The talent of IT-recruiter - how do creators differ from artisans?

Hello!

Today we will talk about the skill of staff recruitment, and Faina Lerner , the teacher of our IT-Recruiter course , will share her secrets :

I have been leading recruiting for IT companies for more than 12 years. Sometimes as part of the HR function, sometimes as a separate direction. One of the main questions for me as a manager is - what qualities and skills distinguish real recruiters from those who are threatened to replace artificial intelligence? I will talk about internal, corporate recruiting. I will share my observations.

Let's start with the fact that, surprisingly, does not really matter:

• Education: I used to think that strong IT recruiters are necessarily techies. That part of them, which is bored with communication with the screen, which tasted and fell in love with the complex taste of the interaction "man-man". They, theoretically, understand the thinking of the candidates, speak the same language with them, are well versed in technologies, clearly structure the texts of vacancies, competently organize decision-making processes and search strategies.
  
  

  On the other hand, many believe that the right recruiters are psychologists, sociologists, or HR specialists. They are able to “see people through”, analyze the implicit, feel the invisible, determine the non-existent. And they will not let into the team a person with deviations according to the scale of values ​​or potential loyalty. In fact, it turns out that people of any profession turn out both brilliant and mediocre recruiters. I did not find any serious addiction.

  
  

• Love for people: when in interviews for beginning specialists I ask why a candidate wants to go to recruitment, I often hear “I love people, I want to make them happy, I want to communicate more”. This is a very dangerous motivation. In real life, she often fails the test of combat. Candidates who failed to come out on the first working day, failed projects, rude customers, a mandatory administrative routine, new employees who quit - cause too much stress and often turn love into insult and fatigue. Respect for people, interest, high ethics is good. But excessive emotional involvement often contributes to a very fast burnout.

• Previous experience: in the corporate recruiting leads many tracks, direct and not so. The classic way from administrative positions, HR or recruiting in agencies does not guarantee neither quality, nor speed, nor long term in the profession.

What works? What distinguishes a regular recruiter, who is able to create a coherent job, write a search query and regularly process the database, from a high professional, to whom, it seems, the candidates themselves are drawn, and which customers hunt for?
Let's, in the best traditions of job description, divide the necessary competences into two groups: those that can be learned, and those that are more related to personal talents (they are difficult to develop in adulthood). This article will be devoted to the first group.

Among personal talents, they seem to me the most significant:

• memory and curiosity

• analytic skills

• perseverance and self-organization

• optimism and the ability to not lose heart

• ethics and commitment

In the first place, in my personal charts, are memory and curiosity . The cool recruiters I work with are as if wizards are pulling the right specialists out of the hat in response to a request. Magical databases of former candidates and colleagues, conference specialists, casual acquaintances from professional chats are working in their heads. This base is replenished due to curiosity towards people and technologies, personal research and new acquaintances, and operates due to an excellent memory for people, faces and surnames. Such an internal repository can be accumulated quite quickly - for the year the active recruiter communicates with hundreds of specialists. But not everyone is lucky to have a memory that stores in the right cells the names, professional interests, strengths and weaknesses of candidates.

And here it is difficult to separate the memory from the second most important talent of strong recruiters - analytical skills . It is considered that in IT companies customers are system-thinking, clearly set technical engineers, and recruiters are creative, humanitarians who are prone to excessive sociability. In real life everything is more complicated. Each recruiter has a lot of comments from customers like “this candidate doesn’t have a spark of God” or “find me a clone of Peter, just not so sharp”. Often the job description looks like “java, android, etc”. The other extreme is a long list of required skills, without division into critical and desirable ones. Some of them usually perform the task of demonstrating the author’s unlimited horizons.

So, already at the stage of collecting requirements, the recruiter needs the ability to find out and analyze the customer’s needs, separate the key from the secondary, predict timelines and probabilities depending on the realities of the market and the company's financial capabilities. The internal recruiter is usually expected to have a deep understanding of the product and the skills and personal qualities necessary for candidates - so sometimes the recruiter manages to form a better team than the customer initially saw.

