Need to Hire Recruiters? Look for these Traits [Part 2]

Welcome back to our discussion of assessing and training recruiters. Last week we talked about Drive and Intellectual Curiosity the 2 foundational Traits that are the building blocks for all other Traits. You can read more about it here. Today we will be diving into the first of the intermediate level Traits — Strategic Mindset.

The Third Trait: Strategic Mindset

We define Strategic Mindset as the desire to improve process. A recruiter with Strategic Mindset will strive to optimize the recruiting process, creating more efficiency and better conversions at each step.

Strategic Mindset

According to research done by Ken Haycock, Anne Cheadle, and Karla Spence Bluestone, most modern business literature on Strategic Mindset fall into one of two categories: strategic thinking and strategic planning. Strategic thinking is “an innovative, creative, and right-brained process that encourages an open exchange of ideas and solutions,” while strategic planning is described as “a systematic and logical application of strategies” or the “development and implementation of an organizational strategic plan.”

They go on to state that “strategic thinking is an individual thinking activity that benefits organizations. In this case, the strategic thinker is taking a step back, evaluating the organization, and recognizing opportunities for improvement. This type of creative thinking leads to “outside the box” ideas, innovative solutions, or new directions and drastically alters how a company or team operates.

On the other side, we have strategic planning, which is centered around analysis and “establishing and formalizing systems and procedures.” The strategic planner provides structure and process by breaking down goals into specific steps, identifying the potential consequences of each step, and determining exactly how each of these steps should be implemented.

For those of you who are familiar with the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, strategic thinking and strategic planning are both Quadrant 2 activities. This time management tool was popularized in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, where author Stephen Covey urged his readers to categorize their daily tasks depending on the task’s urgency and importance:

• Quadrant 1: Urgent, Important
• Quadrant 2: Not Urgent, Important
• Quadrant 3: Urgent, Not Important
• Quadrant 4: Not urgent, Not Important

Most recruiters get caught up in Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 activities, which are the crises, deadlines, interruptions by coworkers, and emails that demand immediate attention. When operating in this fashion, Quadrant 2 activities like strategizing and planning fall to the wayside, but these are essential activities for the Strategic Thinker!

Strategic Mindset and Recruiting

In Recruiting, Strategic Mindset is an intermediate-level Trait that builds on Drive and Intellectual Curiosity, the two foundational Traits we discussed in our last post. A recruiter will want to improve the recruiting process if they have the innate need to succeed. They’ll figure out how to work smarter instead of harder to achieve their objectives. They will also improve the process if they have the innate desire to know. By asking the right questions and understanding the motivations behind today’s processes, the recruiter will be able to figure out how to build a better process for the future.

So when we’re discussing Strategic Mindset in recruiting, are we talking about strategic thinking or strategic planning? The answer is both!

Recruiters need to be creative when figuring how to improve the hiring process. These processes need to grow dynamically as a company grows. It takes unconventional thinking and creativity to shift how the organization thinks about its recruiting process and candidate experience.

This is especially important because each company’s situation is different: their positioning, stage of the product, experience of the leadership team. An events-based recruiting initiative that works at Facebook may not be nearly as effective at an early stage startup with limited brand recognition. Strategic thinking will help the recruiter problem solve and adapt to different scenarios.

At the same time, recruiters need to be analytical when creating and improving and processes at their company. Hiring for talented employees is a complex activity involving an incredible number of people, competing motivations, and too many calendar invites. A strategic planner will dive into the data, examine the reporting and recruiting funnel metrics, and identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement.

Armed with this insight, the strategic planner will drive their organization to develop processes and standards around recruiting. They might build a Wiki of interview questions, bring consistency to the interview format, and create a checklist and guidelines for opening a new position. Their focus is to drive efficiency through standardization, which helps the entire organization function more effectively.

The Strategically-Minded recruiter will ask questions like:

• How do we get more qualified candidates in our interview process in less time?
• How can we design a better technical assessment that determines technical ability while not requiring too much engineering or candidate time?
• How can we create an interview process based on competencies so the decision can be made with fewer people?
• How do we improve brand awareness to generate more inbound candidates?
• What are things we can do to significantly improve the candidate’s interview experience?
• How do we create a more inclusive culture and mitigate bias in the interview process?
• How much time does my engineering team actually have to interview in a given week? Is that enough to reach our hiring targets for the quarter?
• Are my hiring manager’s actions consistent with their words? What are the qualities that they really value?

These questions help the Strategically-Minded recruiter identify how to optimize processes and work more effectively, which make them a great asset to the business. Since they are able to fine-tune each step of the recruiting funnel, recruiters with Strategic Mindset are able to do more with less, which is especially helpful since most recruiting organizations operate with limited resources.

