Why Building a Strong Recruiting Team is so Hard (And How to Succeed Anyway)

Your recruiting team is the back-bone of your organization. Without the right talent to drive innovation and success, it’s likely that wider initiatives won’t succeed.

The first critical team you have to build is your recruiting team. If you didn’t do so the first time, it’s the first team that you need to consider re-vamping.

You have to be smart when you’re hiring your first employees – difficult to do correctly right out of the gate. It’s even harder to reevaluate later when you realize something isn’t working right.

The most major problem talent acquisition leaders run into when building their recruiting teams – leadership isn’t involved in the plan for recruitment.

Recruiting isn’t always top of mind for leadership, but it should be if you intend to hire strategically in the recruiting boom that’s coming in 2016.

“62% expect their company’s hiring volume to rise, but only 42% say their recruitment budget will increase” – Jibe

This discrepancy indicates a gap between leadership and recruiting teams, which is an even larger reason to build a stronger recruiting team – but why is it so hard to build one?

The reasons delve a lot deeper than you think, but they all boil down to one thing – good communication between leadership and the recruiting team.

We’re providing several road blocks to look out for as a talent acquisition leader, and how you can solve for them once you get there.

Real industry experts are hard to find.

The best recruiters are going to be the ones with experience recruiting for the industry in which your organization operates. Your ideal recruiter will not only have a deep understanding of the industry, but he or she will know where the talent pools lie for various skill sets.

Solution: look for a recruiter with their finger on the pulse of your industry.

You can’t be an industry expert in anything unless you’re keeping up with the turnover, innovations and organizational changes going on within it – and not just in your organization, but also in the competition.

A recruiter “in the know,” will know when the time is right to hire, what talent may or may not be ready to be dislodged from their current position, and when it’s the right time to send a job to search.

Knowing the industry will help you build for scale in the right areas of your organization, giving you a better chance for success.

Engaging Passive candidates is more of an art than a science.

The need to recruit talent from the competition is a reality, and most recruiters aren’t up for the task.

“75% of the global workforce is passive, but good talent leaders know that most of them are open to new opportunities.” – LinkedIn

When it comes to building the right recruiting team, you need a team that isn’t afraid to dislodge top talent form their current positions, and they’re armed with the knowledge that most candidates are ready to make a move.

This requires a big picture view and collaborative work with colleagues throughout an entire organization.

Solution: Build a team that’s so passionate about your organization that they don’t need to do any convincing.

A recruiter’s passion for the company’s mission needs to be infectious to lure this talent away. Gaining this top talent is key in producing the right quality of hire, which is why it’s so important to  build a good recruiting team in the first place.

“39% of respondents agreed quality of hire is the most valuable performance metric” – LinkedIn Talent Solutions

If your recruiters are passionate about your organization’s bottom line, it means two things – you’ve found a recruiter who is genuinely interested in your industry and organization’s success, and that you’ve done a good job in passing down your organization’s messaging through a strong employer brand.

Both are important when it comes to building a quality recruiting team.

Insight is something that’s very hard to learn.

Everyone has insight, but not every recruiter will have the insight you need to hire the perfect candidate for your organization’s current open role. This is important no matter where on the value scale and open position falls – the sixth sense for the perfect candidate is imperative to making a good hire.

Solution: Look for someone who spends more time evaluating and less time selling.

Selling an organization is a big part of recruiting, especially when it comes to projecting a strong employer brand that will attract top talent. As a matter of fact, organizations are working with marketing departments in order to make it happen.

“47% of recruiting teams are partnering with marketing to build an employer brand” – Jibe

A recruiter that knows how to sell your employer brand to top talent is a valuable resource, but not as valuable as one who knows how to evaluate talent properly to determine whether or not they’re a good contribution to making an organization successful.

In many cases, recruiting teams and their leadership lean on their ability to send jobs to search and work with direct hire agencies in order to increase their bandwidth and talent pools for business-critical positions.

When building your recruiting team, think about your budget, and hire for the person who will make the right decision when hiring – they’ll be impacting your business directly.