Successful Recruiters Don’t Make These 5 Mistakes: Do You

We write a lot about mistakes for new recruiters to avoid, but what about those of you who have been doing this for a while now? You know you’re not making the novice mistakes, but what other common traps might more established recruiters as yourself fall into?

If you’ve been a recruiter for some time, yet your billing numbers aren’t great, or your candidate database is stagnating, the first step is to ensure that you’re not making any of the following mistakes.

1. You think that you’re a great interviewer and a splendid judge of character.

There’s some fascinating Yale research about how terrible humans are at conducting job interviews.

According to the research, we make hiring decisions based on how much we like people, we make false assumptions based on our prejudices and initial impressions (and then manipulate the candidate’s responses to fit with those assumptions), and we don’t put nearly enough emphasis on the person’s skills or experience.

As a recruiter, you must learn to disengage from your gut instinct when deciding which candidates to put forward. Rely heavily on that CV, check references with a fine-tooth comb, and meet with the candidate to make the obvious checks on presentation and attitude.

When running candidate interviews, ask structured questions—ask the same questions, in the same order, for everyone, and score them immediately after each response. This is the way you’ll come up with the best candidate for the job, not your favourite one.

2. Your job specs/adverts are still not up to scratch. 

This one applies to experienced recruiters as well as new ones – in fact, novice recruiters probably try a lot harder at writing job specs/adverts than their peers. If you’re only rewriting old job specs from the client, then you’re almost certainly confusing matters.

Wipe the screen clean, and start again. Aim for clarity. Be determined to engage the reader. Make the role blindingly obvious, and concisely explain what a day looks like.

Do NOT fall into the trap of writing the job description or advert solely based on your working knowledge of similar roles- you need to be getting good input about the precise role from the client, hiring manager, and ideally, the outgoing team member. Generic vanilla writing does not win the day.

3. You too easily accept that there are ‘no good candidates’.

This is a common trap for recruiters, particularly at the moment when everyone is talking about skill shortages. Sure, there might not be the ‘perfect’ candidate who has every single skill requirement on the client’s hit list, but there are still plenty of great candidates out there, as long as you’re willing to think creatively about their skills and aptitudes.

Use social media to find candidates outside your inner circle of contacts, and consider the super-keen but not as highly qualified candidates and ‘sell’ them to the client instead.

Your job is to find good candidates, so don’t even think about trotting out excuses or you’ll never truly succeed as a recruiter.

You’ll encounter challenges in finding great candidates sometimes; there’s no disputing that. But if you give up before you’ve really tried, failure is your only destination.

4. You’ve taken your eye off the ball. 

It happens. We get complacent. You’re busy, so you slow down on building your talent pipeline, and your pitching has dropped off. One of your big clients stops giving you the vacancies on an exclusive basis- but you think you’re fine, as you have a lot of clients, and are still billing well.

But then one of your other clients folds or goes to another recruiter, and things start to look a great deal less secure. It doesn’t take long for things to change in recruitment- you can go from the top biller to below target with a few blows.

And if you’ve taken your eye off the ball with pitching and candidate databases, you’ll find you have no easy ladder back up to the top.

5. You do pretty much everything else before you get on the phone.

You can bury yourself in a pile of database and admin work and convince yourself that it’s strictly necessary…only to find that you’re spending less than 2 hours a day on the phone actually chasing work. You’re never going to bill highly until you get that number up. Stop thinking about rejection, and stop procrastinating with (too much) LinkedIn, or unnecessary emails.

Plan your calls the night before, so you hit the ground running the minute you arrive at your desk. ‘Begin with the end in mind’ is one of Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Successful People’, and this pro-activeness is a great one to put into your daily practice.

The key to success is looking at your performance through every stage of your career, and modifying your approach when you notice mistakes that are holding you back. Be brave enough to change your recruitment style if it’s not delivering the results you want. After all, as the saying goes, ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result’.

Until next time,

Cheryl and he GSR2R team