The Mark of a Great Recruiter: Focus on Long-Term Relationship Building

Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great, notes that “good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the reasons why we have so little that have become great.”

Good recruiters are a dime a dozen. You can settle for a good recruiting partner as you build your team for future success – or you can insist on a great one. Building a long-term relationship with a great recruiter is one of the best business moves you can make.

Qualities of a Great Recruiter

A great recruiter not only knows your company and its culture, they absorb and understand it to the point where it becomes their own.

You can spot a great recruiter by these traits:

• They address staffing needs even before those needs arise. They have an established candidate pool with the qualifications you need and they can access it on a moment’s notice. This includes passive candidates who may not otherwise be on your radar.
• They have their finger on the pulse of your business. Their professional network, coupled with their candidate pool, constitutes a powerful list of connections to meet both your short-and long-term needs.
• They care about the full employment life cycle. The best recruiters look beyond simply filling positions and develop relationships that start with candidate sourcing and carry through to long-term retention and business value.
• They embrace their role as ambassadors for your company. They appreciate that every interaction an external person has with your organization is a marketing impression – and they use every impression to make a positive impact.
• They share their secrets. Your recruitment partner takes the time to share best practices, thus making your entire team stronger. They smash the paradigm of recruiting as a “secret society” where practitioners don’t exchange information for fear of losing their competitive advantage. They’re beyond this. They are strong, comfortable and confident in their abilities and in the synergy they can build with you.

A Focus on Results

Great recruiters work in tandem with you to amplify the trajectory of your company’s growth.

• They build pipelines. Great recruiters have valuable leads at their fingertips. They construct a network of candidate referrals that is often invisible or intangible to the conglomeration of “good” recruiters out there.
• They have superb marketing and influencing skills. They are adept at sparking candidates’ interest in jobs and accurately identifying their needs so you can make the best hire, the first time around. They pre-sell top talent on your organization and take steps to ensure a solid match before they even present a candidate to you. They use their networks as marketing channels, targeting them for specific hiring needs.
• They brand every job as unique. Based on their deep knowledge of your needs and their candidates’ capabilities, your recruitment partner effectively guides both candidate and hiring manager toward a mutually desirable end.
• They are communication artists. Great recruiters handle three widely varying communication requirements – sourcing new talent, rejecting existing candidates and internal process alignment – with empathy and positivity. Each of these areas is an art in its own right. The best recruiters manage all of them such that every interaction leads to positive momentum.
• They are data driven. Your recruitment partner works with a discipline and frequency comparable to the best software teams. They fully grasp your challenges including sourcing, measuring performance and using sprint processes to optimize results.

The Basis of Relationship Building

You achieve optimum success when your recruiter is an incredible listener and has authentic compassion for you and your people. This is how relationships are forged. Developing networks, cultivating relationships and understanding how they are nurtured is the basis of their disruptive skills. They’re willing share their passion and in return, they earn your loyalty and commitment.

Contact the recruitment experts at BrainWorks for additional resources to drive your successful talent acquisition and management strategies. We look forward to hearing from you!