Good Recruiter Training can be the difference between a successful or a mediocre recruiting team. While on the surface the practice of “recruiting” appears relatively easy (reach out to targeted candidates about a job opportunity), there are many nuances that make up the entire recruiting process and lifecycle.
And recruiting can mean different things to different people, so let’s start by defining the most common forms of recruiting we see in the marketplace:
- Agency Recruiting: a staffing or recruiting firm hires recruiters to fill “job orders” with their employer clients. These job orders are either for contract, contract-to-hire or direct hire employment.
- Corporate Recruiting: in-house, or corporate recruiting, is the function by which a company hires internal staff to work with hiring managers to fill open positions on their teams. Generally these recruiters are a bridge between hiring managers and HR.
There are of course other types of recruiting (freelance, “retained”,etc.) but since the vast majority of recruiting is divided up between these two primary approaches, for the purposes of this article we will focus our attention on these two specifically.
Good recruiter training will teach new recruiters not just what the job is, and how to do it, but WHY to do it a certain way. Ultimately, every recruiter has his/her own unique approach, but fundamentally, the playbook is often the same.
Recruiters who approach their job without formal training will not only develop bad habits along the way, but will, over time, reinforce those bad habits because they’ll trick themselves into thinking they are doing an adequate job. An example of that would be recruiters who don’t take the time to set expectations with candidates up front. No surprise then when at the end of the recruiting cycle, an offer is presented to the candidate and consequently rejected because the candidate thought the position would include managerial duties when it was always presented as an individual contributor position. The untrained recruiter will write this off as bad luck, when in actuality a significant amount of time could have been saved had appropriate expectations been set at the beginning.
In terms of tools, it is not enough to just talk about LinkedIn, email, calendar, and the disparate other recruiting tools that have become ubiquitous in the industry. Good recruiter training will demonstrate the power of each tool when used correctly, step by step, never taking for granted that what comes so easily to a seasoned, trained recruiter will often look like a foreign language to someone with no recruiting experience.
Most importantly, good training isn’t just “showing recruiters how to do the job”. It’s delivering the training curriculum in a classroom setting (either physical or virtual), offering break-out sessions, take-home assignments and most importantly, a manual or playbook they can refer back to over time.
As a recruiting firm owner or recruiting manager, proper training of your recruiters should always be top of mind, and is the single most important thing you can do for new hires to ensure your success.
Well-trained recruiters who succeed at their job don’t do it in a vacuum, and recruiters who fail often do so because of a lack of sufficient training.