Why Don’t More Recruiters Have Strategic Mindset?

Although being Strategically-Minded seems like an obvious way for recruiters to excel at their job, many recruiters don’t develop this Trait! When you have aggressive hiring goals, it can be challenging for recruiters to take the time to think about how to be more effective and efficient. They are too busy to take a step back and think strategically.

The challenge is that your organization’s current processes work. You have an interview process in place, and candidates go through it. Your recruiters send emails and get responses. Your company has been able to make some hires, and most of the hiring managers at your company are able to fill their positions…eventually. It’s a classic “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” scenario. Your current processes may not be fully optimized, but since it works, no one does anything to fine tune it.

When a recruiter does activity and gets results, the most straightforward path forward is to simply do more activity to get more results. Reflecting, experimenting, iterating all takes time away from doing. Many Engineering orgs have built these types of Quadrant 2 activities into their culture: post-mortems, hackathons, and A/B testing all play an important part in helping the engineering teams improve their products and processes. Unfortunately, these types of activities have yet to be established as standard practice for recruiters, especially since the keys to becoming a successful recruiter and recruiting org are less developed.

The Strategic Beginner and Advanced Recruiter

Beginner Recruiters will tend to focus on strategies to improve their own workflow. They may think about ways to improve their email response rates or methods of sourcing candidates more quickly, so they may examine their individual metrics to see where to improve. That being said, many Beginner Recruiters have not developed a Strategic Mindset — they simply do what they have been tasked to do without refining. In this case, their line of questioning may end at “how do I find the people who can do this job?”

Advanced Recruiters with Strategic Mindset focus on improving process at team or organizational levels. They comb through the team’s metrics to understand why so many candidates get rejected at the technical phone screen. They share historical data with their hiring managers to forecast how long it takes to hire a Lead iOS Engineer. The Advanced Recruiter may determine that cutting out 2 interviewers from the interview panel improves hiring outcomes and also saves thousands of dollars in engineering time over the course of a year. When sourcing, they optimize conversions by asking themselves, “how do I find the people who can do this job and want to do this job?” By diving deeper and improving overall process, the Advanced Recruiter elevates the entire organization.

Assessing Strategic Mindset

So what’s the best way to measure a recruiter’s level of Strategic Mindset?

We suggest asking questions that dive into the candidate’s experience optimizing recruiting process for themselves and their team. We want to understand the thought process behind these changes and how they went about determining which changes to make. Here are some example questions and responses:

Question: Tell me how the recruiting process looked when you first joined your last company. What changes, if any, did you make to the processes while you were there?

As discussed, recruiters with Strategic Mindset have a strong desire to optimize process, so we’re looking for answers that describe the existing process, highlight the changes the recruiter wanted to make, detail how they determined these were the right changes to make for this specific team or company, and how they went about implementing the change in process. What changes does the recruiter highlight? Is it at the personal level or the organizational level? How deeply did they dive into the data and reporting?

Question: What metrics do you look at to measure your success as a recruiter?

The recruiter’s answer to this question can illuminate the depth of their Strategic Mindset. Do they talk about absolute numbers, such as hires, as well as the conversions at critical steps in the recruiting funnel? If their answer only includes absolute numbers, like the number of calls, emails, and hires, it may indicate a lack of Strategic Mindset. We’re looking for answers that highlight efficiency metrics and show a deeper understanding of the factors that drive the recruiting process.

Question: What tools do you use to make your job easier? Which ones did you discover and implement?

Strategically Minded recruiters know that it’s just as important to work smart as it is to work hard, which means they’ll actively look for tools that make life easier for them and their teams. What kinds of tools do they highlight? Are they tools that help automate process or give the recruiter better insight into the performance of their process? That would be an indicator that this recruiter has Strategic Mindset. Even better if they are the ones that introduced these tools to the team because it shows that they are proactively making changes to improve the process at the organizational level.

Question: If we are trying to design an interview process to optimize for minimizing our engineer’s time, how would you do that?

This is a great open-ended question that can reveal how a recruiter thinks. Do they ask about how the current interview process works and why you want to prioritize minimizing engineer time? Can they discuss the trade-offs that would need to be made, for example not optimizing for candidate experience. Can they propose a new process that would save your engineers time?

Question: How would you change the interview process if we are optimizing for candidate experience instead?

This is a great follow up to the previous question because we ask the recruiter to re-evaluate the factors that are important. With this change, how does the recruiter respond? Recruiters with Strategic Mindset should be able to take in this new information, make necessary adjustments and adapt quickly. What processes and procedures do they put into place to ensure a great candidate experience? Perhaps the describes how they’ll set SLA’s around communication turnaround time. They may put together a consistent process for walking candidates in and out of interviews. They might describe how they design a technical interview that’s highly relevant to a project an engineering candidate might actually work on if she were to join. What we’re looking for is that extra layer of strategic thinking and strategic planning as the recruiter designs a candidate-centric process.

