How to Build Your Perfect Recruiting Team

Any great team is comprised of members who work well together. That being said, the members of a great team are also diverse in their viewpoints, skills and experience. From the SF Giants to the Fantastic 4, the most successful teams are made up of experts who are united by a common goal, and whose skills cover all the bases. For the fantastic 4, the goal is saving the world from Dr. Doom’s evil schemes. Your recruiting team will be focused on saving your company from the perils of extended vacancies and low-quality hires.

If you are among the 60% of employers who admit to being “very concerned” about the costs of unfilled positions, then you understand the importance of building a perfect recruiting team. The challenge is formidable: it takes an average of 52 days to fill a job in this country, but “top candidates” are almost always hired within their first 10 days of job seeking!

Of course, building the “perfect” recruiting team for your company has as much to do with understanding your needs as it does with selecting team members. The perfect recruiting team will be able to handle your company’s most complex hiring challenges, but they will also be able to do it within budget.

Balancing recruiting resources against hiring needs can be a tricky balance, and different options will work better for different companies.

Internal Recruiting Team

Building an internal recruiting team involves hiring several full-time recruiters to join the ranks of your company. These recruiters will have an intimate understanding of how it is to work at your company and their knowledge of your current employees will help them to make exceptional hires. Additionally, the fact that they are your dedicated recruiters will ensure that their attention is not split and that they have a great deal of experience hiring for your company and your most important jobs.

The big drawback of an internal recruiting team, however, is the fact that you don’t always need to hire. If your recruiting team does their job effectively, and turnover rates decrease, then you will still have the high fixed cost of employing this team full-time. No matter why your hiring needs decrease, an over-staffed recruiting team can be a large drain on resources when there are no hires to make.

External Recruiting Team

An external team can still be perfectly suited to your company’s hiring needs. They won’t know your company from the inside out like an internal team, but they will still have the experience and expertise to fill your most important jobs. Choosing the right recruitment solution is important, and here are two of the most commonly used options:

Contract/Contingency Recruiting

Contract recruiters are employed by agencies and they work with companies on a contract basis. These agreements can be for any number of positions, and you can contract as many of these recruiters as your budget will allow. Contract recruiters work for an hourly rate or fixed bid during contracted period, but may also charge on a per-candidate basis. Some of these recruiters will be used to working together, and all of them will utilize the resources of their agency in the candidate search.

While these recruiters are incentivized to make hires, quickly, this pressure to fill seats can result in lower candidate quality if the deadline is too tight or guidelines are unclear.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) companies act as an extension of the companies who contract their services. Like agency recruiters, the recruiters working for an RPO company will advertise your job and present candidates to hiring managers, but this is where the similarities end.

More than just filling jobs, RPO companies promote the brand of their clients as they contact candidates as well as providing other services essential HR functions. From tracking candidates and compliance to performing audits and training your hiring managers, RPO companies can provide the resources of an enterprise recruiting team without the price tag.

Successful RPO engagements end with a great hire, but highly successful RPO engagement results in a partnership between company and service provider. This way, when hiring needs arise again, the recruiter team in charge of making your hires already knows you and what you need. Want to learn more about RPO? Learn about what RPO is here.

Building Your Perfect Recruiting Team

The size and location of your recruiting team will vary based on your resources and your hiring needs, but any successful recruiting team will use these essential skills to solve your hiring problems:

Experience with Your Most Critical Roles

A member or members of your recruiting team need to have direct experience with your most critical jobs and/or hiring in your industry.

Some jobs are harder to hire for than others, and if your most crucial jobs are highly technical or require advanced degrees/experience, then you need a team who won’t have to start from square one. Every industry has its own conventions and you want recruiters who are acting the way candidates expect them to, not bumbling through the basics. Additionally, selling candidates on technical jobs will require your recruiters to understand what motivates talent in your industry.

Having direct experience with your most important roles can also mean that the recruiter has access to candidates who have applied for or are working the job you need filled. It also means that they have seen their fair share of people who looked like they were a good fit, but ended up failing in the end.

Someone on your recruiting team needs to understand your most crucial jobs, the role they play in your company and which unique demands will shape the profile of the person who is right for the job.

Marketing Skills

There needs to be someone on your recruiting team who thinks and works like a master marketer. From writing an enticing job description to boosting the strength of your employer brand, you want recruiters who understand advertising and appealing to their audience.

In today’s candidate driven market, selling candidates on your job opportunity has never been more important. It has also never been more important for your brand, your online presence and your employer brand to be appealing and up to date. Your recruiter may not be able to write you funnier Facebook posts, but they will be able to advise you on the tone and techniques that work best for communications in your industry.

Recruiting Skills

Any good recruiter team will have a wealth of general hiring knowledge and will have used this knowledge to great effect. If your job advertising efforts end up generating very little in the way of qualified applicants, you want recruiters who are used to pulling a good hire out of the air, not recruiters who panic or try to pass off a bad candidate as a good one.

When your go-to candidate sources fail, then you will need people who are experienced with sourcing candidates from professional networks, candidate databases, ATS, your referrals and pretty much anywhere else candidates can be found.

Team/Goal Orientation

When you’re building your recruiting team, you should be selecting people who cover the skill and experience requirements we just went over, but you should also pick people who are team/goal oriented. This attitude is crucial for teams working on time sensitive projects like hiring, and crucial for anyone who is trying to please as many parties as your average recruiter.

A recruiting team needs to work in perfect harmony if they’re going to fill a complex position or several complex positions. You want recruiters who are focused on maintaining this harmony, but also focused on the ultimate goal and delivering the results that you need in a hire. This attitude will help your team to connect with candidates and employees within your company, which is essential for successful recruiting.

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