The Top 3 Things You Should Have A Recruiter Help With (and What You Can Do Yourself)

We have talked a lot about hiring and finding good prospects lately and the topic has resonated with quite a few of you. We are all looking for ways to tap into the talent pool and find good, quality prospects.

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Today, I wanted to go into a little more depth about what it’s like to work with a talent recruiter and how you can best leverage their skills along the way. As a business coach for the past twenty five years, I have helped thousands of business owners with this process and do it for myself in my own coaching business.

You Can Do It Piecemeal

When you think of hiring a recruiter, many business owners think that a recruiter will handle everything from start to finish and hand you over the perfect candidate within a set period of time. And for some, that is the reality. But for a lot of business owners, myself included, it is a cooperative effort between the recruiter and your own team.

You can have the recruiter:

• Help you gather together a candidate pool
• Screen candidates that you already have in your pipeline
• Schedule interviews
• Etc.

The key is to find what works for you, your budget and your skill set.

Recruiter Strengths and Weaknesses

When planning out your hiring campaign, it’s important to look at the strengths and weaknesses that recruiters bring to the table. They generally possess three things that most business owners lack in varying degrees – time, tools and expertise.

Time: Hiring campaigns are time sensitive and you want to respond to candidates in a timely manner to prevent them from taking other job opportunities along the way. As a business owner, you may not have ten to twenty hours a week to dedicate to a hiring campaign. But a good recruiter does. The one tip I will share here is that even if you hand over pieces to a recruiter, you will need to make the process a top priority and communicate with your recruiter in a timely manner.  The faster you are to respond to their questions, the faster they can get back with your prospective job candidates.

Tools: A recruiter will have access to the highest level of LinkedIn, have access to software for candidate screening and filtering and have access to sources that you most likely do not. They have the technology and tools to help weed through a large candidate pool to find the ones worth interviewing. The process will go much smoother with a recruiter than having someone on your team weed through thousands of emails in their inbox daily.

Expertise: “David, I just let my HR manager do the hiring.” Most HR professionals do not have the expertise to recruit candidates, and they usually don’t enjoy the process. It’s a completely different skill set and job and you are limiting your chances of finding a good quality hire by leaving this task in the hands of someone who isn’t trained to do this properly. Now, they can certainly be used during the interview process, but for the initial recruitment phase a recruiter is likely a better fit.

How do you best leverage a recruiter for your own hiring? Have you given it a try yet?