Recruiting is one of those professions that can be extremely rewarding. If you’re good at recruiting, you know how much opportunity there is to be rewarded. You have the opportunity to meet interesting people and build lasting relationships. You have the opportunity to make an excellent salary. You have the opportunity to work in an exciting career field and you have the opportunity to challenge yourself every single day. Most importantly, you have the opportunity to positively impact people’s lives on a daily basis.
You’ll notice that I say recruiters have the opportunity for all of these great things. That’s because recruiting can also be extremely frustrating. Like most professions, rewards aren’t guaranteed in the recruiting profession. Recruiters find those opportunities for rewards if they are successfully putting people to work. For a recruiter to successfully make a hire they are at the mercy of outside factors, regardless of how well they have done their job. They are at the mercy of the market, the funding for their position, the candidate coming through on their end, and the hiring manager not changing his or her mind at the last second. It can be very frustrating for a recruiter when a hire doesn’t go through due to one of those outside factors that they can’t control.
Recruiting isn’t easy, and a lot of people don’t get to experience the rewards of this profession because they burn themselves out too early. To find success in recruiting, you have to focus on the things you CAN control. It’s important to accept that things will not always go your way, and to not beat yourself up when that happens. It’s a tough and arduous road, but there is a way to stack the deck in your favor. There is a method you can follow that will ensure you win more times than you lose.
I call this the W.I.N. method for recruiting: Work Ethic, Interpersonal Skills, and Networking.
Work Ethic:
Work ethic is the first key component for a successful recruiting career. Early in my career, one of my first mentors was talking to me about the financial rewards of the recruiting industry, and he said “if this job was easy every doctor and lawyer would be a recruiter”. Of course he was trying to convince me that my 60-70 hour work week and $33K salary would eventually pay off- but his message stuck with me. Recruiting is a career that takes time to master. All of the opportunities to be rewarded aren’t immediately available. It takes hard work and a lot of late nights and heartaches to reach a point where the opportunities begin to present themselves. You have to be willing to put in the time and effort. There will be long hours, stressful days, and a few let downs along the road. The learning curve can be a bit brutal and at times downright unfair. Great recruiters are able to weather the storm and push through those hard times by lowering their heads and working through it. Instead of complaining about things not going their way, they keep pushing forward to earn their success.
Interpersonal Skills:
Recruiting is a relationship business. At the end of the day, a recruiter’s product is the people. If you can’t be friendly, engaging and genuine with people you won’t be able to go very far as a recruiter. There are a lot of recruiters out there that a job seeker can work with, and they want one they can trust and connect with. Interpersonal Skills are the second key component for a successful recruiting career. Great recruiters are able to carry on natural conversations, and they focus those conversations around the job seeker and not around their current opening. There is an element of trust that is required to be successful. Job seekers have to be able to trust the recruiter with the future of their careers. If a recruiter isn’t able to gain the trust of their candidate, they will not be able to show them the value of working with them and joining their company. Too often we receive the feedback from job seekers that the recruiter they dealt with was only interested in cramming them into the opening they had, and didn’t take the time to listen to what the job seeker was actually interested in. You’ll never be able to build up your referral pipeline if you can’t connect with people and build trustworthy relationships.
Networking:
This brings us to the third key component for a successful recruiting career- networking. Networking is a combination of both work ethic and interpersonal skills. You have to utilize your work ethic and interpersonal skills to ensure you are working on a daily basis to grow your professional network. If you follow any of the recent recruiting studies, you know that referrals deliver the highest quality of applicants. The only way to get these referrals is to build strong relationships and work constantly to receive referrals. Simply finding resumes isn’t recruiting, that’s sourcing. Recruiting is sourcing the talent, building the relationships, and closing the deal. The easiest and most reliable way to accomplish that is to not only go out and find candidates, but also have candidates come to you through your network. Ask the most successful recruiter you know about their network, and about how much work he or she puts into cultivating that network. Great recruiters understand the importance of a healthy network, and by growing their network they contribute to their own continued success.
Those are the three components of recruiting that you should focus on. Don’t waste your time worrying about things that may go wrong. Be tenacious with your approach to work, be professional and polite to people you interact with, and constantly work to grow your professional network. By focusing on those three key components, you will ensure your own career growth and success. You’ll still have let downs and things won’t always go your way, but the W.I.N. method will provide you with a quick solution to overcome those let downs.
Please send any questions or comments to askrecruitermann@gmail.com. Be sure to also follow me on Twitter @RecruiterMann23
