What Are the Different Roles in Recruitment?

Recruiting takes skill, patience, and, most important of all, teamwork.

It’s common for start-ups, small-scale companies, and even mid-sized companies to handle recruitment without a dedicated team. Sometimes it’s not feasible to dedicate employees to full-time recruitment roles.

But if you can manage it, recruitment teams make the hiring process extraordinarily easier. From cutting down costs to sourcing the very best talent, recruitment teams deliver on the resource and labor investment.

The key to building a superb recruiting team is to balance the work among all members. You must understand what roles perform which essential functions so that you can build a recruiting team that fulfills them.

Not every role is necessary. Understand your own hiring needs, and staff your recruiting team accordingly. Here are the different recruiting roles and what they can bring to your company.

How to Structure a Recruitment Team

Recruiters have a critical task in helping with running a company: finding the people who will make up its core members.

The core staff of a company is the people who answer the phones, interact with clients, handle finances, and so much more. These team members represent the company to the public. It’s paramount that you staff your company with competent, intelligent, respectful employees at the top of their fields.

Hiring recruiters who know how to hire is the best way to achieve that goal. But you must first understand what you’re hiring them for and how they fit into the broader picture of the recruiting team.

Determine Your Timeline, Priorities, and Budget

Each round of hiring is going to be different. If you oversee a large-scale company that hires 100+ people per year, it’s in your best interest to hire a permanent recruiting team. Design each position carefully and allocate tasks accordingly.

If you run a smaller company, the need for a recruiting team may scale with your hiring needs as they shrink and grow.

Each round of hiring will have a budget that you can use to dictate the size of the team. The timeline to turn over a list of qualified candidates will dictate the workflow of each member.

Set a Team Size

Having more recruiters does not necessarily mean better recruitment. You could have a recruiting assistant working under a senior recruiter or a team of ten processing hundreds of applications a day.

It’s crucial you understand your needs for each round of hiring. It’s also essential you have an honest perspective on the capacity and capabilities of your company.

Don’t offload more responsibility onto a recruiting team than they can reasonably handle, but don’t take the duties of recruiting on yourself for fear of overwhelming staff with work. Research has shown that burned-out employees perform worse, leave their jobs quicker, and have less commitment.

Structuring a reliable team requires a delicate balance of delegating responsibilities while preventing burnout.

Pick the Roles You Need

There are many different roles that employees can occupy on recruiting teams. Recruiting is a complex task that involves sourcing talent, onboarding new hires, conducting interviews, and processing background checks. Each team member can perform a bundle of responsibilities to shoulder so that no one person is doing too much.

Determining the roles needed goes back to knowing your priorities and your constraints. It may be that outsourcing recruitment to a third party is more cost-effective until your company becomes established enough to create a permanent, in-house recruiting team.

Once you can establish a vision for your recruiting team, you can pick from the list of different roles below to decide which ones will serve your aims.

What Are the Different Recruitment Team Roles? 

Senior Recruiter

Every team needs a leader. The senior recruiter oversees all processes related to recruitment.

They are the lead contact for company leadership, the HR department, and accounting. They oversee each component of the recruiting process, from talent sourcing to interviewing and onboarding.

Some responsibilities a senior recruiter may hold include:

• Setting the performance goals for each segment role on the recruitment team
• Writing and revising job descriptions
• Deciding on interview questions and etiquette and, in many cases performing candidate interviews

The national average salary for a senior recruiter is almost $78,000 or approximately $37 hourly. Knowing your budget can thus determine if you need to and can afford a senior recruiter on your team.

Recruitment Coordinator

The recruitment coordinator is a second in command to the senior recruiter. Anything the senior recruiter needs, the recruitment coordinator can handle.

The recruitment coordinator must have a high level of organizational and analytical skills. They will track data, scour spreadsheets, increase team efficiency, and enhance recruitment strategies.

HR Lead / Liaison 

HR plays a vital role in recruiting, but it often doesn’t handle the process directly.

The HR lead or liaison handles the flow of information, resources, and communication back and forth between the recruiting team and HR. Often, their task is to maintain the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) so that HR can see what’s happening on the recruiting side.

Maintaining clear and open communication between the recruiting team and the rest of the company ensures that the eventual onboarding processes will run as smoothly as possible.

