What Motivates The Recruiter?

By Author: rdfgdr
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With the job market for top talent so tight these days, hiring quality recruiters for your company has become more important than ever. But how do you know if the recruiter you're interviewing has the right stuff to give you the advantage over your competition in finding and hiring the best job candidates?
One good tactic is to ask a prospective recruiter to walk you through his or her process for finding and hiring a candidate, from the moment a job requisition is delivered until the actual hire. This will give you insight into the recruiter's thoroughness, sophistication, net-work of contacts, and integrity. But to bring the best recruiter on board, you should also look for these attributes;
Attention to Metrics
The best recruiters understand corporate recruiting metrics (quantitative measurements of performance), and can achieve metrical goals. For recruiters, quantitative goals, or metrics, can include the number of hires made, the time to hire (overall average time to hire, or time to hire for key positions), return on investment versus the recruiter's budget, and turnover in positions for which the recruiter ...
... hired. Look for a recruiter who understands and has experience with the kinds of metrical goals your company will be using to measure his or her performance — and can perform to meet those goals.
Sourcing Experience
Where did the recruiter find his or her candidates? Does he or she have experience with only a single sourcing channel — online job boards, for instance? Or does the candidate have experience with a wide range of sourcing channels? Good recruiters will have a strong net-work of other recruiters and professionals in job functions in which your company wants to increase hiring. The best recruiters will have a Rolodex full of contacts that they can tap to get your company the best candidates available.
Domain Experience
It's key to learn what kinds of candidates the recruiter has experience hiring. Make sure he or she has experience hiring the kinds of candidates your company needs. For example, if your company is a small startup, but a recruiter has experience only with big companies, you should consider that a strike against the candidate. The same is true if you're looking for a recruiter to bring in a bunch of technical people, but the person you're interviewing has experience hiring only marketing types.
What Motivates the Recruiter?
The best recruiters are motivated by the challenges of recruiting itself. Money is a factor for good recruiters, but the very best are those who love finding a good resume for an open position. The best recruiters also love making good matches between job candidates and jobs. They get satisfaction out of bringing the right candidate together with the right job. There are a lot of recruiters who can find candidates whose resumes fit with open job descriptions. The best recruiters are those who can make the difficult hire — and give you the best chance of retaining new hires.