue and customer satisfaction, hiring managers will start to recognize recruiters as strategic partners instead of people that just manage company resources.

This change in perspective can be very valuable to a company.

2. Make Connections Before You Need Them

One of the biggest recruitment blunders is waiting for a job opening before starting the search.

A majority of talented people are not simply waiting to get hired. They are already employed and working. They may even be satisfied with the job that they have. As a result, great recruiters build relationships for open jobs that don't even exist yet.

A Living Talent Network

Some good talent networks have:

• People that have worked for you before
• Passive people
• People that are in your field
• People that have applied before
• Virtual networks and forums
• People you know from alumni associations
• Exclusively talented people
• People that have attended your industry events

A good network has quality connections over quantity. So you shouldn't have huge networks with no connections.

Talk to People For No Reason

To help build a great talent network, make your relationship-building moves without making your networks feel transactional.

Use your downtime to share interesting information, congratulate people, stay in touch with candidates, and offer feedback.

These small favors help you build goodwill so when a job does open up, you are ready to build a network.

3. Treat Candidates Well

While evaluating candidates, recruitment is also an evaluation process for the company.

How your company treats candidates can be evaluated based on the steps in the recruitment process. Slow, unclear, repeated steps of recruitment can be an evaluation negative for your company.

If candidates have a positive recruitment experience, the company's credibility is improved.

Be Open and Available

Candidates appreciate when they have clear communication.

Explain the role and responsibilities and describe the interview process, including the expected timelines and next steps. Delays should be communicated proactively to avoid leaving candidates in uncertainty.

Communication is still important, even when the answer is no.

Today's rejected candidate may be tomorrow's customer, valuable candidate, or source of referrals and professional connections.

Personalize Candidate Interactions

When messages are not personalized, they usually feel like automated notifications.

Do not simply say, "Your profile matches our requirement." Explain how and why you believe that members's profile is relevant.

When messages are personalized, candidates believe that recruiters have spent time reviewing their profiles.

That small difference can substantially improve engagement.

Respect Every Candidate

Recruitment has a long memory.

An efficient and timely candidate experience process strengthens your business. A careless process destroys your business. Candidate engagement should be the primary focus of an internal business process.

Use Recruitment Technology Intelligently

Recruitment generates a large volume of data and information which is difficult to manage, such as resumes, applications, interview notes, communication, sourcing data, hiring metrics, and many more.

Technology is meant to simplify and help manage data. Technology should help manage data, but should not replace the judgment of recruiters.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Recruitment technology has the capability to help automate:

• Integration of resumes
• Candidate tracking
• Interview scheduling
• Recruitment communication
• Managing recruitment databases
• Screening applicants
• Creating reports and reminders

Automation of these tasks allows recruiters to focus on candidate engagements and business process stakeholders, rather than focusing on administration.

Make Decisions Based on Data

Recruitment metrics tell you how successful your hiring system is and what areas add friction.

Examples of efficient metrics include:

• Time to hire
• Time to fill
• Candidate conversion rates
• Interview-to-offer ratio
• Offer acceptance rate
• Source effectiveness
• Candidate retention
• Hiring manager satisfaction

Be careful about getting too obsessed with numbers.

Speed of hiring fills your hiring system but does not help fill hiring needs with candidates that fit. Numbers should be balanced. Quality and retention impact your business system as much as hiring speed.

The ideal system aims to balance speed and quality.

Strengthen Your Communication and Persuasion Skills

Recruitment is a people-centric business.

Corporate recruitment is a people-centric business. The degree to which you can communicate is one of the most important skills you will have in your business.

You will have to communicate to the candidates, hiring manager, the CEO, the HR team, business partners, team leads, and outside stakeholders.

Create the Offer

As a recruiter, you need to know how to offer a position in such a way that the recipient knows the value the offer has.

Do not exaggerate the opportunity. Offer the value proposition.

Consider the environment in which the opportunity the offer is has:

• Career growth
• Culture of the business
• The kind of leadership they will be exposed to
• What kind of projects that will be offered
• What they stand to gain in the way of learning
• Benefits
• The kind of scope there is in the way of improvement
• The kind of freedom the position will offer.

A high performing candidate will be far more likely to receive high performing offers than low performing candidates. Because of this, the recruiter that offers the least low performing offers has the best chance of continuing the interest of that candidate.

Recruiters that offer the best low performing offers are the best at listening.

Many candidates may worry about how things like pay, job duties, and location will affect things like their career progression and job security. There are also management concerns such as budgeting and the capability of the candidates when considering things such as cultural fit and the level of urgency to fill the position.

The best way to find out the level of importance for those concerns is to listen.

A recruiter with the ability to understand these concerns will make it possible to have great conversations and better manage the expectations of both parties.

Long-lasting Success from Utilizing Recruitment Skills

The strategies you have learned are at their most effective when used often.

An effective recruiter has the ability to foresee the needs of a workforce instead of simply responding to job openings.

They have the ability to create professional networks instead of simply searching them.

They have the ability to explain an individual's skills instead of simply submitting their resume.

They have the ability to manage their networks instead of simply creating interview opportunities.

They define their success by placing the right people in roles where they will provide great benefit to the organization instead of placing a large number of people in roles.

Embrace the Importance of Continuous Learning

Corporate recruitment is a fast-evolving field.

An effective recruiter has the ability to foresee the needs of a workforce. Instead of job openings, they are always learning about recruitment. They are studying new advancements in technology and the recruitment field, new methods and theories of interviews, new ways to brand their employers and new healthy recruitment analytics. Knowledge in all these areas will provide a recruiter with a strong professional advantage.

Understanding candidates and businesses will provide a recruiter with the ability to positively alter hiring outcomes.

Five Interrelated Principles for Achieving Success as a Corporate Recruiter

The five interrelated principles described herein all lead to one clear end goal - success.

Most of these principles do not even require a large financial investment to implement.

In fact, all it takes is the right level of commitment.

The right mindset of a business informed recruiter is to recruit top quality as opposed to a mediocre business personality who requires extensive training to fill the role. Likewise, an experienced recruiter can utilize a technology to create a frictionless hiring process and sharpen their communication skills to create synergy between the candidate and the hiring manager, and at the same time, create an overwhelmingly positive user experience for candidates.

As a corporate recruiter, when all of these tools and resources are mastered, you will have developed an extremely effective and efficient recruitment framework.

Final Thoughts

As a corporate recruiter, success is not defined by the lowest number of applications pushed through to fill every open role. Success is defined by the seamless integration of business needs, candidate needs, technology, and the human element.

Start with the basics and get it right.

Learn your business, build your relationships before the vacancy creates a hiring crisis, make each interaction with a candidate count, and implement a frictionless hiring process using technology and professional business communication with empathy and clarity.

Even with the changing dynamics of recruitment, one business winning principle remains fresh and current: connecting the right people with the right opportunities gives a business a winning edge over its competition.

If your organization is looking for professional recruitment and placement support, Om Sai Group Consultancy has the structured solutions to meet your talent acquisition and recruitment needs.

Reach us at: +91 729 102 4327