Need to Hire Recruiters? Look for these Traits [Part 1]

Thanks for joining us! As we introduced in our last post, we will spend the next 8 weeks sharing our 4x4 Framework for Assessing and Training Technical Recruiters. Our goal is to bring standards to assessing and training recruiters, to help organizations hire recruiters and recruiters improve their skills.

From our conversations with Recruiting Leaders and Founders, it’s clear that assessing recruiters today is challenging, and many rely on surface-level questions, such as:

• How many hires did you make at your last company?
• How do you source candidates outside of LinkedIn?

Without guidelines, Founders often default to looking for a recruiter that is a “people person,” but these friendly, confident, extroverted recruiters are not always the most effective recruiters. In our 8-part series, we reveal the Traits and Skills we evaluate here at TechRec Academy.

The Foundational Traits

Our first post in the series is a 2-for-1 deal! We will discuss the two foundational Traits that are the building blocks — Drive and Intellectual Curiosity. Without a combination of Drive and Intellectual Curiosity, you probably want to choose another line of work.

The First Trait: Drive

At TechRec Academy, we see Drive as the innate need to succeed. A Driven recruiter will work relentlessly to achieve their goals. Without Drive it is exceedingly difficult to overcome all the obstacles that arise when building a hiring pipeline.

Drive and Grit

A conversation about Drive wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Angela Duckworth’s book written about her research into Grit, which is a blend of passion and persistence. In her book, Duckworth contends that Grit, not Talent, is the common denominator of high achievers. While many high achievers are talented, Grit has a multiplier effect since effort improves both skill and achievement. Duckworth captures this in her formula:

Talent x Effort = Skill

Skill x Effort = Achievement

In one of her examples, Duckworth points to a study of competitive swimmers titled “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Sociologist Dan Chambliss observed that “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then fit together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”

Gritty people do the things they need to succeed, and this deep desire to succeed is what we call Drive.

Drive and Recruiting

So how does Drive relate to Recruiting? Well, Recruiting is no walk in the park. In a given week, a typical recruiter may experience some or all of the following:

• Sending out 200 hand-crafted emails to potential candidates, to have the ten or fifteen responses all be “not interested.” The other 185 emails? No response at all.
• Hiring managers who demand the world’s best ninja unicorn but unable to budge on qualifications, timeline, and compensation.
• Spending months cultivating relationships with candidates to get to the offer stage just to have them accept another offer.
• Late nights browsing thousands of LinkedIn profiles.
• Hoping for the stars to align across the interviewing panel, the hiring manager, and the candidate, especially since people can be unpredictable.

As Vice President, Recruiting of Instacart, Michael Case, mentioned in our Recruiting Panel Event in January, he vets for recruiters with “the ability to keep going” because as a recruiter, “almost everything you touch fails. And that’s not normal to keep going like that.” It takes a special kind of person to get knocked down again and again and still get back up.

The Driven Beginner and Advanced Recruiter

The Beginner Recruiter with Drive will put in relentless effort. They have the ability to work hard and generate activity at a high volume, which is important because there is no shortcut for the quantity of work needed to make hires.

A Beginner Recruiter with only Drive will get results by brute force, but it won’t scale. This undirected Drive can result in a flurry of activity to start, building a pipeline of candidates, but it is common to see this Drive flame out when results are slow to materialize.

Advanced Recruiters understand that the goal is to make hires, and they understand that activity is not the same as results. Advanced Recruiters are able to stay motivated in the face of constant rejection, overcoming change such as shifting job requirements, new hiring managers, company pivots, etc. They understand that recruiting is a game of patience, and Advanced Recruiters display a remarkable amount of delayed gratification.

Assessing Drive

Now for the big question — how do we evaluate Drive in a recruiter? How do we differentiate between recruiters who put in flurries of activity or talk a good game versus those who truly have the Grit to persevere?

Angela Duckworth’s evaluation asks people to rate how much they resonate with statements like, “I finish whatever I begin” and “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.” The Grit Scale can be telling, but it may not be as reliable in an interview setting.

So how else can we dig into a recruiter’s Grit? We propose asking questions that dive into situations where the candidate had to be persistent and fight to overcome obstacles. Potential questions may include:

1. What’s something that you’ve done in your life that was hard? Why was it hard?
2. Tell me about a time in your life when you experienced considerable setback. What made that situation challenging? What did you do to improve your situation?
3. Tell me about a time you missed a deadline.
4. What motivates you to be a recruiter?
5. What do you do if you or your team is behind pace to make the hires you need?

Make sure to dig into their examples! Do they accept responsibility for the setback/ missed deadline? Did they learn from the challenge to prevent it from happening again? Do they seem undeterred from stepping back into the ring?

Ask a Beginner Recruiter about a time they missed a deadline, and they may describe a time when the requirements changed too many times, preventing them from hitting their goals. An Advanced Recruiter will talk about how they anticipated the requirements change, worked around it, and learned from it for the future.

Ask a Beginner Recruiter, “What do you do if you are behind pace to make the hires you need?” and they might describe how they worked weekends and put in extra hours to connect with more people and fill up the pipeline. An Advanced Recruiter would explain how they put in extra time to dig into the funnel metrics, identified that the interview process dragged on too long, and how they worked to change the interview panel in order to make the hires.

What if a Recruiter Only Has Drive?