Make sure to dig into the recruiter’s answers. We’re looking for long term thinkers who care about efficiency, building consistent process, solving problems, and elevating their team.

This is especially critical if you are hiring your first recruiter. As the sole recruiter, they will be splitting their time among sourcing candidates, working with hiring managers, establishing new processes, running the recruiting process, and pushing initiatives. It’s a lot to juggle, and the recruiter will need to demonstrate a Strategic Mindset in order to effectively manage these priorities.

What if a Recruiter Only Has Strategic Mindset?

A recruiter that only has Strategic Mindset will shine in a Recruiting Operations role. They are passionate about improving process and finding ways to streamline the hiring process for the rest of the team. They are effective data crunchers, and they are happy to implement tools and standardize procedures. Since they are so process-focused, recruiters with only Strategic Mindset typically aren’t the best at executing searches. To maximize their Strategic Mindset, put them in roles where they can elevate a team of recruiters that excel at making hires.

Training Strategic Mindset

What happens if you talk to a promising recruiter that exemplifies Drive and Intellectual Curiosity, but they don’t have Strategic Mindset? Fear not! Many recruiters don’t know to develop Strategic Mindset, but as long as they have the foundational Traits, Strategic Mindset can be cultivated.

In this excellent post by Glen Cathey, he shares his take on what it takes to become a world class recruiter, which boils down to “deliberate practice.” Cathey shares the critical elements that define “deliberate practice,” and many of these elements also help grow a Strategic Mindset:

Deliberate Practice Improves Performance by Design

Cathey contends that at work, most people just do what they’ve always done, which doesn’t do much to improve performance. “Deliberate practice is specifically designed to improve performance by stretching you just beyond your current ability.” To develop a Strategic Mindset within a recruiter, have them practice what they are not currently good at. Perhaps it’s challenging them to fill a similar role in less time or having the recruiter tackle positions that they are unfamiliar with. This habit of growth encourages the recruiter to figure out how to continually push the boundaries of their performance.

Deliberate Practice Requires Metacognition

Another element of deliberate practice is metacognition, or thinking about how one thinks. Cathey explains that “top performers perform metacognition much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.” To develop this mindset in recruiters, ask them to challenge their assumptions and have them reflect and observe their thought processes. Some example questions:

• Do I really understand this position?
• How many different ways can this type of experience be described in a resume, and how can I effectively search for all of them?
• What types of candidates does our interview process optimize for? Is that what we really want?
• Are candidates having the best possible experience when interviewing at our company? What are ways we can tweak our website, job descriptions, messaging, and process to make candidates feel more connected with our brand?

In their research paper, Ellen Goldman, Terrence Cahill, and Rubens Pessanha Filho identify a number of ways develop “strategic thinking ability,” such as “monitoring results/benchmarking” and “participating in strategic planning.” How does this apply to recruiting? One way is to have recruiters analyze metrics. In the beginning, have them track and monitor their own individual metrics and conversion rates for messaging, candidate calls, interviews, etc. As they become more familiar with the reporting, encourage them to dive into the recruiting funnel metrics. They should get used to turning to data for answers and ways to improve.

Another way to get recruiters exposure to strategic thinking and planning is to have them participate in strategy meetings. In these meetings, recruiters will reinforce their understanding of the company’s goals, gain knowledge on the industry and market, and learn about the priorities of stakeholders. All of this provides valuable context that will help recruiters identify the gaps in the process.

A Harvard Business Review article on developing strategic thinkers in organizations highlights another important point for training Strategic Mindset. Developing Strategic Mindset takes time and deliberate effort, but how do you ensure your recruiter gets around to this Quadrant 2 activity when your company has aggressive hiring goals? “Encourage [recruiters] to set a regular time aside for strategic planning. A strategic approach takes time. Make it a regular part of their job.”

Remind recruiters that developing Strategic Mindset is not an extra task on their to do list — it’s part of their job! Have them set aside time regularly to dive into data and question their assumptions. Make sure to reward them for thinking critically and encourage them to optimize the process. With these steps, you’ll have a Strategically-Minded recruiter in no time!

The Next Trait

As we’ve seen, Strategic Mindset is an intermediate-level Trait that builds on Drive and Intellectual Curiosity. Recruiters with Strategic Mindset elevate the entire organization by optimizing processes for the team. This Trait is a difference maker for companies, and it’s the first step of recruiting at a higher level. Next week we will explore the second intermediate-level Trait, Communication & EQ.