Part of the job of a recruiter is sourcing, that is, searching for candidates. Any overflow of vacancy responses is always pure logic and analytics, plus a good knowledge of tools and technologies. In which companies can a suitable candidate work, how can his role be called, how to contact him and how to interest him, how to quickly understand his relevance to the position? Sourcing competitions among recruiters are most similar to detective spy novels. How can you find the address of the current place of work of the leading Erlang specialist in the blurred school photo of the class? There are literally seven consecutive requests, some assumptions and creativity - and we have not only a place of work, but also personal contacts (we will leave the subject of personal data for a separate article).

Even when the candidate has already been found, the subsequent interaction with him, the search for points of contact and compromises, the determination of optimal conditions, arguments for negotiations and, if necessary, separation - all this requires analytic abilities.
Further, what is important in any profession. But in recruiting, perhaps, especially. It is perseverance and self-organization . In this same group I will include optimism, dedication and the ability to not lose heart.

Recruiting in IT is a game in which it is impossible to win. If suddenly the recruiter "hired all" - he was left without work. As a rule, the needs of IT-companies greatly exceed the capabilities of the market and a particular specialist in employment. Each small victory is followed by new and new challenges. Recruiters are rarely praised, but often hurried and scolded. They are responsible for all shortcomings in the marketing, management and salary policy of the employer, as well as for the limited market, the level of education in the country and the "inadequate" requests of candidates. They are often tried to control in the process. (In recruiting, as in the upbringing of children and in medicine, everyone understands, and everyone is ready to give advice and evaluate the efforts being made). They are rarely willing to really help.



Under these conditions, only genuinely passionate professionals, driven by internal stimuli and capable of setting goals for themselves, sensibly assessing successes and shortcomings, structuring their work, drawing up schedules and following them, do not fall into mediocrity. As a rule, when a candidate was not immediately found miraculously (which happens, but not often), when the first cream (skimmed for IT professions) and open resumes on working sites are removed, the painstaking and ungrateful work on searching and processing candidates begins. The funnels show different numbers, but some normal conversion - 1 out of 100 candidates considered and potentially suitable candidates will become an employee. Yes 1%. And the responses to the average vacancy of a leading IT engineer are about 2-4. At the coolest companies and at especially interesting vacancies 10-20. The rest is a systematic and competent washing of ore in search of gold. Search, hope, contact, hope again, interview, hope increases, failure ... a short despair, recorded, remembered for the future, made conclusions, looking further.

What encourages recruiters? I notice very different motivations. Someone happy moment of hitting the target - when found the right person for the role and company; for someone to influence the fate of candidates - they open up a new world and new perspectives to people; someone likes a fairly obvious, specific feedback, or hired, or not; it is important for someone that due to his efforts the business grows and develops; someone is fascinated by competition, the excitement of comparing with others or with oneself; Many are pleased with the bonus and the dependence of income on effort. In any case, it is very important to revive from the ashes of failures, to notice and praise yourself for achievements, not to get bogged down in a routine. It is important to work systematically and a lot - but at the same time be rationally lazy, using the best ways to achieve results.

In choosing the path there is a very big temptation of an easy, but dangerous for the reputation of the solution. And here I come to the last, very important quality of a true recruiting master - ethics and responsibility in fulfilling obligations. In theory, everything is at the level of common sense. Everyone understands that it is important to give feedback even in case of refusal to the candidate; everyone knows that it is useful to keep the customer informed; all for telling the truth; everyone understands that a long-term reputation in the profession is more important than short-term benefits, and that not all methods are good at all. But it requires a very large self-discipline and internal decency, so that under a hail of tasks attacking each other, in hopeless situations, in the sensation of a close victory or, on the contrary, the disappearing bonus, do the right thing.

Perhaps these are the main talents on my list that distinguish strong recruiters.
You will say, but what about communications, difficult negotiations, subtle sales, writing vacancies about superman and mega-gurus, how does understanding of technologies and methodologies for developing and managing the employer's brand? How is long-term forecasting and planning, understanding the recruiting process? Where is the excellent knowledge and use of tools and search queries? What about discipline in administering candidate management systems?

I am sure that all this can and must be learned to become a professional. To do this, there are now online and offline courses. It is important not to make a mistake and choose the right ones. These skills can also be mastered in a certain time by coming “from scratch” to an agency that has IT vacancies. The entrance to the profession is relatively easy, like the first earnings. But the path to it is long and the horizon of financial and professional opportunities depends only on you - and on your talents.

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