What is recruiting and what do recruiters do: a starter guide

Recruitment, or recruitment, is an HR function that every specialist and manager is familiar with. Everyone is interviewed, and some managers also interview new employees themselves.

But what does recruitment look like from the inside? What techniques do recruiters have? In this article, we have collected answers to basic questions about recruitment:

• What is recruiting and what tasks does it solve?
• Who is responsible for recruiting in companies
• What are the types of recruiting
• What stages does recruiting include?
• What is a recruiting funnel
• Who is a hiring manager and what does he do?
• What tools and methods are used in recruiting
• How to learn more about HR

What is recruiting: main goals and objectives

Recruiting is the search and hiring of employees. Companies select suitable candidates, assess their skills and experience, and then, if the candidates meet the requirements, send them offers and get them a job in the company.

Let's say a company needs a new marketer. Recruiters determine the requirements for the candidate, for example, education, skills, experience. They then post the vacancy on employee search platforms.

After that, the recruitment stage begins: recruiters review the received resumes, conduct preliminary telephone interviews and schedule meetings with the most suitable candidates. The final stage of recruiting is the evaluation of candidates based on the results of interviews and the choice of the best among them.

The goal of recruiting is to find qualified employees whose skills will meet the needs of the company. To do this, the following tasks are solved in the recruiting process:

• determine which employees are needed;
• attract candidates;
• assess their skills and experience;
• choose the best;
• offer them the conditions under which they will agree to work in the company.

We will talk in more detail about how recruiting works and what tools are used for it in the following sections. For now, let's figure out who is engaged in recruiting in companies.

Who is responsible for recruiting in companies: managers, HR or agencies

There are three common types of recruitment organization:

• employees are hired by heads of departments or heads of the entire business;
• full-time HR specialists are responsible for recruitment;
• The company engages an outsourcing recruitment agency.

The choice of strategy depends on the size of the company, its financial resources, and whether employees have free time to participate in recruitment. Below, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of each of the options.

Employees are recruited by the heads of departments or the entire business. Most often, this happens in young companies that do not have the resources for a full-time HR manager.

At the start, this is a good option: the founders of the startup are passionate about the idea and can quickly attract the right personnel to the team. Managers have an understanding of what kind of people are needed, and often useful professional connections.

Later, when the company grows, this option becomes resource-intensive. Managers have more tasks, and there is less time for recruiting. Both the quality of recruitment and the main work of managers suffer from this. At this stage, you need to choose one of two options - hire recruiters on staff or order the services of an agency.

In large companies, hiring managers tend to participate in interviews with potential employees after the first meetings – that is, in the middle or at the end of the recruitment. Involving only managers in recruiting is the most ineffective option.

The internal HR department is responsible for recruitment. This is the most common option with significant advantages. A recruiter is familiar with hiring managers. He understands the company's business, so he understands what kind of specialists he is looking for.

"His" HR manager knows what kind of person will be able to join the corporate culture of the company, who will be able to find a common language with the manager. An internal specialist will be able to quickly contact the hiring manager and get answers to your questions. This means that it will have less downtime than an external agency.

The internal recruiter will work according to the processes built and agreed with the managers. You don't have to spend a lot of time discussing the hiring process for a new position, as it happens at the beginning of working with an agency.

But there are limitations here. For example, professional tools for finding personnel are expensive, and companies cannot always provide them to the HR department. Sometimes an HR specialist is engaged not only in the search for personnel. In this case, he cannot devote enough time to recruitment, especially if he needs to close a lot of positions. All this greatly worsens the quality of recruiting and increases the hiring time.

The company enters into an agreement with an HR agency. The strength of agencies is a narrow specialization in recruitment. Agencies are most often involved when you need a targeted or, conversely, mass selection. Sometimes they are contacted for narrow tasks: for example, so that the agency's specialists evaluate the applicant's experience from a resume or conduct telephone interviews on the candidate base.

Their services will be useful if:

• company employees do not have time to organize a full cycle of recruitment;
• the company lacks expertise in recruitment;
• there is not enough money to hire recruiters and buy recruitment tools — for example, to buy a website database;
• You need to find a non-standard specialist with unique experience.

