7 Habits of Highly Effective Recruiter - Part II
Last week, I discussed 3 of the 7 habits of highly effective recruiter. This week, I’ll share the rest of the habits.
Identify the selling points of each position you are working on
When you begin a search, ideally you should ask the question “why should anyone work for you and/or this job?” Among everything the hiring manager says, select points that are most compelling to you. If you are not sold, it will be difficult to come up with a sales pitch that moves passive seekers’ heart.
That leads me the sales aspect of being recruiter, especially if you are an agency recruiter: a smaller startup company opts to use a recruiter because they don’t have the marketing reach the way a larger corporation does. In other words, you are their spokesperson that drives attention to this growing organization. Rather than killing candidates’ enthusiasm about this company, your job is to gain as much information about this company and sell the hell out of it. In each of your email to potential candidates, it should be sincere and moving.
Experiment different organization tools If you have a goal of filling 5 positions each month, and have a continuous 10-15 open reqs to fill, you will need great organization tools. I use the following tools daily: ~ Google Alerts: I have daily alerts sending to my inbox informing me what’s happening in different companies - restructuring, layoffs, new C-suites folks. ~ Evernote: I have different notebooks for different major functions - candidates, search notebook, marketing lessons, daily tasks with candidates pipeline for each role. ~ Todoist: Not only can you jot down to do list on Todoist, you can also flag emails as a to-do list item and save a website as an item. One of the things I like to do a lot is - if I’m data mining on LinkedIn, and the search result of 40 pages comes back, I will plough through 5-10 pages at a time. I will then save the link in Todoist. When I open it again the following day, it goes back to the page I left off and I can continue on page 6 or 11. ~ Timer: again, the only way I can fill 5 positions while working on 10-15 open reqs is if I am disciplined with how much time I spend hunting. Everyone can drown themselves in a search…so pull yourself out with a timer before you drown. ~ Indeed: I have Indeed resumes sent to me daily. They are your semi low hanging fruits.
Figure out your rhythms There are things you do that helps you feel most productive. I always recommend people to do the following in chronological order: a.) Do what you know to be the most urgent first - interview change, interview cancelation, or whatever you know to be time sensitive b. )Do what you hate most first. Every day. The more mental and emotional room you free yourself, the more you can be effective in other areas c.) harvest first and sow the seeds: confirm interview emails from the day before; respond to all Inmails; plough through applications; plough through Indeed resume emails; hunt d.) Consider variables such as onsite interview scheduling. If you know some of the C-level folks’ schedules become booked rather quickly, you should prioritize interview coordination first. This activity can yield to you filling a req. Now, everyone has their own rhythm. Just because the schedule above work great for me may not work well for you. So my last point...
Test, implement, learn. Then repeat. Be open to testing out what works best for you, reflect on your productivity at the end of the day (do you have personal productivity measurements?), learn from why you are productive or not productive that day, and tweak it for the following day.
Hopefully you’ve find my 7 habits useful. Again, if you have a bag of tricks that are very different from mine, please either comment below or send them to me at helen@hirerightconsulting.com.
