With many businesses returning to the office and resuming back to ‘normal’ operations, it seems like everyone is hiring. Demand for recruiters has never been higher, whether on the agency or internal side, many recruitment agencies are recruiting recruiters (say that sentence three times quickly!).

Connecting and finding recruiters can help propel your business growth and development. But the question is: how do you find the right recruiter?

Rectxt was founded by actual recruiters (Brad and Brian), and we’ve spent the majority of our recruitment careers in leadership roles. As a result, we’ve learned a lot from our experience building and developing recruitment teams so we wanted to share our top 10 tips for recruiting recruiters.

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Here are our 10 tips for recruiting recruiters:

1. Hire on potential (not experience)

Only hiring recruiters with ‘out of the box’ domain expertise is tricky and will take you a long time. Instead, we recommend hiring a recruiter who has strong recruitment fundamentals and that you teach them the industry or business that you recruit in.

2. Hire recruiters who recruit themselves into your job

In our experience those recruiters who reach out actively to inquire about an open position (vs passively applying to a job posting) practice what they preach and stick out from the rest.

3. Don’t give your recruiters an antiquated ATS and expect success

Instead, give them a great tech stack (beyond the ATS). List your recruitment technology stack on the job posting, so recruiters will know what to expect with the interface and capabilities.

4. Look for an agency background

Good recruiters with agency backgrounds come with a sense of urgency drilled into them. They understand that hiring is a timely matter and will commit to delivering within that time frame.

5. Pay for quality

You pay for what you get. If you pay a below-market wage, you’ll get below-market quality.

6. Offer a simple and motivating compensation structure

Especially for our agency friends or internal teams with commission/bonus components: Your compensation structure should be simple and transparent – if you need a spreadsheet to figure it out, you’re doing it wrong (and don’t move the goalposts every year!).

7. Don’t hire HR “generalists” to be recruiters

Recruitment today requires a specialist skillset and a narrow focus to be successful.

As HR is such a broad landscape and HR ‘generalists’ do a bit of everything, they typically don’t make the best recruiters. Of course, there are always exceptions but for the most part, you’ll want to hire a specialist to fill the recruiter seat.

8. Use sourcing assignments

Similarly to developers taking a coding challenge during the interview process, give your shortlisted recruiter candidates a real job requirement and allow them 24 – 48 hours to present their candidate list and walk through how they tackled the search.

During this presentation, you can assess how they take your feedback. We like to deliberately leave out important information, which gives them the opportunity to ask any questions about the role to mine for information that they need to be successful.

9. Involve your entire recruitment team in the hiring process

Arrange a short ‘meet and greet’ with your hiring team and afterwards get their individual feedback about how they feel the person would fit into the hiring team. After all, the people who know your team best are your team.

And last but not least…

10. Always trust your gut

Finally, if you feel something is ‘off’ or ‘fishy’ about the candidate, even if they have all the credentials and experience you’re looking for, then always trust your gut and move on with your search.

Remember: There is no “one size fits all” recruiter but remember that each recruiter you hire is capable of helping to grow your company. We hope that you found these 10 tips useful!

We like to host guest blogs from our expert integration partners so you’ll find that this blog was originally published by Rectxt here.