The agency has all the necessary tools for searching: its own database of candidates, access to job search sites, networking on social networks and professional communities. The disadvantage of agencies is that their services are expensive. However, our experience shows that cooperation with the agency is a guarantee of quality.

In this article, we will talk mainly about recruitment by internal HR specialists. Below we will analyze what types of recruiting there are, what a standard recruitment scheme looks like, what a recruitment funnel is, and what skills a recruiter needs.

What are the types of recruiting

Depending on what kind of specialists need to be found and in what quantity, recruiting is divided into two main types - mass and pointed. Let's figure it out.

Mass recruitment. This is the selection of personnel for the same type of positions. It is used when you need to find several employees at once who will have the same responsibilities and salary. For example, service personnel, cashiers, consultants, call center employees, and so on are hired in this way. As a rule, in mass recruiting, the speed of selecting candidates is important, not their competencies.

Point (individual) recruiting. It is used when you need to select a specialist who is most suitable for the company in terms of competencies: skills, personal characteristics, work experience, and so on. Unlike mass recruiting, with individual recruiting, the emphasis is on the quality of candidates, and not on their number and speed of recruitment.

In turn, targeted recruiting is divided into two types:

• Management selection is the selection of highly qualified specialists and middle managers. For example, accountants, financiers, heads of departments.
• Executive search — selection of top managers. Unlike middle managers, top management rarely looks for a job on their own. Therefore, the tools of such recruiting differ from management selection.

There is also a concept of headhunting in recruiting. In the process of headhunting, the company tries to attract a specific person — as a rule, this is a talented specialist of the highest category. The methods of this type of recruiting are aimed at luring a person from another company.

What stages does recruiting consist of: the classic scheme

The hiring process differs from company to company. The size of the organization, the specifics, and what positions need to be filled play a role. Even in one company, the search for specialists for dissimilar vacancies will differ. However, in most cases, new employees are selected according to the general scheme, which can be called classic.

Here are the stages it includes:

• The candidate responds to the vacancy or the recruiter himself contacts a potential employee by looking at his resume.
• Telephone interview or correspondence. The recruiter clarifies the candidate's experience, answers introductory questions about the vacancy. At this stage, it is appropriate for the applicant to clarify the conditions of work in the company: schedule, office address, etc. For an HR manager, it is logical to ask questions about the resume, clarify whether the applicant is currently employed and what job offers he is interested in.
• Interview with a recruiter. More detailed discussion of the vacancy. At this stage, questions are asked about the candidate's experience, motivation and how they cope with work situations.

The goal of the recruiter at this stage is to identify the characteristics of the candidate's personality and check him for compliance with the corporate culture. At this stage, the employer can offer to solve business cases.

• Interview with the hiring manager or senior specialist. At this stage, the candidate communicates with an expert, and the company can assess the professional knowledge of a potential employee. The main focus of the interview with the hiring manager is on expertise.
• Test task. Sometimes it is done right at the interview, and sometimes after the interview.
• Personality tests, questionnaires.
• Interview with the director of the company or the head of the department. This is the final interview that is conducted if the decision must be approved by a higher manager.

There may be more stages if we are talking about the vacancy of a leading specialist and manager, or fewer when interns and assistants are hired. We advise candidates to immediately check with the HR manager what stages they will have to go through. The stages may vary, go in a different order, some may be missing. It all depends on the company and position.

What is a recruiting funnel and why do you need to build one?

A recruiting funnel is a tool for evaluating the effectiveness of recruitment. This is an HR analogue of the usual marketing tool — a sales funnel.

The recruitment funnel shows how candidates move through the hiring stages from application to registration. A funnel is an applied tool. If you regularly analyze it, you can quickly determine at which of the steps the largest number of applicants leave. Then you can find ways to fix it.

The funnel will also help predict how much work needs to be done to close a position similar to the previous one. How many resumes you need to see, how many people to invite for an interview.

The funnel can be analyzed and improved at different levels. Let's say you see a weak conversion at the stage when you collect responses to a vacancy. Then you need to check how correct and attractive the job description is. It will be appropriate to think about what other sources can be used to post a vacancy.

