What Makes a Good Recruiting Team?

Recruiting is the backbone of business excellence. Hiring exceptional people for your recruiting team is crucial whether you’re in hospitality, finance, or the food industry. It’s the only way to elevate talent in the rest of the company. 

Recruiters are responsible for much more than finding candidates to recommend for hire. They often compose interview scripts, maintain a database of internal recommendations, manage the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), and supervise onboarding processes. 

Without a solid recruiting team, you could lose top talent to your competitors. Recruiting is a critical stage, and one small step could cost you. 

You can take several steps immediately to optimize your recruiting team’s processes. From embracing emerging technology to strategic advertising, here are some strategies for building an excellent recruiting team. 

Strategic Advertising

Even small companies have complex needs. There will not be a standard job posting that applies to all job listings you need to advertise.

Strategic advertising is a way of individualizing job postings and candidate searches based on the particular job and candidates. 

Job openings in your marketing department will call for different verbiage, requirements, and applications instructions than openings in HR. The same goes for seasonal, contract, part-time, and full-time work. 

Designate someone on your recruiting team to be responsible for strategic advertising. Make it their job to meet the diversity of candidates and open positions with a wide range of approaches.

A Well-Designed Balance of Roles

It’s not necessarily true that more recruiters automatically equals better recruitment. Start-ups, small-sized companies, and even mid-sized companies may delegate a single employee as the Senior Recruiter. That person’s job is to handle everything from talent scouting to job posting, interviews, and onboarding.

If your company hires more than 20 people per year, it warrants having a well-staffed recruiting team. There are plenty of different roles that can play a part in a recruiting team:

• Senior Recruiter: The Senior Recruiter takes the broadest view of the job. They act as the immediate supervisor to everyone on the recruiting team, overseeing all operations. They also report back directly to company leadership and make final candidate referrals.
• Employee Referral Manager: Your internal network is the best place to find talent. The Employee Referral Manager keeps a detailed inventory of employees’ in-network contacts. Often this is archived in the Applicant Tracking Software (ATS.)
• HR Liaison: Recruiting processes go hand in hand with HR. The liaison handles the flow of information, resources, and communication between HR and the recruiting team. They maintain clear and open channels with the recruiting team and communicate the latter’s needs and the status of the recruitment drive to HR.
• Sourcer: The Sourcer is a creative member of the recruiting team. Before the company even posts jobs publicly, the Sourcer is working their network and the broader networks of employees within the company to scout out excellent, untapped talent. The Sourcer has the power to save the company a massive amount of time and labor if they creatively utilize internal resources, applicant databases, and social media to find candidates. The best ones may scout applicants who aren’t even on the job market yet.
• Hiring Manager: Somebody needs to take charge of the actual hiring process. In some companies, executive leadership makes final decisions outside the recruiting team. But a Hiring Manager fulfills a valuable role on your recruiting team. This person works directly with the leaders of the various departments in need of new talent. They note their needs, work with the Senior Recruiter to design job posts, and help make the ultimate decision.
• Onboarding Manager: Once candidates come on board, they need to sync with the company workflow and culture. The Onboarding Manager oversees this process, working directly with HR and the department that hired the candidate to make that process as smooth as possible.

Lean on Internal Talent

Your employees are a strategic resource for candidate recommendations. Don’t let them go to waste. 

Before designing an elaborate job post and scouring candidate databases, ask trusted employees. See if they can recommend anyone with commensurate experience. It bypasses needlessly time-consuming processes and can save the company time and money.

Your employees will not all recommend contacts to you proactively—you have to ask for them. Even if there is an established referral award, employees can’t recommend contacts for jobs they aren’t aware you’re aiming to fill.

Keep everyone in the loop on job openings before they’re made public. High-performing companies want to hire candidates with long-term potential. Nontraditional talent sources can be great resources to scout those kinds of candidates.

Look for Potential, Not Experience

New findings show that job openings are over 11 million, a record high. Jobseekers are at record highs too.

There’s never been a better time to be hiring. But with so many candidates coming from diverse backgrounds and experience levels, you need to revisit your priorities.

High-performing companies no longer hire for experience. They hire for potential. It’s a much better investment to bring someone in, train them, and help them realize their potential than to serve as a launchpad for high-performing candidates who will eventually leap somewhere else.

Embracing Emerging Technology

According to 70% of respondents to one LinkedIn survey, hybrid or fully virtual recruiting is here to stay as the new norm. Virtual interviews and recruiting are just one form of emerging technology that recruiters can embrace.

AI, algorithms, and predictive data analysis help recruiters work smarter, not harder. Take advantage of data-driven analytics to build a better recruiting team.

You have to find some balance between human knowledge and AI-driven data. Data can’t rule everything. But you’re getting nowhere by rejecting modern technology.

Integrate the Recruiting Team with Other Departments

The best thing a recruiting team can be is collaborative. Each recruiting team member should strive for clear and open communication with all other members.

That should be the same goal for the departments that are hiring, too. Every hiring cycle is different, and every team has different needs.

The key to attracting great candidates is to personalize the search for them. The team you’re hiring for will have valuable data that you’ll need to personalize the job search.

Track Performance

Performance analytics have become common measurements that employers track. It helps employers and team leaders foster their employees’ growth and reorganize teams according to strengths and weaknesses.

You can track analytics in recruiting too. Use technology to measure how job posts are faring, what sites they’re performing best on, who’s clicking through, and their on-page time for the job post. 

All these metrics will give you a sense of the talent pool you’re attracting and indicate changes you can make to attract different candidates. 

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Recruit for a Recruitment Team?

Most recruitment advice covers how to recruit better. But how do you recruit for your recruitment team?

The first place to start is looking internally. Your existing talent pool should be the standard by which you’re measuring external candidates. Why not offer split-position promotions and responsibility increases with corresponding pay increases?

Don’t be afraid of unsettling the existing infrastructure. Assembling an excellent recruiting team ensures that you will fill any gaps you create in no time. 

Should I Outsource My Recruiting Needs?

Many companies outsource their recruiting processes. There are advantages to outsourcing.

It conserves valuable human resources. Outsourcing allows companies to concentrate on their bottom line and delegate time-consuming tasks to experts.

But there are downsides, too. Nobody knows your needs as you do. You can communicate what you’re looking for to recruiters, but it’s easy to get caught in a never-ending cycle of fielding barely-good-enough candidates.

Taking charge of your own recruiting guarantees that you’ll bring in candidates that will work well alongside their new teams.

Supercharge Your Recruitment Process

Recruiting is an often overlooked part of doing business. But it couldn’t be more critical.

ScoutLogic knows that your time is precious. Our Scout Service Model assigns a dedicated Scout to your case. They’ll act as an extension of your team, saving you the time typically spent calling, emailing, and updating a revolving door of agents. 

ScoutLogic provides premium background checks faster and with more accuracy. Most checks return within one day, no matter the complexity of the requests, and our dispute rate is .02%.

Build a better-recruiting team, and incorporate ScoutLogic as a permanent fixture of your hiring process.

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.