Sourcer

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people not in the labor force looking for a job has increased by 700,000 since February 2020.

That’s a lot of eager, qualified candidates to sort, and it’s the responsibility of the Sourcer to wade through the mountains of applications to find the few truly stellar candidates.

The sourcer’s job begins before the applications even start coming, though. Truly skilled recruiters will put feelers into their networks, work their contacts, utilize social tools like LinkedIn, comb applicant databases, and do industry research to track down candidates. They are the go-to when you want to fast-track to the front of the line.

Sourcers may also have recommendations for internal hires. In-network candidates tend to hire much faster than candidates unknown to anyone in leadership. When their skill set comes pre-approved, all it takes is an ace interview to get hired.

The mission of the recruitment team as a whole is to make the workplace a happier, more efficient, and harmonious place. Sourcers can help with this by making the hiring process fast.

Employee Referral Manager

An estimated 40% of U.S.-based companies outsourced their recruiting processes to external agencies.

Recruitment is becoming such a broad, globalized process that companies barely want to think about it in-house. But don’t give up on internal recruiting.

Tapping someone to take over an employee referral position on your recruiting team will make the process immensely quicker and more painless.

An employer’s best asset is their employees. Employees come with multi-branched networks of their own, teeming with untapped talent.

Break out of the cycle of passing over nine bad resumes for every one good resume, and let your employee referral manager find better talent faster.

Hiring Manager

A hiring manager can be one of two things.

1. A hiring manager can be the person on the recruiting team responsible for selecting final candidates to pass over to leadership. They aren’t involved in sourcing talent, pre-interviewing candidates, or overseeing onboarding. They will conduct primary interviews, review background checks, and collate the final list of top picks.
2. A hiring manager can also refer to the leader within the company who is hiring for their department. They aren’t a permanent part of the recruiting team, but when openings crop up on their team, they’ll flex in as the expert, communicating their needs, timeline, and budget to you.

It will be on you to decide whether you want these two roles filled by different employees or if you want to collapse the roles into one. You can have the department head manage the hiring process, but know that this can take time away from doing their actual job.

Again, this is where considering the needs, budget, and timeline is crucial to making the most efficient and equitable decision.

Onboarding Manager

Once a small group of candidates has gone through interviews, it’s time to decide. The lucky candidate or candidates now have to acclimate to a new work environment.

It’s the onboarding manager’s job to oversee that process. The process can begin days or even weeks before the chosen candidate’s first day. They will brief new hires on where to go, what to bring, what to expect, and how the first few days will go.

What Does a Recruitment Team Have To Manage?

Recruitment strategies vary depending on the company, the open position, and the size of the recruitment group.

Some of the recruiting team’s core tasks are:

• Conceptualizing the scouting, interviewing, and onboarding processes from top to bottom
• Tracking performance and progress in the ATS so that company-wide review can take place
• Working within budget and on given timelines to solicit high-quality candidates who match terms outlined in the job description

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Role of the Recruitment Team?

Hiring is a fact of life in business. Assembling a well-oiled recruitment machine is an investment that pays dividends back.

The role of a recruitment team is to handle all operations related to finding, vetting, and hiring new staff members. From background checks to coordinating candidate travel, recruiting teams deliver the most promising new hires.

Build Smarter Teams

You don’t have to build bigger when you build smarter. Putting together an exceptional recruiting team will help you raise the level of productivity and performance company-wide.

ScoutLogic provides background checks made easy for recruiters. Our dedicated Scout service ensures that a well-trained, dedicated service agent will be by your side whenever you have a question.

Quality background checks cut down recruiting time by sifting candidates down only to the best. Try ScoutLogic’s industry-leading services today.

David Garcia

David Garcia, co-founder and CEO of Scout Logic, is an industry leader in the bulk background check world. With his strategic acumen and expertise in the HR sphere, specifically in hiring, recruiting, legal compliance, background checks, and resume screening, he’s an invaluable asset and consultant.

David's counsel extends across the boards of ScoutLogic, YipitData, and Supplier.io, drawing from his impactful stints on the boards of Infutor and Avetta. With an extensive 25-year journey, he champions unparalleled B2B commercial leadership within data & analytics, significantly shaping the HR landscape.