What Makes a Good Recruiter – A Two-Dimensional Challenge

I held senior management positions in the recruitment industry for more than 30 years, and I hired hundreds of people into recruitment companies personally, and probably thousands indirectly through my teams. I have also been on the client side and engaged recruiters to find me people, and of course, I have been party to a few decades of hearing recruiters talk about their experiences.

I have been reflecting on the tension between what a recruitment company wants from its top performers and what its clients want from them, and why they may not always be aligned. 

The industry has changed as society and technology have changed, but the basic principles of running a recruitment company are much the same. These days I am an adviser, coach, and investor, not operationally involved, and it’s interesting to see how ex-colleagues and contacts discuss the pressing issues of the day. Not much has fundamentally changed. However, when I reflect, I am quite clear on what makes a good recruiter from a fee-paying client point of view. None of what I have distilled out here is rocket science or new, but some of it gets lost for the recruiter in the stress of working in a company trying to grow and make profit, politics, ego, and events beyond our control. 

In my experience, clients want a few things when they engage a recruiter:

• To hire successfully

• To build a relationship that will yield positive results in the future

• To have a partner colleagues will appreciate too

• To work with someone, they can “get on with”

• To have a partner that can be supportive when things aren’t so easy.

Hiring successfully is vital for the success of any organisation. It is very hard to predict how someone you hire will fare once they are onboard. It’s competitive to find and keep the right people. The recruiter can give you options and help you hire but they are not responsible for what happens once the new hire is on the payroll. I have always been surprised how little clients have asked about a recruiter’s success in their space. Hiring recruiters is often about gut feel, compatible fees, and “right time right place”. Typically, a client will give the impression they are talking to a few recruiters, there will be a fee discussion and all being well a job spec will surface. Sometimes that’s enough, but the recruiter is representing that client in the market, and often if they are using a recruiter there is a problem, because they are going outside their organisation and paying a fee for help.
I have asked prospective recruiters representing me to present back what it is they will say to target candidates exactly, how they will position the opportunity and the organisation. That can tell you a lot and build a strong relationship based on shared understanding and clarity. I also want to know exactly what the recruiter is going to do, in terms of research and the sorts of numbers involved, in either a contingency (no placement no fee) or a retained executive search process. I want to know when I will get feedback when I can expect a shortlist of interested and qualified candidates to review, and what information will accompany those.

Building a relationship with a recruiter should result in tangible results, but along the way, it should also be interesting because recruiters pick up
useful market knowledge, and a good test is access to valuable candidates that are potentially good additions although not part of a search. The time put into working with a recruiter should make it easier the next time to agree on what’s important and shorten the time to success. 

Working with colleagues means the recruiter will be exposed to other client stakeholders during recruitment processes and this is an opportunity to expand the relationship, therefore the recruiter’s qualities and interpersonal skills will reflect onto the original client. This is not often discussed but it’s key to expanding the usefulness of the relationship, and it may be necessary to ask the client for feedback to be confident of where the relationship is going. Client feedback surveys are all well and good, but asking a straight question of a partner is also vital. 

“Getting on” is very helpful and ideally the recruiter and client can communicate easily, enjoy and appreciate each other. I have seen many times where this can become disingenuous and false. In the 90’s we used to be taught to overuse first names, to enquire about children, spouses and which sports team they supported, we had budgets for entertainment etc, I could go on, but like any relationship a client and recruiter bond is based on mutual benefit, respect and something less tangible based around empathy and listening. Recruitment life rarely goes as planned because we are working with people, who are unpredictable, and recruitment is subject to how an organisation is doing and it is influenced by many issues and forces.

Being supportive when it’s tough is vital for a client wanting to build a long-term relationship, I want to know how the recruiter will be when
things get tricky:

• What happens when the best candidate turns down an offer?

• What happens when hiring goes on hold?

• What happens when a second interview with a client’s colleague goes wrong?

• What happens when the job spec is changed?

• What happens when hiring goes on hold?

These things happen frequently, and the well-trained recruiter will have answers for all of them, but the experience of these types of events will be a test of how well the relationship will develop. In the heat of the moment the relationship is tested, and what happens will dictate the future of how well it works from there. When I think back and consider the qualities of those recruiters who have been consistently the most successful over many years I have a few observations. Defining success is hard. I have worked with recruiters billing millions, and those filling less senior roles but billing hundreds of thousands, in whatever currency you choose wherever in the world. I think I can define success as a recruiter as:

• Filling roles and being asked to do more

• Having positive feedback from the client about the working relationship

• Doing both over the years

If I had to come up with five attributes from a recruitment company CEO's point of view the difference to the five that I listed above would be that I would need to make room for billing and teamwork. So, the question I ask is, would recruitment companies be more successful if they adopted the five attributes I listed first because billing success and teamwork would naturally be part of those, and success would follow?

I can see the faces of many of those recruiters and I can remember so many reviews and discussions. What do those people tend to have in common?

Well, in the execution of their job, they had the ability to be very focused, to manage a large and complex workload, to be good at listening, to work very hard consistently, to work to a routine that is sometimes very boring, to be driven by outcomes and very resilient. On balance, they were driven mostly by what clients wanted, but maybe they were not always driven by what their employers wanted.

Outside of their client relationships, they were not necessarily the easiest employees. They were not always the best team members or the most supportive of the company’s goals. But I value and respect what they did. My list includes extroverts and introverts, jokers and the deadly serious, risk takers and those that went by the book, all types of human beings. They definitely would not all sit in a room together very easily, but, any one of them could take on a client’s needs and be totally driven by a successful outcome. I have a few stories……