If you see that candidates refuse the position at the offer stage, you need to collect the reasons for rejections and evaluate the offer. Perhaps it is not competitive. Why do candidates choose other offers? Perhaps you take too long to make a hiring decision after the final interview, and during this time the candidate manages to get another offer. There can be many reasons - each situation needs to be considered separately.

A recruitment funnel helps you quickly identify where the problem is. Now we can look for a solution.

Who is a hiring manager and what is required of him

The search for employees is carried out by the recruitment manager, he is also called a recruiter. Its goal is to provide the heads of departments with relevant candidates and fill vacancies in a timely manner. In this position, you need to communicate a lot: build contact with applicants and internal customers. For a recruiter, it is important that he knows how and loves to talk to people.

Special education is rarely required to enter the profession. At the start, employers often pay attention to the communication skills of the future recruiter: his energy, activity, openness, willingness to communicate a lot.

If you have these qualities, you can confidently apply for the position of a surveyor. This is a starting position in the HR department. Such a specialist searches for candidates and arranges an interview with them, but he does not conduct interviews. This is done by more experienced colleagues — recruiters.

A specialist without experience can immediately apply for the position of a recruiter. However, it is better to have theoretical knowledge for this. You can recommend special literature, for example, books by Svetlana Ivanova or Michael Armstrong.

It is also useful to read articles from HR communities: they will help you keep abreast of current trends. Online courses will help you get all the knowledge you need for recruitment.

What distinguishes a specialist with experience? Not only does he know how to establish contact with the candidate, but he also knows how to test his skills and personal qualities. To do this, he uses special techniques, which we will talk about below.

What tools and methods are used in recruiting

The most popular recruiter tool is sites that post vacancies and resumes of candidates. Social networks are also used to search for candidates - and professional ones, for example, LinkedIn,

In them, you can find specialized communities for finding a job. Recently, search through messengers has become popular.

To increase the number of responses, recruiters can contact the marketing department. Targeted or contextual advertising is often used to attract applicants. If the company needs personnel with a certain education or young specialists, recruiters begin cooperation with universities and attract students and graduates for internships, participate in job fairs.

Here are the techniques that HR managers use in communicating with a candidate:

• Biographical interview – general questions about the candidate's previous experience.
• Case interview – the candidate solves business cases that are close to real work tasks.
• Projective interview is a discussion with the candidate of situations when he needs to evaluate not himself, but others. Examples of questions: "Why don't people pay loans?", "Why are they stressed at work?"
• Personal interview. The goal is to understand the candidate's personality and motivation. Example of a question: which of your qualities help in your work, and which, on the contrary, hinder you?
• Competency-based interviews. There are two popular methodologies here: STAR (Situaton-Task-Action-Result) and PARLA (Problem-Action-Result-Learned-Applied).

The STAR and PARLA methods are similar. The candidate is asked to recall a case from his work experience. The STAR method assumes that the case should be described according to the scheme "situation – task – action – result". This helps to assess the managerial abilities of the candidate using real examples. PARLA is slightly different in its scheme: for this method, the sequence will be "problem – action – result – conclusions drawn – how you apply the experience in the future".

Usually, these methods are not used in their pure form. For a more complete picture, the recruiter uses a mix of questions. This allows you to get a complete picture of the candidate.

It is important to understand what metrics will allow you to evaluate your work correctly. To do this, you should study the HR analytics block and get acquainted with the recruiter's performance indicators. They will help you set work goals correctly and speak the same language with your business — the language of numbers.

There are many areas in HR besides recruitment. In small companies, generalists are in demand: they can simultaneously engage in recruitment, HR records management, supervise the adaptation of personnel and their training, as well as develop the employer's HR brand.

The most important in 5 points

• There are three main ways to organize recruitment in a company: creating an internal HR department, using the services of an external agency, and recruitment by management.
• Although the recruitment process differs from company to company, applicants are often interviewed according to a similar classic scheme. These are initial interviews with HR, then an expert test with the hiring manager, after which a test task and a final interview.
• A recruitment funnel is an HR analogue of a sales funnel. It is used to understand the effectiveness of recruitment and find weaknesses.
• Communication skills are very important for a recruiter. You don't need a lot of theoretical knowledge to enter the profession, but specialized courses will come in handy.
• Recruiters have their own tools. These are platforms where you can search for candidates and interview techniques.