While Drive is a critical Trait, it’s not the only Trait a recruiter needs to be successful. If Recruiter only has Drive, they will get results on a small scale but cause issues at larger scale, like creating bandwidth constraints and interviewer burnout. Recruiters that only have Drive can still be a valuable member of your team, especially if your primary goal is to increase volume. To mitigate the risks, the Driven recruiter needs to to be partnered with an experienced hiring manager or recruiting leader who can design processes.

The Second Trait: Intellectual Curiosity

The second must-have Trait is Intellectual Curiosity. We define Intellectual Curiosity as the innate desire to know. Intellectually Curious people ask many questions, which is critical for learning all the Skills and knowledge needed to be an effective recruiter. Remember, there is no degree for Recruiting.

Intellectual Curiosity

A lot of research has gone into understanding curiosity. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that a “hungry mind” is just as important as intelligence and effort in determining success. Closely tied to Curiosity is Growth Mindset, or the understanding that abilities and intelligence can be developed. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has done extensive research on students’ attitudes about failure. She noticed that some students were able to recover quickly from setbacks, while others really struggled. Based on her research, Dweck created the terms “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” to describe how people think about learning and intelligence. When students believe they can get smarter, they put in extra time and effort, which helps them achieve more.

Having curiosity and a growth mindset is critical for learning and growth.

Intellectual Curiosity and Recruiting

Recruiting is a nuanced role, where recruiters must be excellent communicators, salespeople, researchers, organizers, influencers, expectation-setters, closers, people matchers, schedulers psychologists, data crunchers, coaches, and mentors. It takes someone who is genuinely curious to fully understand the many facets of the job.

An Intellectually Curious recruiter asks questions: What does this team do? Who is the best person for this job? Why is this the best process? How can I make these hires while using less of my team’s time? Where can I learn more about this topic? When can I make time to ask more questions?

These recruiters continually learn more about technology, their craft, the business, and the world. They want to understand how and why things work.

The Intellectually Curious Beginner and Advanced Recruiter

The Beginner and Advanced Recruiter differ in what they are curious about and how they go about answering their questions. Beginner Recruiters tend to have skills and knowledge-based questions, like “What is the the difference between React and React Native?” and “How do I get better at closing?” They’ll take to Wikipedia, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn to learn about new roles, and they’ll explore unfamiliar keywords before they start a search.

Intellectually Curious recruiters make great sourcers and researchers, but if that’s the only Trait they have, they won’t be able to execute in the rest of the process. These recruiters tend to overlearn, spending too much time becoming an expert and hindering them from making hires.

For Advanced Recruiters, curiosity is directed at the bigger picture. Where are the bottlenecks in our process? How do other organizations build their brand? Why are so few of our candidates accepting our offers in the last 6 months? Advanced Recruiters will sit with the teams they are hiring for to understand what the team does, who is on the team, and how to target their recruiting strategy. They make hires proactively by understanding the team, not just the open jobs. Advanced Recruiters walk the fine line of knowing just enough to successfully build the team.

Assessing Intellectual Curiosity

Now you’re probably curious about how we measure Intellectual Curiosity!

One way of evaluating a person’s level of Curiosity, you can use the Curiosity Assessment, created by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh. The 24-question survey that has people select whether they agree or disagree with statements like, “I like to do things my own way” and “I don’t question rules and regulations.” Based on the answers, the results share one’s flexibility in thinking, interest in learning, and adaptability to new situations.

To assess recruiters for Intellectual Curiosity, we suggest asking open-ended questions that reveal critical thinking. Give recruiting candidates complex (and realistic) hiring situations with limited information, and see how they behave. Do they try to answer the question with such sparse information? Do they ask questions to understand the context? What is the depth of the questions that they ask? Some examples of questions to ask during the interview include:

• How do you learn about a new role that you’ve never worked on before? (Ideally, you will be able to highlight on a specific role, like Machine Learning Engineer)
• Tell me about a role you worked on recently. How did you go about your search? Why did you go about it in that way?
• Tell me about your last company’s product, technology, and business model.
• What questions do you have for me?

Once again, you’ll want to dig into the recruiter’s responses. Can they explain why the approached a problem in a certain way? How could they improve on it next time? What were they optimizing for with the approach they took?

Ask a Beginner Recruiter how they learn about a new role that they’ve never worked on before, and they might say that they search the web, watch videos, or find someone to ask. An Advanced Recruiter will start there, but they’ll also describe how they come back to the hiring manager to calibrate and ask follow-on questions to put together a plan. These deeper level questions help the Advanced Recruiter gain the context to execute.

You can also gauge a recruiter’s Intellectual Curiosity by the depth of the questions they ask! What do they want to know about hiring at your company? They should spend more time asking about your interview process, recruiting tools, and hiring pain points than your perks. Are they thinking critically about your organization?

What if a Recruiter Only Has Intellectual Curiosity?

A recruiter that only has Intellectual Curiosity makes a fine researcher or sourcer. They love to dive deep and understand every facet of technology, roles, and the industry, which makes them valuable for gathering information. To mitigate their tendency to overlearn, partner them with a recruiter or manager who can keep them accountable for delivering on quantity.

Next Trait

As we can see, it takes both Drive and Intellectual Curiosity for recruiters to develop the skills they need to be effective. For those who are looking to hire recruiters, start with Drive and Intellectual Curiosity, for they are the foundation that all the other Traits and skills build upon. Without them, it’s incredibly difficult to develop the other Traits and Skills. Join us next week to hear about the next Trait: Strategic Mindset.